Five Essential Tips For Any Internet Start-Up
How my website made it into Fortune magazine

Submitted by Justin October 08, 2009

4.8 (12)

Five Essential Tips For Any Internet Start-Up

Lesson #1 - If You Hate Going To Work, Stop Going to Work

It was in the summer of 2006 when I decided, like Twisted Sister once bravely proclaimed several decades before me, that I wasn't going to take it anymore. At the age of 23, with no discernible business experience and $5,000 in my bank account, I quit my comfy, well-paying IT project management job to start Zen Presence LTD, an internet company that was to put an Eastern twist on the American dominated male personal development niche. It was an idea that I was developing several months prior to my resignation and I thought it was so unique and original that it would soon take the self-help genre by storm.

I can clearly remember the look on the CEOs face the day I quit. I handed in my two weeks notice to my boss and about 15 minutes later I was summoned straight to her bosses office for a pow-pow with the owner of the company.

"What the fuck?" he asked, tossing my letter out of his hands and onto his supple cherrywood mahogany desk. "Don't be a schmuck, you have plenty of time to be an entrepreneur, but why don't you learn something about business first? I can help, just stay here for a couple years."

"I don't like going to work anymore Joe." I gulped. "I don't like waking up in the morning anymore. I've got to do something else and I have a great idea for a website that I know will be successful."

"You're throwing away a six-figure income and a management position by the time you're 25. This is an emotional decision and not a business decision. Most new business fail and your idea probably isn't that good. I'll give you a day to reconsider before I accept your resignation."

He was right, it was an emotional decision. But at that point I was so far gone down the rabbit hole there was no looking back. I legitimately thought I was just as smart as Joe and that I could found and run a profitable start-up in less than six months. And I was right... just optimistic.

The next day I confirmed my decision with the CEO. He mumbled something to the effect of, 'you fucked up' as security ushered me past his corner office.

Lesson #2 - Understand the Market Need

Zen Presence LTD was the first business I ever started. It was in November of 2006. Zen Presence was supposed to be what you could achieve after paying me a $19.95 monthly membership fee to unlock the 'secret' materials available on the ZenPresence.com website. I wrote over 200 pages of content broken up over dozens of short articles and essays. It took me two months to write the material and two months to build the website. I had to learn the Joomla CMS from scratch in order to build out the site. I promoted Zen Presence through a plethora of social networks, user submitted news sites, directories, forums, blog comments, etc. Even though the site was up for a few months and only had a couple hundred visitors a day, I was confident some famous blogger would feature my work and it would just blow up overnight. To my bewilderment however, a year after I built and spent six hours a day promoting the site, I had sold a grand total of just two 'ZP Systems'. That didn't even cover the server costs.

Later, I would realize that I failed to determine a need in the market for my product. I didn't do any testing of the content or materials to the self-help audience, nor did I preform any Google AdWords micro-testing as recommended by Four Hour Work Week author Tim Ferriss (fourhourworkweek.com—blog).

Lesson #3 - Don't Follow, Innovative

Slowly realizing the enormous time/monetary failure of Zen Presence, I decided to go in a different direction. I saw many 'successful' internet marketing gurus promoting the technique of using single-page, sales letter style websites to sell their eBooks and membership sites.

After reading many books by the gurus, I thought for sure what I was doing with Zen Presence was too complicated and to sell people stuff on the internet they don't need I would have to use this tried and tested sales letter technique. So I wrote three new eBooks, Facebook Pick-Up Guide, Sports Betting Demystified and the Jewish Single Dating and put up simple one-page sales letters on three seperate websites.

At this point, I was essentially penniless, so I took out a credit card to pay for the banner ads on niche-specific sites to promote my new eBooks. The gambit proved fruitless once again. The Facebook Pick-Up guide sold enough to pay for the banner costs, but everything else was still a net negative and I went further into credit card debt just to pay my rent and basic living expenses.

My worst fears came true and my former CEO Joe was absolutely correct -- one year after I established Zen Presence, it was dissolved. To top it off, not only was I broke, I had precious little to show for it. I couldn't go out to eat with my friends. I couldn't afford to buy my girlfriend flowers on her birthday. Lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Dinner was two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I couldn't do any of the things I really wanted to do. It sucked, yes, but at the same time it was incredibly freeing not having to wake up at 8 AM to go to work. My worst fears came true and it wasn't that bad. Truly though, I was still happier than I was working 'for the man' so it was actually quite tolerable. I still wanted more of course, I wanted to live the American Dream and become a successful young entrepreneur like Tim Ferriss or Kevin Rose.

Lesson #4 - Never Kill Your Dream, Just Postpone It If Necessary

At this point in my professional career, I couldn't be considered anything more than an abject failure. But, despite all my shortcomings, I was just as determined to make it on my own as before. Even though my ultimate goal was to own and collect residual income on my digital products, I had to start paying the ever-mounting bills right now.

Turns out that simply the process of creating all of those failed websites and books really helped me understand web design and copyrighting. I asked a friend for a part-time gig doing copyrighting for his SEO company and he generously agreed to pay me $50 per completed article. With my new contracting job, I was able to cover most of my core expenses and still have time to work on my own business on the side. I built up a decent portfolio of clients and learned a whole lot about search engine optimization and making money on the web in general.

I could finally afford to go out to eat with my friends, but I was still beholden to someone else to give me a paycheck. Sure I didn't have to go into an office anymore since all my work could be done remotely, but that essential core of the American Dream still eluded me.

Lesson #5 - Hard Work & Perseverance

Two years after the initial conception of Zen Presence and one year after it went down in flames, I decided to create another residual income based digital product website, WeedMaps.com, a medical marijuana dispensary finder similar to Yelp.com. This time however, I had the good fortune of being able to learn from my past mistakes and utilize my new experience. I quickly built up a proof-of-concept website in a week using the same Joomla CMS I had to learn to when making Zen Presence. This time though, I validated the concept through Google AdWords micro-testing. I wrote the copy in an SEO friendly way thanks to my part-time work experience. I brought on a talented web programming friend to help me flesh out the user interface. I finally had all the tools and knowledge necessary to succeed in an online business, I just needed to execute.

For the next six months, I made WeedMaps.com the focus of my life. After I was finished writing copy for my part-time job, I devoted every last morsel of my time, energy and resources to expanding WeedMaps into the site it is today. For the initial couple months building the site, I rejected nearly all invitations and time requests from my friends. I was simply so engrossed with the prospect of being able to live 'free of the man' that I thought it would be unfair to give my friends and loved ones my divided attention. It was a grueling period but curiously enjoyable. I realized it doesn't feel like work when you really love what you do.

I emerged from my bunker about eight months after I initially established WeedMaps. I was officially the owner of a (marginally) profitable web business. WeedMaps.com has now been online for fourteen months and I couldn't be prouder of the site that has since been featured in Fortune Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and thousands of other periodicals and websites. To the outside world of course, it seems like an overnight success. Yet to build a site like WeedMaps I had to rely heavily on my past experiences (read: failures). If it wasn't for those disastrous businesses of ventures past, there would have been no way I would of had the knowledge or experience to successful launch WeedMaps. Someone else might have come in and taken WeedMaps place, and I would have been working the same boring ass job, getting bossed around by the same miserable people, grinding out the same boring ass check.

“It's only called work, when you'd rather be doing something else.” - Attributed to Samuel Clemens

User reviews

View all user reviews

Average user rating from: 12 user(s)

To write a review please register or login.

Rating:

4.8 (12)