Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

As I wrote in the post about internet business ideas, it is important to do a quick scan of competitors before getting too excited about your brilliant business idea. However, even if you do find someone doing EXACTLY what you planned to do, it isn’t quite time to throw in the towel.

In early 1998 Leah and I were mountain biking at the Stevens Creek mountain bike trail in Modoc, SC when we came up with the basic framework for singletracks. Leah had her own mountain biking homepage at the time called Mudhunny that listed directions and descriptions of trails we had both ridden but was limited to just those trails we had experienced. Our brainstorming led us to believe there should be a website that offered mountain bike classified ads, product reviews, trail information, forums, etc. for a national audience. Thus, singletracks was born.

Since neither of us had heard of sites like MTBR.com or Dirtworld.com we assumed that nothing like this existed at that time (it did). Had we known this, as would-be entrepreneurs we probably would have passed on the idea since it was already being done well. Our naivete allowed us to get a product built and deployed. By the time we had a product, we were committed to the idea and the threat of competition really didn’t phase us. Almost eight years later and singletracks is still around (and poised to pass Dirtworld in terms of the number of trail listings).

Once we recognized that the competition existed, it was time to differentiate ourselves. Stay tuned to hear the rest of the story…

Funny thing about Internet business ideas: no one is ever the first to come up with a new idea for a website. In fact, this is generally true for most ideas and this concept has been reinforced in writing by successful entrepreneurs like Guy Kawasaki. But what does this mean?

First off, it means that if you have a great idea for a business, it is generally not to your advantage to keep it a secret while you write your business plan. You probably don’t have anything that (many) other people haven’t thought of before and even if it is a great idea, most people are not in a position to take advantage of your idea. In fact, by sharing your idea with others you’ll get useful feedback and may even find potential partners while you build your network of business contacts. I’ve listened to dozens of business ideas while at Duke and I can honestly say none of the ideas I’ve heard have been completely “new.” Most business ideas are at most a new twist on an old idea or an extension of an existing concept into a new area. These are the best types of ideas in my opinion anyway since they involve an established and proven market.

But what about ideas for Internet websites? Since I’m generally known among my network of contacts as the Internet guy, I get alot of people approaching me with ideas for websites. How about a website that allows you to report speeding ticket locations/speedtraps? (speedtraps.org, speedtrap.com, and now my own entry, TripleBlaze Speeding) What about an online DVD trading service? (Peerflix or DVD Exchange) These are just two of the ideas I’ve heard from friends who simply weren’t aware of what already existed online, even though a simple google search quickly revealed these sites. But isn’t there still an opportunity since no one knows about these sites? Yes and no.

The real opportunity lies not in building a better website but in creating a more effective marketing program for your site. It’s what the dot-coms in the late 1990s understood about Super Bowl marketing and blowing tons of cash. But arguably sites like Yahoo!, Amazon, and eBay could not have risen above the clutter without the HUGE marketing investments that were made in the early days of their categories. Today the same lesson holds; if you want to have a successful website operating in a particular category you need to figure out FIRST how to market the idea, (with a good emphasis on offline as well as online marketing) then how to actually execute the website. These days building the website is actually the easiest part with customizable open source software and user-friendly web design packages.

So, before you get excited about that great new concept for a website you just came up with, take a quick look around the search engines. If your idea already exists (or even if your idea actually turns out to be original) the next most important step is to figure out how you will market your idea. Who are the customers, where can you find them (at the DMV, buying DVDs at Best Buy, etc.), and how expensive will it be to reach these consumers? If you can answer these questions then you probably have a great idea you should pursue. If not, you can at least understand why no one has heard of Speedtraps.org or Peerflix (yet).