Your Biggest FAILURES

[christopheravell]

I thought it would be fun (and a good exercise in humility) for us to share some of our biggest online FAILURES. Maybe, unlike me, you haven't had any... But I sure have had a couple. I have had plenty more mistakes (like selling something for far less than it was worth) but that is for a different thread. What I want to know here is:

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST ONLINE FAILURE?
Basically a site you were ready to run with and was excited and sure it was going to succeed only to see it fall flat on it's face? I am interested in hearing *real* failure stories not *stories where I say I failed but it is obvious I really succeeded*.

Let me start with one of mine. There are two I have, but one will do for now.

The site was YourICC.com and it was a "new" type of search engine. We had a nice simple layout, a great tagline "The Search that Reads Your Mind" and, what I thought was a great plan.

As sites like Excite and others will becoming more and more cluttered with news / ads / etc I thought a website that cut-to-the-chase and just provided quality search results was a great idea. Teamed up with keyword targeted advertising that was non-intrusive I thought we had a real winner.

We launched a promotion - "The Haunted Hearse Tour of Terror" which was an online sensation and, for the month of October 2000, we were one of the most accessed sites on the web.

However, the website traffic didn't equal new search traffic and the site fizzled fast and fell right on it's face. Total failure. We invested about $4000 in the site and made a whopping $0... Nothing.

Realizing the site was going nowhere and with the emergence of Google as the dominating search I shut the site down.

I was felt confident YourICC was going to make millions. Nope - total failure.

So, what is your non-success story?

[tvanslooten]

I could write a book about my online failures. I seem to waste around $5,000/year chasing various projects that go no where but I'll share the one that hurts the most.

A few years ago I thought it was time to start buying websites/businesses. eBay was the only marketplace I knew of at the time where you could buy online businesses. How ignorant I was! This guy had an established business for sale selling used, collectible Oakley sunglasses on eBay. This was right up my alley because I always wanted to be an eBay Power Seller (which this guy was) and I always wanted to own some kind of ecommerce business so I started placing my bids. I was the "lucky" winner and the business was mine for $5,500. Within a month of taking ownership of the business, the supplier of the sunglasses was having a hard time finding glasses for me to sell. I later found out the supplier was the former owner's cousin who ran a pawn shop in a seedy area of L.A. I suspect the glasses I was selling were hot or something fishy was going on because he'd sell them to me for around $50 and I'd sell them for $75-$150 on eBay.

During the first two months I owned the business, I was losing money because the few sunglasses that were available to sell weren't selling. Then I got a letter from eBay that my Power Seller account (the one I bought) and my own personal account that I had owned for years with 100% feedback had all been closed. I found out it was against eBay's TOS to buy accounts and that they essentially ban you for life from eBay for doing it. It took me 3 months battling eBay and hunting down the V.P. of US Operations of eBay to get my personal account back. Yes, I literally tracked down the direct telephone number of the VP of eBay's US Operations. I never got to talk to him directly, but I hounded his secretary enough that after a few calls to his office (and a couple faxes and emails) my account was reinstated.

In total, I lost over $6,500 in the deal and 3 months of time and headache getting my eBay account back. Looking back at the deal, I still can't believe how stupid I was. There were so many red flags that if I saw the listing today I would laugh. Sadly, as a newbie "business buyer" it seemed like a totally legit and lucrative opportunity. This ordeal will haunt me to my dying day.

Travis

[QualityNonsense]

Great idea for a thread!

I'll put all my failures under the clumsy-but-accurate category of "massively over-estimating how much money the users of an un-monetized or new site will spend". Ie, assumming: " "OMG! This site has X thousand visits a month, of course X% of them will spend £X per month".

It never, ever works out that way...

[JJMcClure]

www.Etheco.com- did it with three colleagues, intended to be the next big ethical living website, never did a damn thing, dunno know why it's still live.

[3Six]

My biggest failure was not getting into pharma sites early enough. I had a fantastic opportunity I let slip some years ago that I'm still kicking myself for. It's worth several million today.

[christopheravell]

My biggest failure was not getting into pharma sites early enough. I had a fantastic opportunity I let slip some years ago that I'm still kicking myself for. It's worth several million today.

That is too bad. I could write a book on the number of opportunities I passed up on that have been extremely successful. But they were mostly for ethical / moral reasons so I am actually glad I passed and would chalk them in the "success" column personally. I do however wish I had kept in contact with my good friend Steve Chen! We went to Hersey together and I even visited him a couple of times at IMSA, but we just drifted apart as time and distance can do to a high school friendship. Steve, you remember me when -- right? :-)