I finished Day 5 today and secured my domain name. I'm keeping it a surprise for now.
My Initial Impressions
The good:
The information in the SBI action guide and forums is great. SBI talks OVER and OVER and OVER about delivering quality content to your users. SBI basically promotes the attitude of, "You need to give your users something useful or you DON'T deserve to make money!" And I agree with this completely.
The process of researching your interests and finding the right domain name to focus on is very long, but compared to the process of starting any other kind of business, it's very quick! The tools provided are excellent, though you could do a lot of good research for free if you know where and how to look.
The video action guide tutorials are nice. They show you exactly what to do using words, sound, and pictures.
The bad:
I have some minor quips.
A lot of the action guide is repetitive. I sometimes scanned the page like yes... yes... I get it... next! I guess this is helpful to some people but to someone who "gets it" the first time, this is unnecessary.
The action guide has some missing images. You'll see words that refer to a figure or image, but the image is missing. Oops! This is a NEWBIE mistake which I would not expect. Fortunately you can easily understand what's going on without the images.
SBI's site layout itself is dated and a tad annoying with all the pop-up windows. As a member, why am I getting pop-up windows asking me to purchase SBI? I already purchased it -- leave me alone!
Conclusion
So far SBI is worth the money. I'm having fun with the process so far and look forward to creating the site and getting to know the people in the SBI forums. They all seem very friendly.
SBI should hire a designer to improve their overall look and feel. However, they have recently released a beta version of their new Brainstorm tool, and it looks and works great.