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- Mar 18, 2014
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I'm going to share something that absolutely crushed a limiting belief I had that perhaps success is something reserved for "other" people. People that <insert some excuse here>.
I hope this helps someone realize that success is for anyone, not just someone who has a special skill or piece of knowledge or money or connections or timing or whatever.
Background: There are only two main players in my chosen niche. Both are B2C sites that charge businesses to use their service to sell to consumers (think along the lines of zillow.com). One site is so-so, one is horrible. Neither is ground breaking or offering anything innovative at all. They simply provide a service. I've been a web designer/developer for 17 years and am very confident that I can produce a better quality site that includes innovations their customers talk about on their own blogs/reddit/etc.
One whiney day while telling myself special people run the successful web sites, I thought, "Well, let's figure out who exactly owns these sites anyways." BBB Search for physical address and then once I had state, I went to the states business lookup, found the business paperwork, and now I have actual names of the owners.
Let the Facebook stalking begin!
The thing that shocked me is that both of the "big players" are owned by people just like me. Early 30's, married w/ young kids. The "companies" (websites) are not run by anyone. There's no army of employees. Nothing... One site hasn't updated anything since 2003, yet makes 100k+/month revenue (public profiles of paying customers visible). Three people own that site and from their Facebook photos/comments, they all like to travel.
These guys also come across as D-bags in their posts online (FB, online forums), most of the time dropping comments about their yachts or most recent vacation. The thought occurred to me: D-bags probably don't give an F about what other people think. They have such an inflated view of themselves they act as if they can't fail (heard that before?).
After probably too much time spent stalking, I now firmly believe "If they can do it, so can I."
I have been consistently working on my site every night since and am confident it will succeed.
Anyone else ever do this to figure out who the competition really is, or am I crazy?
I hope this helps someone realize that success is for anyone, not just someone who has a special skill or piece of knowledge or money or connections or timing or whatever.
Background: There are only two main players in my chosen niche. Both are B2C sites that charge businesses to use their service to sell to consumers (think along the lines of zillow.com). One site is so-so, one is horrible. Neither is ground breaking or offering anything innovative at all. They simply provide a service. I've been a web designer/developer for 17 years and am very confident that I can produce a better quality site that includes innovations their customers talk about on their own blogs/reddit/etc.
One whiney day while telling myself special people run the successful web sites, I thought, "Well, let's figure out who exactly owns these sites anyways." BBB Search for physical address and then once I had state, I went to the states business lookup, found the business paperwork, and now I have actual names of the owners.
Let the Facebook stalking begin!
The thing that shocked me is that both of the "big players" are owned by people just like me. Early 30's, married w/ young kids. The "companies" (websites) are not run by anyone. There's no army of employees. Nothing... One site hasn't updated anything since 2003, yet makes 100k+/month revenue (public profiles of paying customers visible). Three people own that site and from their Facebook photos/comments, they all like to travel.
These guys also come across as D-bags in their posts online (FB, online forums), most of the time dropping comments about their yachts or most recent vacation. The thought occurred to me: D-bags probably don't give an F about what other people think. They have such an inflated view of themselves they act as if they can't fail (heard that before?).
After probably too much time spent stalking, I now firmly believe "If they can do it, so can I."
I have been consistently working on my site every night since and am confident it will succeed.
Anyone else ever do this to figure out who the competition really is, or am I crazy?
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