“You should write a blog post for us.” When Hannah from Growing Business made the suggestion at a networking event last week, one thing was clear. She clearly hadn’t read my book.
A little over 12 months ago, my life as a dotcom entrepreneur was firmly on track. For a start, I had a desk. And a swivel chair.An entire office in fact, in a 'trendy' part of East London, not far from Liverpool Street. I also had a business partner, a business plan and a Blackberry. I was working 20 hour days to become the next Larry Page or Serge Brin. Sure, the company was burning through money like the KLF, but so what? That time, this year I would be a billionaire.
18 months on, only the Blackberry remains. I’m back doing the only job I've really ever been qualified to do: writing about my life as a failure. Certainly not qualified to offer advice to others. But Hannah wanted a blog post and if I’ve learned anything in life (I haven’t), it’s that when a hot blonde girl asks you to do something, you say yes. The details can be worked out later.
And so, after a bit of thought and half a bottle of decent rum, here we go. The only advice I’m qualified to give anyone. Five essential steps for guaranteed failure as a dot com entrepreneur…
STEP ONE: Be crap at technology (and don’t at least have a 50/50 business partner who is a geek). I knew I had a good business idea and could hype it to the press. Surely that was enough. The actual building of the product – the programming, the webdesign, the hosting – could be outsourced. This worked like a dream, for about a week. Then the bills started to come in. Mark Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook himself, Page and Brinbuilt version one of Google, Hurley and Chen built YouTube themselves. Each of those entrepreneurs is now worth obscene amounts of money while I am living in a flat made of pizza boxes.
STEP TWO: Spend money like water, despite not actually having any revenues. I rented a split-level office, paid three full time salaries and threw weekly parties. I thought the company could grow big enough, quickly enough to get bought out or raise venture capital funding before we ran out of seed money. I was wrong.
STEP THREE: Be lazy. More so than any other market, the Internet never sleeps. 24-hours a day, there’s someone, somewhere in the world trying to build a slightly better version of your product. If that person isn’t you, say goodbye to your customers.
STEP FOUR: Ignore advice from other people in the industry. Dot coms are supposed to break the rules, right? So what if my friend Richard thought the design of our site was all wrong? He may have been a professional designer, but I was a maverick! Today Richard’s company – Moo.com – is one of the runaway successes of the UK dotcom sector. I am one of his many, many customers.
STEP FIVE: Also… spend a night in jail, alienate half of London’s investment community, turn up drunk to vital meetings, get named and shamed in a newspaper and start fights with journalists. Oh - and absolutely, definitely choose the love of your life as your business partner. That last one’s a must.
And that should do it it. Follow those steps to the letter and before long, you too will be writing a tell-all book about how much of an embarrassing failure you are. Or you could do the opposite and very possibly end up wealthy and successful beyond your wildest dreams. Your choice.
But, whatever you decide, trust me on the hot blonde girls.
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Paul Carr is a former Guardian New Media columnist and founder of numerous Internet companies, to varying degrees of failure. He blogs at
http://www.bringingnothing.com
and his book, Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore, is published this month by Weidenfeld&Nicolson.
