Forum Moderators: open
After six months of research, graphic work, content writing and programing I was ready. If I say so myself it was a first class effort. It had all the bells
and whistles that a site of this nature needed.
So with adequate funding I sailed off into the sea of single romance.
Rather than soaring like an eagle it was more stuttering and sputtering like a
wounded duck till it finally nose dived into the swamp of failed websites!
What happen?....I came to the party too late!
Timing is everything in war and commerce. I failed to adequately judge the strength and deep pockets of the giants like EHarmony, Match, Friend Finder
and the big head lead they had on all of us smaller rivals.
Also not factored in was the emergence of the free sites like Plenty of Fish,
Face Book, My Space, et al.
After eight months and loads of deniro I strucked the colors and limped off the
fields of on line romance.
The final score? Eighty six paid members, five hundred and four free members and a badly dented bank account.
The moral of this little tale of woe? Pick your spots carefully and dont fall in love with your own efforts.
You have to know when to hold em and know when to fold em!
Anyone else been down this road? Lets hear from you...KF
(Then there was the time I made a site for....No I cant go there, too painful!)
[edited by: King_Fisher at 9:09 pm (utc) on Mar. 16, 2008]
Also in this world of change, guess it could be used for something else - just needs a bit more brainstorming?
I'll spare you the details but I'm slowly learning not to bother chasing a small niche that will never be big or all that profitable. I've got two "bigger" sites and they're more worth my time now than all these little ideas... Lesson learned.
You only fail in internet marketing when you give up and if you're here means you didn't fail.
Deep huh? :)
It's tough to get people to believe you. I can get in the door, but then it's "What do you know?" I was right, but others got the market.
Swanny, I hope people listen to you about not bother chasing the small stuff. I was too big, but the people I'm working with now are thinking too small.
Actually looking seriously at a couple of much larger than usual opportunities (for us) right now, but that is primarily because we think that the big players in these 'medium ponds' suck and are vulnerable.
I've had several sites fail miserably, fail so badly that I took them offline. Whether it was the idea that wasn't right, the timing, the promotional efforts, etc.. I don't know. I mean I could point a finger at any of those and say it was the cause. All I really know is that those sites didn't work. End of story.
When "Plan A" doesn't work, you go to "Plan B." If Plan B fails, you go to "Plan C." I guess the moral of the story is just keep banging away until something works.
You already know this though.
When faced with exciting ideas, they should be first noted, and thought over for sometime, before they get implemented.
Without any funding I have launched a few sites. One ecomm site is doing well. It offers a product that is currently NOT available online in my country. It is also a low margin product so the big guys are not interested. I am happily toiling along. Today received a phone call from a customer saying the site was beautiful.. I think site design is ugly but yes..the content and product is beautiful for the interested person. That is what I focussed on.
One info. site is sinking fast. Even after one year it has hardly any back links.. Topic is too obscure..for Americans ( who still drive the internet economy).
Rest of the sites are doing o.K.
Some good, some bad.. some satisfaction.
Call me a diehard optimist but I'm yet to be convinced that the timing can ever be wrong. It's just a question of getting the angle right.
That's a great point, if I remember correctly Google was just a bit behind yahoo (overture-goto) when they decided to get in the search engine game.
I cant believe the time and money I wasted.
Hang on a sec here. Can you take a minute and make a list of all the things this has taught you? Beyond the single one you're focusing on. The benefits may not help your bank account, but there are richer assets than money, and I'll bet that list is at least 50 items long.
Any millionaire will tell you: "I've lost everything many times. This is how you learn how not to fail" (or to quote Aerosmith, "You've got to lose to learn how to win." :-) )
I've got dozens of these, literally. At first I thought like you did, wow, what a waste . . . then I met my wife who showed me, among other things, there is nothing you do that is a waste. All of these "failed" projects have paid back a hundredfold in customer and personal projects that have come later. Without the failures, I wouldn't know what would work.
Walk away from it, then come back in a few months, you will see a new spin you can put on it.
Each of my sites that failed, and there have been 3 so far, I learned new things. I had to get into different coding languages that went beyond basic HTML and that experience in itself was worth a lot. I learned what didn't work, and while that lesson certainly isn't as valuable as learning what does work, it's still good information to have.
I'm an optimist too. Somewhat jaded but an optimist nonetheless. I really do think it's a matter of timing though. It's also a matter of catching people's attention. I mean look at that million dollar pixel site, for instance. What an utterly stupid idea - yet it worked. Yeah, it was a gimmick but the bottom line was that it worked. It won't work tomorrow though and that's the fatal flaw. Timing, durability, offering something people are going to need on a continual basis. I'm just rambling here but these are things I think are key to a successful site.
The down side of this phased approach is you cant create something really spectacular from the outset, and your considerations are about turning something out at as low a cost as possible. The upside is that you save lots of wasted time, if the idea doesn't work.
A few years ago when everywhere online auction sites where spreading and no one would have invested a dime in just another one I had a client who focused on an auction site for airplanes exclusively - with success. Why focus on thousands of auction items for a few hundred $ when all you need is to sell one airplane worth several millions $ to make the same or even more profit?
If you focus on a certain group it is much easier to target advertising and if your service is exclusive enough you need less members. Whats the use of having thousands of members who pay 10$ each when all you need are a few hundred paying 100$ or $200 each.
[edited by: jecasc at 6:48 pm (utc) on Mar. 17, 2008]
Most of the time, you can boil down the problems to one or more of the following:
1) Idea
2) Implementation (which can include location)
3) Timing
4) Outside factors over which you had almost no control
(Also, things constantly change, so what is successful today may be dead in a year. And vice versa.)
Dissect what went wrong and factor that into the next endeavor. Later, when you do succeed (and you will, if you learn from the mistakes and fix them in the future), and many people complain with envy about how "lucky" you are in your successful venture, you can just smile knowingly.
