Perhaps the biggest challenge to launching consumer services in the trust market I blogged about a few minutes ago is scale. How do you sustain your operation in the early stages while you are busy over-delivering on value without asking for much in return? Sounds pretty thankless, right? If you are not focussed on earning a reasonable profit on each visitor/member, you are generally relying on a critical mass of consumers to drive advertising revenue (or low penetration, optional subscriptions). You wont have this critical mass right away, and you wont ever get it without: a) a kick-ass product; b) perfect market timing and approach; and c) some dumb luck leading to a viral firestorm.

Two key challenges:

• No early stage revenue
• No real business until you reach a loyal audience of over 1M users

The fist challenge can be overcome with funding or the self-sustaining passion of a few driving founders (provided that your founders have the balance of skill-sets to drive the service for some period of time). The second challenge can be achieved by selecting a niche market initially. Gain traction, build passion, and then decide whether to go deeper into that niche (building a more profitable per user model), or move on to broader, mainstream market (see: Facebook begins as campus tool, goes mainstream and hits 175M users globally). Both options are entirely valid.