Flush the Toilet: Young Entrepreneurs

I remember it like it was yesterday… selling my black 1997 (tricked out) Honda Civic, borrowing $7,500 from my parents, and basically selling everything I could get my hands on. It was the hot Summer of 2004 and my first business was in development.I was like a little baby with candy, so happy! I had around $12,000 to spend, money that I was fortunate enough to acquire from good ol’ mom and pops and my one and only car I sold for $5,000 (damn, that car was hard to give up).

I was passionate…. I was hungry…. I was determined… and I was STUPID! You see, at the time I didn’t really know much about getting a website going in terms of developement, marketing, etc… I was just a kid with an idea and $12,000 in my Commerce Banking account. So what did I do, I basically went with any old development team from India and got ripped off big time. Looking back, I was overcharged, lied to about who was working on the site, and I kept being asked to pay extra money every month for jobs that were mysteriously “extended.” The end result: I ended up paying these guys in India around $6,000 for an incomplete-buggy-too-many-features site that did about 1,000 things but never worked properly.

So what did I do… I being my determined self, I unloaded another $6,000 to another off-shore development firm to fix the site and get it up and running(never go offshore!). Now, these guys were a bit better (they never really lied to me). They actually convinced me to drop around 90% of my features and focus on one main feature of the site (which never made sense to me until years later). Finally, the site launched in Feb. 2005 and lasted ’til that summer 2005.

Net Result: -$12,000 down the drain.

Wow, it’s crazy even thinking about it again, but it really made me become a smarter person from losing all of that cash. Looking back, most of it was my fault. I was a over-zealous 20 year-old who wanted a site built with 0 experience on how sites were built, 0 experience on the exact niche I was going to attack, and 0 experience on how to really get a website off it’s feet. All I had, at the end of the day, was my idea(which isn’t enough).

Now, my idea was strong, no doubt, but the problem was that it was a great site but with 0 following and no focus… and just when it started to get following, I took it down to build something better that actually never got off the ground (that’s a whole different story).

The moral of the story: Know your business inside and out before you try build it, especially if you’re going to invest your own cash into it. Start small… you don’t have to create a service with 1000 features… offering a small service on the internet to a small group of people can really amount to millions of people. Remember “small” on the internet can mean “many people” (this is a huge place). If you’re going to hire programmers and designers, at least know the basics of the technology so that you can speak their language (otherwise, they may take advantage of you). Heck, you should learn the technology yourself even if you don’t plan on building the sites yourself. Make sure you STUDY..STUDY…STUDY…never stop learning: read books on what you’re doing, talk to people who have made it, ask questions.. listen to podcasts…brainstorm everyday. And finally, NEVER…NEVER…NEVER… give up… NO MATTER WHAT! That’s the real key to success. Yes, I lost cash, but gained priceless experience while doing so.

I’m still standing, baby!