What Happened One Year Ago Today?

Well, as I mentioned a few posts back we are starting to hit the one year milestones of our little business idea. Today marks the one year date of the initial checks being written to fund all the development, initial office space, hosting, etc that needed to be done.

But, more importantly it marks the date that I committed to at some point in the future walk away from my "career". I cannot say I realized it at the time, but obviously somewhere in there as the checks start to get written and employees hired you know you are headed somewhere.

More importantly, it was only a week or so from this date that we started the initial talks with potential customers with what they would expect and would like to see as the product grew (this helped us form a roadmap that we are still enhancing). It also let us know what many customers were missing as far as education goes when it comes to local search and marketing their business online.

As with any new company you morph a bit over the first year but if I think back the core idea has stayed the same, the opportunity has just grown from what we initially expected. If I had to choose between opportunity being smaller or larger, well I will take larger any day of the week.

As we hit the one year mark and start the year of 2010 I must say, today January 4th 2010, was a great first business day of the New Year. If days go even half as good as this for the rest of the year life will be good.

Thanks all for the support over the past year!

Focus On What Could Be And Not What Is

It still amazes me (ok, probably not actually) that people ask me why I took the time to start a business on a dot me domain name. Why waste the time???

Well, as I have mentioned in past posts, the first thing domain investors need to do when they start to think about building a business is step outside of the inward focused thinking we all do since we are so close to our domain investments. We need to quit thinking about the NAME and more about a business model.

Much like buying the right domain names to resell is about building the correct domain investment model, the same goes when you have an idea for a business based on one of your domain names. No less than three times I have had people say why not just buy the .COM for X amount of dollars.

Come on, seriously, if you are going to start a business and you are not already starting with 10 million bucks in the bank of someone elses money before you have a dime in revenue how smart is it to actually spend hundreds of thousands on a domain name?

I know there are plenty of "dot anything other than .COM haters" out there that are disagreeing, probably never will read this blog again, but oh well. It is the truth. There is a reason you see many companies that have started up not get their .COM domain that they end up spending 100K on until after the fact. That reason is that they would of never even got off the ground if they would of spent that money on the name rather than focusing on their business first.

Do not get me wrong, most people miss the point with the conversation above, the point is not that the name is not valuable, but it is not so valuable that the business should never start just because you do not have the name. It cracks me up when people act like that, and I see it virtually anytime I head to the message boards or make a post about alternative extensions.

I know you are thinking what the heck, why would you say this when you want to sell domain names at a profit. Once again, you miss the point, the point is the name is valuable, they should buy the name at some point. In many cases these whiz bang new companies end up on TechCrunch in a story that XYZ company buys ABC name after getting their B round of funding. How many times have you read stories like that? It has been more than a few times. But if the company had 250K of seed funding does it make sense to spend 100K on a name? NOPE NOT AT ALL.

So, if you are a domain investor and you have a great idea for a business but since you are so close to the domain industry you cannot see what could be but instead are only focused on having to have the .COM before starting you need to step out of the industry for a second and think like so many other people who HAVE started successful businesses without their keyword .COM and get moving.

I will say it one more time, focus on what could be not what is!

Screw The Economy And Go For It!

As with most people right now I have many friends out of work, some have been looking for something solid for over a year. Many of them are top end, quality sales people who know how to close a deal, get stuff done, and in normal times are sought after daily by leading tech companies. Obvioulsy things are different these days....

We all know people that were previously well thought of employees of companies that have had a hard time finding the employment they want and rightly deserve.  Many have depleted their savings, lost their homes, went bankrupt, etc. Its tough and I hate to see good people go through this. I do not have this sympathy for everyone since I think at times certrain people will always find an excuse not to  be successful, for them I have no compassion, sorry just don't. They seem to find away to have an excuse even during boom times.

But recently I was having a conversation with a friend of mine I have known for sometime, have worked with him at a few different companies, and know the quality of his work and his ability to succeed. But he has been trying to find full time employment since May of last year, his savings are close to being depleted and he is on edge to say the least. This person is a hard worker, one of those that you get emails from at 2 AM and then check again and have more at 7 AM.

We are pretty close friends so I felt comfortable asking him how much he had depleted his savings, how much time and effort he had spent in looking for a job. I then laid out something for him. In the time he had been looking for a job, and with the amount of money he had depleted from his savings he could of started a company and created some income for himself. Maybe not the amount he had before his lay off but something near it. Overtime he could of exceeded it. I had these thoughts in the past but after sitting with someone and then seeing the numbers and time that had been wasted (and I do mean wasted) by my close friend it was a bit sad to see what he  could of done rather than allowing the drive to help someone else (i.e. looking for that 40/60 hr a week job) consume him. My concern now is that its too late for him.

We talked a bit after the conversation about ideas he would of liked to of acted on and what he thought he could of created. He is both frustrated and excited now that he thinks about it this way. The way he sees it and wishes he would of seen it earlier is that the economy sucks, lets face it, and if pretty much everyone you know has spent an extended amount of time searching and not finding a job, and if they do find one its much less pay than before which means they end up depleting savings they may have, then why not start from the beginning and create something for yourself. The biggest hurdle that lay before most would be business owners is getting away from their day job, trust me I know.

Anyway, just wanted to relate that story, there really is no end to it, he is at a point now that he does not have the resources left to invest in himself like he could of several months back, but now has a different focus on the job hunt. If theres nothing there MAKE SOMETHING!

Sorry for the lack of domaining talk in this one.....