launch a clone of elance.com

Varun

How about offering the service for free for first 6 months? Also, do not take out your commission for those first 6 months. So when you target your adwords or YPN - the KW can highlight these incentives.

Mention on your site you are new but your safe and secure and trustworthy!

Now when you say you need a new idea, or existing idea with some twist - you need to first of all understand the existing concept thoroughly. eLance is not a garage shop - the concept had millions of $$$ of backing during the glorified dot com days.

Anyway - not to discourage you - but there is Craigslist.org which is pretty much free for anybody plus it is extremely famous (NYTimes, and many big publications covered it and CL is now a phenomenon) - the point I am trying to make - do you plan to have an idea this grand?

First and foremost - you need an idea - deciding which monkey business to take care of and how is a secondary thing.

 

Well, I do have a good budget and I do have some unique ideas.. I just want to spread them..

 

As is quite common, I see "missing the forest for the trees" here.
The operational aspects (escrow service,support etc) and setup are actually the relatively easier part. As someone said earlier, it is getting developers to come to your site and the chicken and egg thing. I would add that don't count your chickens before they hatch.
Like the guy who spends almost al his money doing avant-garde beautiful renovations for his grocery store & employ lots of service staff. Then he realises he has little money left and discovers that there are a few Walmarts and supermarkets nearby.
Don't even think about ramping up and having support staff overheads until you have decent database of signups. By and large, marketplace models like this has a long gestation period and you are bleeding overheads and you don't start getting income until you have hit a critical mass of signups. And you do need to spend lots on marketing/promotion. The industry is already saturated/cornered by a few big boys- elance, guru, scriptlance, getafreelancer, rentacoder.
If you have a big development team and budget, you are better off branding yourself and starting DIY turnkey/scripts marketplace where you can put your own programs or other developers programs and sell them to internet users for a fee or subscription. Because of work quality, cost and availability of Web2.0 technologies, more web users are going the DIY route instead of outsourcing it to others

 

i have tried myself to do such a website. It is very hard to get people to post projects.

 

Thnx for all the feedback.
I do understand your points but, as I told before, I do not want to do a regular freelancer site.. i need something new. some new idea/feature, which none of them has..
I am looking for people how can do some brainstorming on the business model and marketing strategies.. i have some in mind, but want to share with the one who is really serious about what i am looking for.