I currently work in a part of the government in my state that helps people set up their business. They call us and we basically tell them what to do and what forms are needed, etc. I would guess that a large percentage of people that contact us have no idea how to set up their own business or what is even the first step. Because of this, many of them would simply prefer to pay a service such as LegalZoom to do it for them so they don't have to figure it all out. LegalZoom charges them a minimum of $150 to do this and up to $350.

I had an idea to start a small website (for my state at first) to basically provide potential business owners all the tools they need to register everything themselves instead of paying someone to do it for them.

It would basically include detailed descriptions and videos of what was needed for each state (PDFs of each form, videos walking them through the forms and how to answer specific questions, phone numbers for addition questions etc.) In the end, this would be provided for each state so that, when you come to the site, you could immediately choose your state and see all of this specific information for that state.

I was just wondering if any of you think there would be a need for that and if it would catch on. It would basically be a lot of work for me upfront, but would pay itself back in the long run.

Any suggestions would be great!

So is this going to be a government website, or your own personal site? And if its your own personal site, are you charging money? And then doesn't that put you right at LegalZoom yet with a fraction of their marketing & advertising costs??

To have customer accounts, passwords etc you'd need to backend databases which can be a challenge to code &/or support. Not a $20/month Wix site. It is doable, but quite a task in setting up, plus the fact most people won't find/view the site the first couple months due to lack of familiarity/low google rankings.

It would be a personal site.

Yea, I would basically be trying to reach the individuals who don't want to pay an attorney or LegalZoom to do it for them, can't afford to do that or want to do it themselves but aren't sure how. Now, this is basically what I do for a living, so if anyone calls our office, we can basically tell them exactly how to register their business very easily. That said, they still pay for people to do it for them, for some reason.

My initial idea was to have it set up so that they would have to pay $10 or $20 and it would give them access to a part of my site where they would get all that information on setting up a company in their specific site. I'm not 100% sold on that, but I don't know anything about getting money from advertising or how that works.

At the risk of being labelled a troll, sounds like a conflict of interest to me as long as you are employed in that department/capacity.

Sounds to me like you're trying to create a duplicate of

Starting & Managing a Business | The U.S. Small Business Administration | SBA.gov (http://www.sba.gov/category/navigation-structure/starting-managing-business)