The Virtual Woman: A Woman's
Weekly Guide To Cyberspace
Making Money The Old Fashioned Way (Or Not)
It could be worse. You could be a Dot Com company making money. Gads-how embarrassing is that?? In Cyberspace you're nobody if you're not in debt. And you're nobody Big unless you're in Big debt. Try telling someone at an industry cocktail party that you're profitable and watch them proceed to stifle a guffaw and then size you up as a liar. Invariably they'll high-tail it to their comfort zone over at the other end of the well funded hors d'oeuvre table where the red wine flows as freely as the red ink does.My company is profitable. And hang on, it gets worse. We're debt free too. I'm not saying I'm proud but I am saying it, "I am The Virtual Woman and I run a profitable Internet company." And the truth shall set me free. As will the profits.
So where's your gravy train then? If The Virtual Woman can make money why can't you get yours? If this is where you're at then you, dear reader, have fallen victim to the hype. Yup, some major, major hype. Mix a few parts successful Dot Com IPOs with a few thousands parts hype and you've got, well, fiction. For the most part. Yes, I read the article about Yahoo! That if you would have invested $10,000 years ago when they first went public you'd be a gabillionairre. And if you'd invested $10,000 in Microsoft 20 years ago you probably wouldn't have gotten even this far reading this column. You would have been summoned to your golf game in Maui and off you'd a gone.
The do-it-yourself, "create a website and they will come" route is also way too simplistic and unrealistic at this point. The game has gotten fierce and chock filled with competitors willing to borrow literally hundreds of millions of dollars to survive losses for years to come solely on the chance that by creating a cyberbrand of some sort and some market presence that they'll be able to then turn the business around and make it profitable. Somehow. Not sure how. But somehow it'll all get better once the Corner to profitably is turned (the Corner is generally 3-4 years out-no one knows what this Corner looks like or what's around it or what street it's even located on but believe me, in the Internet biz, that Corner is one veeeery popular place).
But while Do It Yourself is out, the Initial Public Offering is in. Think of a concept, any concept, virtualize it and borrow about 50 million dollars and "build it up." Then, convince a company to underwrite your stock. They in turn will convince the General Public to invest. You, as company owner, don't give a rat's patoot if the company ever earns a nickel of real money as your stock options vest in about 6 months and if the stock does well you're well, off to Maui for that golf game. Check out www.ipocentral.com for some groovy ideas.
The other non IPO angle and the one we took was to earn money "the old fashioned way." That is, you earn it. The concept is simple albeit unpopular for Dot Coms. The money we take in from clients exceeds the money we spend to operate our business. This is also known as operating profitably. We have been able to do this mainly by adhering to two general principles: 1. We answer the phone and talk to people who are interested in buying and 2. We keep our costs down-in fact, we keep them below our revenues.
I've run this business since 1996 and we've grown about 10 fold. While our competitors are busy trying to go public and sell their souls to investors and banks we're busy pleasing customers, keeping our ears to the ground for trends and answering the phone. Works for me.
If you're serious about investing your time and/or money in an Internet biz keep in mind that there are many more stories of failures than successes-you just don't read about them and why would you-what companies want to publicize their demise? So be careful investing in Dot Coms and even more careful about starting one yourself. For investing in DotComs I recommend checking out InternetNews.Com and more specifically their stock section (http://www.internetnews.com/stocks/ For those interested in starting a Dot Com I recommend getting acquainted with all things Internet at (where else?) Internet.com (http://www.internet.com). If you'd prefer your information come to you versus having to go fetch it on the web, cruise through a variety of email lists at Liszt's site at http://www.liszt.com/select/Internet/Marketing/.
Happy Surfing!
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Contributing Editor: Sue Levin
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