Continue Building Blogs Or Co-Found E-Payment Startup?

next direction for my "web empire": e-payment or blog(s)?

[WhoIsShe]

Hello,

I run a very popular community website in my country, a developing country. I make what amounts to 2-3 modest salaries from it in a month, though it's tedious work.

For some time now, I've been planning to expand by building a high quality entertainment blog. I reckon that it will be the first blog in my country that publishes information based on what readers want and not just what the author is interested in. I know that I can build it to have up to two times my community website's traffic.

Prior to that, I had this dream of building a really sweet e-payment service from my country. Our fraud level is so high that international services Paypal will not touch us with a ten foot pole, so do not have convenient e-payment system at the moment. I know I can crack the market by facing the fraud issue squarely, but I abandoned this for web publishing due to inadequate capital.

Recently, a trusted acquaintance of mine, whose intelligence and business acumen I respect, and who has more capital than I have even now, offered to enter into business with me for the e-payment project and agreed to give me the controlling share. He's going to
be the technical implementor, while I'll be the one to determine features and promote it through my site.

This coincided with the time I was to start the new entertainment blog, and I know I can't combine both projects. The blog would require a lot of time.

I would like Webmasterworld members to ask me penetrating questions and please help me choose which direction is right. Should I go for E-payment project with my friend or my entertainment blog I've been planning all along?

Appreciation.

[LifeinAsia]

Just curious- if billion dollar companies can't fix the fraud issue, exactly how will you? I can understand that being local will help somewhat, but if that's all that was needed, the big guys would have done it long ago.

Also, since your contry has such a reputation for fraud, building trust for your business will be extremely difficult.

I don't want to discourage the e-payment idea, because I would certainly love to see e-payments go to more countries. (I feel that a reliable and trustworthy e-payment system in "untrustworthy" countries would go a long way to decreasing fraud in those countries.)

[WhoIsShe]

I'm not at all afraid of potential competition from local entrepreneurs and (especially) banks. One serious fear of mine is that the upcoming Google payment service will by for people everywhere and will render my e-paymewnt idea unworkable.