Is Starting An Internet Business Fundamentally Different From Starting Any Other Business?
by: pawmarks
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Word Count: 674
Like so many others in the past two centuries, I am on a quest. Call it a hobby. I enjoy puzzling out why some people, who don't seem much different than anyone else, manage to effortlessly shift gears and turn their business into a fire-breathing monster literally overnight while others, similarly educated and motivated, stand there with their mouth ajar. Perhaps more so on the Internet than any other business arena, the distance between the movers and shakers and the players in first gear is spectacular.
In a real world business, the signs of success are less elusive. The diplomat. The person with the gift of gab that dominates the company's sales organization. The politician that effortlessly builds one strategic relationship after another on their meteoric rise to the top. The entertainer. The professional athlete. The natural.
But in the realm of the Internet, things are a whole lot murkier. In large part, gone is the face-to-face. It's replacement? Email, Instant Messaging, RSS Feeds, Self-taught video and audio production. Often the product or service is electronically based. All of a sudden, the individual who would never, ever survive in the offline world is king of the hill. Technical Wizardry. Software development. People with insights into bizarre and obscure new technologies that will take the world years or even decades to catch up with. Electronic organization builders. Mentors, writers and prophets.
Where do all these online businesses start? The answer is murkier still. Unlike a traditional business enterprise, that requires forethought, and discipline, and frequently large amounts of startup capital and risk-taking, the would-be Internet businessperson appears to often drift into the business. A chance conversation in a chat room. An email with a heart-pounding signature, leading to a web site or electronic magazine subscription that starts the wheels turning: "Hey, maybe I could do...."
It is common for a traditional business to struggle heroically for years before turning a profit. Many never do. And yet, the aspiring Internet entrepreneur, with the proper guidance, can be profitable in their first week! Some, in their first few hours. This creates an immensely powerful and seductive attraction to the business. And its global. For the first time in human history, we have, for better or worse, something of a global business language: English. So, hundreds of millions of people living for the most part on a dollar a day in the third world that have learned English, or who speak it natively thanks to hundreds of years of British and US imperialism, are jumping in. It's chaotic.
If Internet business people would simply follow J Paul Getty's advice and use XP (eXtreme Programming), the arena would look a lot more like the conventional business segments. What is J Paul Getty's advice, you say? "Find a Need and fill it" What is XP, you ask? XP is all about building a series of tests. You predetermine what the end result must be before the first word is uttered, the first nail is driven. You then relentlessly run the tests, while pursuing your vision of what you intend to produce. Until you pass all the tests. Defining the need, building the tests, then the laser-focused chase to pass all the tests, refining and expanding the number and complexity of the tests as you go along.
But nearly ALL Internet businesses ignore Getty's sage words, and I dare say 99.999 % of all online entrepreneurs think XP is another operating system from Microsoft. So the delivery of products, ideas, services, and new ways of doing things is a whole lot messier. When it's so dirt cheap (pun intended) to throw mud against the wall to see if any of it sticks, it becomes the model for the industry. No wonder so many of us have mud up to our knees!
Think long and hard about these two, inextricably-related principles. Identifying the need. Using XP to test and re-test the possible solutions. The most successful people on the Internet, whether they admit it or not, are doing just that. The rest just stand there and watch with wonder.
About the Author
Steve is a CPA, real estate developer and author who has been an online entrepreneur since long before the web arrived. Steve is the architect behind a whole network of mentoring communities, which can be previewed at http://bigdogmentoring.com His newsletter can be found at http://internetmentornews.com
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