Hey Guys,
I thought I would start a thread for everyone to tell their story about their successes and failures with starting an online business. I myself am young and very interested in web startups. I have had a few projects I have worked on in the past so I will start...
In college, myself and 2 other friends started a social entertainment site associated with our school. For the first year we posted funny videos + pics, cool beer pong tables, new music, and blogged stories about the what is going on at school. We provided forums and classifieds for students on campus. We made our money from selling t shirts. We advertised our site by word of mouth, giving out free stuff through contests, and writing our domain in chalk all over campus. I completely designed the site from scratch with basic html. We paid for the domain and hosting with revenues generated from selling tshirts. We brought tshirts to football game tailgates to sell and provided an online store through the site.
Over time, we started slacking off and slowly stopped updating the site as often. I guess you could blame it on too much partying, haha. When it came time to renew the domain and hosting I decided to let it go. I also started to realize that over the past year, I had put in 90% of the work between myself and 2 friends. I built the site, updated it, and marketed it. The others gave input, advertised it around campus, and sold tshirts. We also lost some of our competitive edge to another similar site as well as facebook. Since I had some great shirt ideas, I opened a printfection account to still allow shirt sales without costing me a dime. You can see what is still left of it at printfection.com/mx . Although we did not make very much money, it was a fun experience running this type of site. Even if we had kept this site prospering, it would have been very difficult to keep up with after graduating and moving.
Story 2
After college I began working full time with investments. When I needed to take time away from work and waste some time browsing the web, I came across centsports. Centsports allows registered users to sportsbet on vegas odds but with money provided by the site rather than their own. They give you 10 cents to start and if you make it to $20 you can cashout. I frequently found myself on this site so I did some research on it and found it to be pretty successful from advertising revenue. From there I had the idea to start a similar site, but instead of betting on sports, betting on the stock market. So here was my idea... My site gives you a free 10 cents. You can bet on what stocks will do on a daily basis and if you make it to $20, you can cash out. I didn't know enough about coding to develop such a site so I hired a programmer on elance. Unfortunatly, we came to the conclusion that he could not set up an API to feed stocks to bet on through the site but he could make an option to allow me to manually chose stocks to bet on and whether they would increase or decrease in value every day. Well at the time I didn't think that would matter but I was wrong. After the site was complete, I advertised and my users grew. I was making a good amount of money from adsense because financial links payout pretty well. Here is where the problems started... Because there was no built in API for the bets, I had to manually choose the stocks to be bet on, calculate their odds with a beta equation I developed, and then determine each outcome. This was a daily basis I partake in for 3/4 of a year and became very demanding of my time. Doing this while working a full time job and marketing the site, writing articles for it became stressful. I had several new additions I wanted to add to the site but when I contacted the coder to add them, it was determined the price would be very expensive. I slowly devoted less and less time to the site until I completely stopped updating it. At this point there is very little ad revenue coming in so I have decided I am going to try to sell the script. With the domain I may make a blog to update every so often for some side cash. You can check out the site at betmystock.com
Now I am currently trying to learn php and other coding software so I can completly develop any ideas I have on my own. It is a slow process but hopefully it will get me somewhere successful.
I thought I would start a thread for everyone to tell their story about their successes and failures with starting an online business. I myself am young and very interested in web startups. I have had a few projects I have worked on in the past so I will start...
In college, myself and 2 other friends started a social entertainment site associated with our school. For the first year we posted funny videos + pics, cool beer pong tables, new music, and blogged stories about the what is going on at school. We provided forums and classifieds for students on campus. We made our money from selling t shirts. We advertised our site by word of mouth, giving out free stuff through contests, and writing our domain in chalk all over campus. I completely designed the site from scratch with basic html. We paid for the domain and hosting with revenues generated from selling tshirts. We brought tshirts to football game tailgates to sell and provided an online store through the site.
Over time, we started slacking off and slowly stopped updating the site as often. I guess you could blame it on too much partying, haha. When it came time to renew the domain and hosting I decided to let it go. I also started to realize that over the past year, I had put in 90% of the work between myself and 2 friends. I built the site, updated it, and marketed it. The others gave input, advertised it around campus, and sold tshirts. We also lost some of our competitive edge to another similar site as well as facebook. Since I had some great shirt ideas, I opened a printfection account to still allow shirt sales without costing me a dime. You can see what is still left of it at printfection.com/mx . Although we did not make very much money, it was a fun experience running this type of site. Even if we had kept this site prospering, it would have been very difficult to keep up with after graduating and moving.
Story 2
After college I began working full time with investments. When I needed to take time away from work and waste some time browsing the web, I came across centsports. Centsports allows registered users to sportsbet on vegas odds but with money provided by the site rather than their own. They give you 10 cents to start and if you make it to $20 you can cashout. I frequently found myself on this site so I did some research on it and found it to be pretty successful from advertising revenue. From there I had the idea to start a similar site, but instead of betting on sports, betting on the stock market. So here was my idea... My site gives you a free 10 cents. You can bet on what stocks will do on a daily basis and if you make it to $20, you can cash out. I didn't know enough about coding to develop such a site so I hired a programmer on elance. Unfortunatly, we came to the conclusion that he could not set up an API to feed stocks to bet on through the site but he could make an option to allow me to manually chose stocks to bet on and whether they would increase or decrease in value every day. Well at the time I didn't think that would matter but I was wrong. After the site was complete, I advertised and my users grew. I was making a good amount of money from adsense because financial links payout pretty well. Here is where the problems started... Because there was no built in API for the bets, I had to manually choose the stocks to be bet on, calculate their odds with a beta equation I developed, and then determine each outcome. This was a daily basis I partake in for 3/4 of a year and became very demanding of my time. Doing this while working a full time job and marketing the site, writing articles for it became stressful. I had several new additions I wanted to add to the site but when I contacted the coder to add them, it was determined the price would be very expensive. I slowly devoted less and less time to the site until I completely stopped updating it. At this point there is very little ad revenue coming in so I have decided I am going to try to sell the script. With the domain I may make a blog to update every so often for some side cash. You can check out the site at betmystock.com
Now I am currently trying to learn php and other coding software so I can completly develop any ideas I have on my own. It is a slow process but hopefully it will get me somewhere successful.
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