Internet business ideas: You aren’t the first
March 1st, 2006Funny 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).
