Cashcampus Memory Lane (part 1)
Ok, so do you guys and gals remember when I told you about the time when I lost 12,000 starting my first website, www.cashcampus.com? Well over the next few days I’ll be going down memory lane and showing you some aspects of how I created the currently deceased cashcampus.com (well the site is now my company homepage), which at the time was a site that allowed students to sell research information to one another and make cash every week.
It’s my hope that in explaining how I came about some of these ideas, you’ll learn from my mistakes and gain from my small successes. Sometimes just seeing how someone did something can inspire you to create something great.
Ok, here’s a screen shot of basically what my first internet site looked like:
As you can see, I offered like 1000 different features on the site: selling research, getting redeemable points (campbux), taking a virtual tour, getting tutoring, etc… there was simply no focus which severely diluted the primary service of the site: selling notes.
When you start planning for a business you have to have two sets of ideas that you wish to implement. One set for ideas that “must” be offered when your business firsts launches and another set of less important services that can wait until your business matures a bit.
You need to ask yourself: “what are the features that really matter?” The features that really, really matter should be in the first version of your business. Everything else should and must wait until you to gain some credibility and trust from your clients, and then you can slowly start to implements some of those features/services you’ve just been dying to launch. Just be cool and take your time.
Some people call it “feature creeper” when you feel the need to keep on adding and adding ideas (the ideas just keep on creeping up on you), I just call it being overly-excited and trying to do a million things for a million people. Your business should only do a few things for a few people, not the world. Remember, a few people can mean millions of people.
Don’t feel the need to make your business cater to all groups of people because you feel that it can. Just because it can, doesn’t mean that it should. It’s always better to keep your business tight and focused on solving a certain problem for a certain group of people.
Think about Google, the reason that they are so successful today is because they kept their focus on search engines for so long and just kept on improving and improving that niche until they became market leaders. Well that’s exactly how you have to think with your own business, stay focused on one thing and improve the hell out of it. Work that niche. Rip open that niche. Dominate that niche. Not a million niches, “one” niche.
An idea is like a baby’s diaper, it’s always going to be changed and changed. The key is to keep on changing the diaper with the same baby, not a million babies. Your baby is the focus of your company and the diapers are the ideas that surround the focus of your company. Stick with your baby and as it grows you’ll be changing diapers less and less as your company becomes more refined (and less stinky). Following me?
At the time of cashcampus.com, I couldn’t see that. I was blinded by trying to blow up in a matter of weeks by trying to change the diaper of every single individual in the world. Pheww… what a job!
Stay tuned for more walks down Cashcampus Memory Lane…
related post:
- Starting the business losing 12,000
- Memory Lane Part 2
- Memory Lane Part 3
- Memory Lane Part 4
- Memory Lane Part 5
- Memory Lane Part 6
tags: student entrepreneur
Oh, sorry forgive me man, now only i knew that u building this web site as ur business yeah?
Yup quite inspiring, while building in the 1st place of cos u must keep focus on ur TASKS that got to do ur business b4 trying some thing esle…. just like GOOGLE………. is ok if you make mistake, you must learn from it, yeah you may be a fool in the 1st place just like KIYOSAKI his 1st Business, his rich dad call him the big fool because he don’t admit that he got a financal cancer when look at the staement. This is also one of the example how Kiyosaki learn his mistake and start over again to found his way to reached the light….
Wow can’t believe i typed alot forgive me if you find some of the sentance very abusive
wishing you good luck in what ur doing