A new lesson in internet startups

[roblewis]

I have been dabbling in internet stuff since March of 2006 in an effort to find a way to make revenue while facing the non-compete lawsuit of the century, as one of my colleagues referred to it. Some of these projects have netted me five figure revenue in a matter of a few days and some have still not produced any revenue. I have been involved in well over 20 in the past two years. I have learned many lessons and new skills including site design and development, I have learned how to run a site and build traffic (and lose it as well), I have begun to blog, become the teacher, and the best part of it is that I have made a ton of new contacts.

One lesson I wished I had learned in the beginning was the one I learned first while selling in person: Sizing up your competition and determining their capabilities and accomplishments. When I began selling in person, I learned everything about the competition, all the way down to knowing where they live. When you know where they live, you can determine their calling patterns and where they generally spend most of their time. This lets you capitalize on their weakness (think national geographic and the tiger and gazelle). I jumped in several of these "projects" head first with no thought, plan, or research. One particular project, I pictured the competition (there were less than five true competitors, and still is) doing the same thing I do, working from a home office by himself with nothing more than a laptop and a cellphone. After all, I had very little money involved and I am neck and neck on site traffic with my largest competitor, our rankings are near identical, and we are calling the same companies with equal success.

After a conversation with the president of this company, I realized he has far more invested, he has more employees, and he has the experience I lack and I have the experience and contacts he lacks, a great potential partnership. Feels good knowing I have nowhere near as much invested to be so closely competitive, but also somewhat unnerving. We are from the same area, we have the same motivations, and he is actually a nice guy, somehow I had pictured someone older and grumpier than me. This left me with a good feeling about progressing our conversations about combining our companies and making a potentially lucrative partnership. No one knows what the future holds, but there was no excuse for not knowing my competition before getting as involved as I did before doing the necessary research. Lesson learned.