Advertisement
Dang it, I meant for this to be a discussion, not a listing... Pardon the extra repost!
Greetings fellow dot-communists. Now that we seem to have cleaned up the rubble from the bubble, it may be fun to look back and laugh at the business plans that we all worked so hard at making work. Advertising dollars anyone?
So go ahead, offer up the business plan and/or peculiar product offering that your dot com tried, and why it didn't work! I just today talked to a fellow tribalist who worked at a company who was making a Java application server - sold 5 units - spent $18 million - and poof. Perhaps we can all have a chuckle looking back on the exuberance of the day. After all, if we cannot learn from our mistakes then we are bound to make them again...
Greetings fellow dot-communists. Now that we seem to have cleaned up the rubble from the bubble, it may be fun to look back and laugh at the business plans that we all worked so hard at making work. Advertising dollars anyone?
So go ahead, offer up the business plan and/or peculiar product offering that your dot com tried, and why it didn't work! I just today talked to a fellow tribalist who worked at a company who was making a Java application server - sold 5 units - spent $18 million - and poof. Perhaps we can all have a chuckle looking back on the exuberance of the day. After all, if we cannot learn from our mistakes then we are bound to make them again...
posted by:
|
SF Bay Area
|
Advertisement
Advertisement
-
Re: Worst Business Plan?? (repost)
Thu, August 7, 2003 - 7:29 AMWorking for a dot come so stupid I don't even want to name it.
A quote in a meeting:
Boss: "Well, we have over 500,000 hits per day so far!"
VC Guy: "Your service is free. How are you going to leverage profit?"
Boss: "Oh, easy! We plan to grow to over 1.5 million hits!"
Me: "sigh"
Reminded me of the bank on SNL that only made change. "How do we stay in business only making change? Volume."
-
Plan wasn't so bad as the execution and timing
Thu, August 7, 2003 - 9:17 PMI'd reply, but I'm saving it for my Technical MBA Thesis paper.
Just kidding. But I do have enough data for a thesis. Which App Server company was that? Although it failed, I thought that Lutris (also an App Server company, and about the same size, hmmm) had the right idea, but delayed market entry + Sun licensing disputes + 9/11 + flushed economy were enough to do them in. When we started to hit the skids, there was a full pipeline of work contracts - we were interviewing engineers like mad trying to ramp up, and in less than a quarter, every client either cancelled or postponed as their IT funding was cut.
More tragic topics:
Live Picture
Thuridion (multiple)
Borland (multiple)
-
Re: Worst Business Plan?? (repost)
Sun, August 24, 2003 - 12:49 PMHim, both my past tech employers qualify pretty well:
1. Be, Inc. - A co-worker loving referred to the "business plan du jour"... "we're a computer company!" -> "we're a mac-platform operating system company!" -> "we're the 'Media OS' company!" -> "forget the PowerPC, we're an Intel operating system company!" -> "forget the desktop, we're an internet appliance operating system company!" -> "yeah, we had to sell our IP to Palm, so now we only exist in name to sue Microsoft!"...
2. ReplayTV, Inc. - They were doing things fine until someone had the brilliant idea to have former Hollywood execs take over...
*Sigh* It was still fun... Looking to get back into tech now that things are starting to perk up a little bit...
Brian -
-
Re: Worst Business Plan?? (repost)
Fri, September 5, 2003 - 10:46 AMRemember Den (sorry, that's ">EN") or Pop.com?
Those were the days. Though I still miss Kozmo.com
-
Re: Worst Business Plan?? (repost)
Tue, October 21, 2003 - 7:44 PMHere's mine: DevX.com (recently acquired by JupiterMedia). It was a spin-off of Fawcette Technical Publications. Here's what the biz plan was: become an "aggregator" of developer discussion boards, seeded with reprinted editorial from FTP's developer books and conferences, and sell access back to whatever content members created on the discussion boards. Editorial content was hidden behind pay-to-view front ends (except if you had direct links via a number from the magazines).
Hummer-Winblad funded it--they convinced the founder that he had to spin web off from print so that they could help, because they didn't understant print media (because it actually made money). They executed the spinoff in January of 2000.
Talk about bad timing. -
-
Re: Worst Business Plan?? (repost)
Fri, October 24, 2003 - 12:03 AMiBEAM Broadcasting- Selling streaming media bandwidth at prices below our cost (we'll make it up in volume). Or the phrase often used by a collegue of mine was 'forward pricing'. The more you stream the more you lose. Yea, we thought we were changing the world too. What a blast tho...worked with just about every major media company on pioneering streaming projects. Disney, Warner, Viacom, Universal, and many, many more. Met some great friends too! We all got together last year and had a stock certificate buring party in Palo Alto. -
-
Re: Worst Business Plan?? (repost)
Sat, December 13, 2003 - 1:26 PMPets.com ...the dog puppet is fun and still making a living pushing cars I think.
-
Re: Worst Business Plan?? (repost)
Sat, December 13, 2003 - 1:26 PMPets.com ...the dog puppet is fun and still making a living pushing cars I think.
-
-
-
