Starting A business in Ghana While a Student

If you do manage to get a product that seems to be working and funding, then you'll enter a whole series of new challenges building the company, but don't worry about those yet.
Congratulations for going down this path. It will be a blast.For a startup, too many things can go wrong, and while there are many books you can read on startups, they don't really give you the actual steps you need to create a solid startup. As a business owner and a student who was listed among the Top 100 Student Entrepreneurs in Ghana, this what I think must be done.

Nowadays (in my experience) a beta version is a must. Because of the low barrier to entry to building a prototype, very, very few investors nowadays will invest in or even talk to someone before you have some early traction with customers and early product. The best steps?

1. Validate your idea, either via building a beta/mockup and testing out with possible customers (real customers, not your friends), or through some market research talking with actual customers.

2. Based on that feedback, build out your idea further to where you can sign up early customers to actually use your product. The idea? To prove that actual customers would pay for and/or use your product.

3. Engage with angel investors/venture investors to figure out if you're in an area they might have interest in investing in, and to further develop your idea.

The one exception? If you've done it before. If you're a serial entrepreneur with a solid track record, you just might be able to get funding on an idea. But then, you wouldn't be asking this question.

First is the inverse relationship of concept maturity to both funding and ownership. The more concrete and complete your idea the more funding you'll find more easily and the more ownership of the company you'll retain.

Essentially, as noted in the other responses, advance the concept as far as possible using as little money as possible. Since it's a web concept, you can build a functional site with little to no investment in an afternoon. In the process you will discover aspects of the concept you may not have considered. This will help you to improve your understanding of what areas need to be further developed.

The second observation is that it's best to make the assumption that every idea you have has been thought of by many others. Some number of people are almost certainly trying, or have tried and failed, to implement the same fundamental idea and business model.

Unless you have a patent pending for some core aspect of the site, competition will be stiff. Intellectual Property (IP) protection, such as patents, will be an entry barrier, but know that they offer a short-lived advantage. The others already working on the idea will reach market (with their own IP or using yours). Well funded imitators will replicate the site within days of your early success being noticed in Twitterland or elsewhere. Have well defined plans in place for dealing with your competition.

Third is that it's better to own 1% of a winner than 100% of a loser. While my first point indicates how to retain as much ownership as possible, don't lose sight of the fact that the investment community exists because they serve a purpose; compressing time-to-market and facilitating rapid growth. They can supply you not only with funding, they also have ready access to the technical, managerial and legal talent you will need to stay ahead of your competitors.

Search for the reason the perceived market is untapped. The focused service you envision may be provided in fragmented form through other focus segments, making your actual market much smaller than expected. Research your business model thoroughly. Generating sufficient revenue to be profitable over time is very difficult. The number of companies that ran out of runway (cash flow) is mind boggling.

Finally, know that luck is a deciding factor. The first and best technologies are rarely the winners. Bill Gates would likely be all but unknown had Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M) picked up the phone when IBM called looking for their PC operating system. The fickle finger of fate has had far more influence on the business world than the will and effort of bright minds.

I hesitate to try to summarize them because I fear it may keep you from reading them, but the core idea is that too many startups confuse product development with "customer development," which is a methodology to validate whether your idea is something that people would actually use, pay for, and whether you will be able to reach those customers profitably. Building the product is rarely the  problem. Knowing if the product is worth building always is.

Example: it sounds like you are going to vet your idea with people you already know and respect. Mistake. Vet it with potential customers who you don't know. Your friends will all say, "yeah, I guess I would use that" just to be nice. None of them will. You need to find a bunch of people you don't know who are all smack in the middle of your target market. And you should not "sell" your idea to them. You need to show it to them, sit back, listen, and have them beg you to please build it since oh my god they need this so much. If you have to "sell" the idea at this stage, you are setting yourself up for months of trying to push a string.

Also, why are you writing code? If you don't know if the idea will work, why would you go down the path of implementing it (other than just mockups to facilitate feedback sessions)? 

(Again, read the books..they walk through great methodologies on how to validate an idea, and they describe most of the classic pitfalls that first-time entrepreneurs go through).
All the best!