I think you are NOT way off in your thinking. I see the market opportunity you are talking about and as someone who is toying with the prospect of a legal tube site of my own, my first intuition tells me to put a B2B spin on it since I have been building B2B companies for over 12 years...
With that said, I like what you are saying, and found out as I am considering starting my own [legal] Tube site that there is no cookie cutter solution, or even available software that is any good (for me anyway).
I have learned many years ago that just because there is a market opportunity or need, doesn't necessarily mean it will be successful.
If you like reading...here's a little personal story as an Example: Back in 1999, I was hired as Interim CEO of a web portal called Financialweb. I was only 29 but I had been SVP of another financial firm and was well in tune with the internet (having been logging on damn near since the beginning). The company had 300 employees and was publicly trading at $5 per share with $100,000,000 market cap (which is to say it was a big company with decent money behind it). We were in talks with yahoo and the newly announced google about acquisition. The point is that the Chairman of the Board of Directors (my boss) wanted a "hook". At the time the company had direct lines into all major stock markets which nobody had except reuters. Even they didn't have AMEX at the time. The firm also had great portfolio tools, and stock screaners and such like no other site at the time. How to use that advantage?
I pitched my idea, and we packaged the tools and live quotes into a co-branded product line to sell to other websites that wanted quotes on their pages. Now a site could co-brand our realtime stock quotes and such and pay monthly fees. I made it so, and hired a sales team. The revenue (all banner driven at the time) went from $136,000 per month to well over $500kper month within three months. BUT, it lay flat at that point. The reason? Nobody really knows. The ironic thing was since the decision was made to avoid acquisition by going B2B, the big portals were not interested anymore (they were strictly B2C at the time).
There was still a tremendous market need, price point was right, but it just didn't stick. in the end sneaky practices by the investors sunk the firm and got three executives put in prison, but I had gone on to start my own mobile software company by that time...You just never know. My first real learning experience about how hard success really is. Fortunately, I don't make the same mistakes twice.
The moral of the story. Market research. before you invest the time and money to put it together, you make sure you have a built in client base when you launch. You can do this in many many ways (such as putting it up here like you did), But never build it just because you "know" it will be needed. Sometimes shit sounds like a great idea, but more often than not it doesn't sell just because it is a good idea.
