How to Startup a new Business on the Internet
A new Website takes a long time and costs a lot to get right.
But once you’ve got it right, you’ve built something utilitarian and of lasting value.
Any company that truly becomes a utility also becomes very valuable.
In software, this is the story of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc. We use these companies daily to be able to do things that we think are basic needs. For the same reasons, telecom carriers and cable networks also are valuable utilities. Yahoo (Overture – pay-for-placement search service), and Google have proven that search monetizes better than other web applications.
This is not a surprise, because the search utility tends to captures user intent well. Just as directory based approaches gave way to general full text search as web content grew, now we are seeing the transition from general search to vertical searches such as people, product, travel, health, source-code, auctions, etc. These new category search engines can improve user experience dramatically.
However, these business`s take time, talent, and investment to bring to fruition.
They all start with crawling web documents, filtering for the category, extracting and disambiguating entities, and then building a rich user interface. To attain success, any new search startup needs to think about 3 main things:
1. How can you build something defensible, that is own the relevant domain names, and copyrights.
2. How do you get distribution, time and exposure.
3. How to attain maximum leverage given the high fixed costs.
Defensibility
A custom application for finding and building, provides users a rich and convenient user experience, the strategy is defensible.
Human-powered search, that people can add information too such as pictures, tags, related people, etc. that are not easily found on the web.
This aggregated search result ends up creating the default place on the web for people information.
Also the human powered search strategy is highly defensible while providing a great user experience.
Distribution
Startups have limited budgets and therefore can’t spend much to advertise their services.
Thus, most successful web startups rely on zero cost viral growth.
However, unlike social networks and other web applications, most search engines are not inherently viral.
This makes distribution and growth a challenge.
In general, few users will discover a new website, and in the first few years growth will be slow.
Some search applications, especially in product search and information have found ways to aggregate content in a way that not only is valuable to users, but also adds value to search engines like Google.
This can be a good early growth strategy for such search engines.
Leverage
Building a website search engine has a lot of fixed costs.
Most search engines need 10 to 20 top notch engineers and at least 2 years to get to a reasonable place.
In addition to talent one needs a lot of hardware to crawl, index, and serve up a large data set.
It is therefore important to limit the scope of the problem, go after low hanging fruit, and find a way to deliver a good user experience.
Discover everything you need to know about a topic, that is the way Google did it.
You’ll need to raise $15-$30m and spend a minimum of 2 years before getting to healthy profitability if you’re going after large fragmented categories like people or product.
If you can find a way to dominate a smaller category quicker and cheaper (with a smaller end outcome), that is wise.
With Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, we’ve really only seen the first phase of an enormous and ever expanding field.
The second wave of category-search companies (auctions) have the opportunity to build large stand alone businesses that deliver tremendous value both upstream to Google and downstream to the category that they serve.
Auction101
It is now time for Auction101 to take over the Worldwide auctions search business. Auction101 has had a presence on the Worldwide Internet for over nine years.
There has been no business plan or real idea for the direction the project has been or should be going, until now, 2008.
It seems that there is now a Niche, business opportunity that might be described as a totally new opening online for a smart operator (ambitious, wise) to establish a very large source of income, and jobs for many people, using the domain name auction101.com.
http://www.auction101.com Every now and then a golden egg appears.
It’s a site that is mature, and has tons of original content, has exhalent coverage in the search engines.
That site I’m intimately aware of.
I’ve owned and grown Auction101.com for the past nine years, but now it’s time to say goodbye.
This website is basically a search engine marketer’s dream come true.
It’s ripe for affiliate networks, PPC campaigns, text link ads, and much more.
It is waiting to be monetized. Why do I want to sell it?
It is a part of my life that I’ve been letting go of this year.
I’m also wanting to sell it to invest the money into different things, like upgrading my home.
So, if you’re looking for the perfect website to take over and monetize, check out the website. http://www.auction101.com/ Wouldn’t it make more sense to have one local directory, Worldwide Auctions Community, that any search engine can access? You would then have a single place to manage all your local information which any search engine can access making for the greatest local reach.
The purpose of the Website is to Inform, that is, to provide Information on new Products and new Technology, about Developments in other countries and above all, about people in the profession, the trade (gossip has always had the highest information – or misinformation – quotient of all communication).
Sale includes: a partially developed website and, the domain names:
auction101.com, auction101.org, auction101.net, auction101.info, auction101.us, auction101.in, auction101.biz, auction101.cn, and auctionclopedia.com
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE AUCTION101.COM Trademark Act Section 2(d), 15 U.S.C. §1052(d). TMEP §704.02. Identification of Services “Providing information in the field of local and online auctions, in International Class 35″.
