But again, no one's going to fund that, so you'll have to bootstrap or go the friends and family route.
Then you'll need to be technical enough to set up a Wordpress MU and figure out how to handle the caching stuff so your site stays up and responsive.
Then you'll need to go find a writer for each neighborhood who will consistently write for free/peanuts.
You might have to edit all their work too.
So that's production.
Then you have to build a list of sales contacts in each community.
You have to create a sales kit that explains who you are and why they should advertise with you. No one will have ever heard of you and that's where most sales conversations will die.
You have to take payment from them and then reroute that to your writers and so on.
In short, it's a ton of work, very hands on work. You can cut out some of these steps, but building relationships with the writers and with the Mom & Pop businesses is the tricky part and very time intensive.
Also, you'll be lucky if any one of these sites clears 1000 uniques in a day for the first two years, so national brands won't want to touch you unless you're running about 100 sites.
Again, it's totally do-able, but it's a lot of work for a small team.
Knowing absolutely nothing about this, let me just throw a random idea out there:
Split the work up so that you are just providing the service to partners in local communities. You can manage the tech centrally, and anything else that can benefit from centralization (national ad network, AP-style content, etc), but farm out the actual micro-sites to local partners.
Of course you probably want to run a couple of them yourself so you understand the market and the pain points. And you'll probably have to bootstrap pretty hard to get critical mass.
But at some point it seems like you could be providing services to established local organizations (like newspapers), and potentially become profitable while charging those organizations an order of magnitude less than what it would take to cook up their own site from scratch.
The key would really be understanding what all these local community organizations have in common.
But again, no one's going to fund that, so you'll have to bootstrap or go the friends and family route.
Then you'll need to be technical enough to set up a Wordpress MU and figure out how to handle the caching stuff so your site stays up and responsive.
Then you'll need to go find a writer for each neighborhood who will consistently write for free/peanuts.
You might have to edit all their work too.
So that's production.
Then you have to build a list of sales contacts in each community.
You have to create a sales kit that explains who you are and why they should advertise with you. No one will have ever heard of you and that's where most sales conversations will die.
You have to take payment from them and then reroute that to your writers and so on.
In short, it's a ton of work, very hands on work. You can cut out some of these steps, but building relationships with the writers and with the Mom & Pop businesses is the tricky part and very time intensive.
Also, you'll be lucky if any one of these sites clears 1000 uniques in a day for the first two years, so national brands won't want to touch you unless you're running about 100 sites.
Again, it's totally do-able, but it's a lot of work for a small team.