Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

I attended a talk at Fuqua yesterday by a serial entrepreneur named Jeff Johnston that was pretty interesting. I usually take handwritten notes at these events and eventually type them up and I think I’ll continue to post my notes to the blog for others to read. Anyway, here are the interesting things I took away from Jeff’s talk:

- Illiquidity is a huge issue for entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur may own stakes in 5 companies making him/her rich on paper but this doesn’t do anything for one’s own cash flow. Having an exit strategy in mind when starting a business is the best way to make sure you will have cash at some point in the future.

- Jeff helped found a market research company in his early days and said he found that to be extremely helpful in identifying market opportunities for new businesses. I imagine what happens is you are doing research for a particular company and hear feedback that is unrelated to the research at hand but that yields market insight into a new area of focus. Jeff didn’t give specific examples of ideas he got from market research but the concept makes sense.

- Jeff said his MBA was a key to his success. I’ve spoken with a number of entrepreneurs over the years and they often tell me an MBA isn’t necessary to succeed (maybe they’re jealous of or intimidated by the MBAs?). In fact, when I met with Steve Bigari and told him I was interested in entrepreneurship and was planning on getting my MBA, he looked incredulously at me and asked “why?”. Of course every entrepreneur thinks the path he/she took to success is the best one but it was comforting at least to hear an MBA said that he got value from his education.

Another great presentation at Fuqua, it’s awesome to be able to get so many perspectives from successful entrepreneurs like Jeff while in business school.

I joined the YPN beta a few weeks ago to try out on Singletracks. I set my site to display YPN ads half the time and Google Ads the other half of the time. Anyway, the ads I kept getting for days were for Vonage and golfing on Prince Edward Island, Canada (my site is about Mountain Biking). I also saw an ad for my own website! (I advertise on Overture) After several days of this I contacted Yahoo! and told them I was very disappointed with the targeting of their ads.

The response? You didn’t turn on ad targeting in your account settings. Well duh! I also didn’t add my own website to the list of blocked ads on my account settings. I chose the “Sports” category for my ad target and added my own site to my list of blocked advertisers. So this was pretty annoying but I did it anyway, hoping that the ads would improve dramatically. But they didn’t.

Now the only 2 ads I see are for Wrestling Singlets and (still) golfing on Prince Edward Island. I scaled back the ads to show only 20% of the time and waited a couple more weeks. Same ads, same crappy click-through rate (between 0 and 0.2%). Over the course of my trial (3 weeks or so) I’ve earned around $12. With Google I would have earned $200. So today I finally pulled the plug and stopped showing YPN ads. Hopefully things will improve once the beta is complete but it seems like there is a long way to go.