Thought I would share an experience I had while launching a Dolphin based site and working with potential investment.
Please feel free to add your own experiences below, see if we can inspire, encourage each other!
I started using Dolphin maybe around 2010. I built a few small niche sites for people I was filming with (martial arts focused not adult!). Those sites were moderately successful for a short while, each serving a network of students of different martial arts styles. My hook for the sites would be the pay to access video sections, where students could get instruction videos of world champions. Kinda like youtube on steroids!
These lasted a year or two, made some half decent money. Unfortunately the supply of new content was heavy on myself so far as travelling and time to film, edit, manage etc... and I let the sites slip. They are now no longer online.
I then had the idea for a different site, a regional network that would bring together lots of localised communities, provide free services to public users, then list businesses and so on but with some modified features that would make businesses want to be on the site (can't disclose these features!).
After a year of building, lots of custom coding to certain modules and forever tweaking the site to flow better, I set myself a 'beta' launch date with a loose business plan.
I got the site to that point where I was not happy that it was finished, but it was 'good enough' for beta.. This is important to have in mind, otherwise if you wait for the site to be 'ready' you will be forever waiting!
I then went out to a local town, armed with ipad and nothing but screen shots and went door to door in local shops.
Having never done any 121 sales before this was an interesting learning curve!
Quickly realising that only 1 in 10 shops I would get to speak to the person I needed to talk to about paying to be included in the site meant I had my work cut out straight away.
However, I kept going every day for a month. Only really managing to get into shop a few hours each day.
After the first month, I had 30 businesses had given me cash ON THE SPOT to be listed!!! Lots of rejections though, but I still had a good amount of money for a first month!
What I should have done at this point is kept going exactly as I was for a while, but I took some advice a little too quick and looked at getting a business plan together for investors...
I drew up a plan based on my first months return, if I had people in lots of different towns working for me. To make the shops/businesses list quicker and to get round the issue of other people handling the payments, I set the site to allow 6 months free listing. This would hopefully also increase the number of shops getting on the site, make it grow quicker, appear to be more popular etc and only mean payments were handled by a sales office 6 months later.
I started looking where to get investment based on this approach as the potential earning figures were very attractive.
I posted on a business 'angel' site which was free, but you then had to pay a £100 fee to get the contact info from any potential investors who showed interest.
After a few days, I had 3 investors showing interest. I decided to jump in and pay the contact fee.
The first was just a sales person, offering to put me in contact with other investors for a %... didn't bother calling him back!
The 2nd had a fantastic story, talked all the talk, and was massively enthusiastic. Turned out though he was a bit of a well known internet faker who was all talk and no cash!
The 3rd, turned out to be the real deal. Worked as some ridiculously high level of banking investment handling millions in transactions every day. went up to the offices he worked at which most likely cost more than some small countries have in debt... There was lots of initial interest!
Then followed a series of back and forth talks, emails, minor changes to the plan and layout etc... all of which dragged on and on... 6 months later still nothing was signed and no money had moved. At this point I was no longer doing any on the street promotion of my site, or any promotion at all as everything was focused on 'getting this investment'.
Then, along came another site that offered something very similar to my site, and in my local area. In fact, in lots of local areas... They obviously had investment as they were advertising everywhere. Suddenly there was little I could do to compete as I was a 1 man job, and they had teams of people assigned to each town, company cars, flashy sales teams....
My site was shelved and I started the process all over of taking what I had learned and looking to apply it to my next project.
This was all about 1.5 years ago.
Now, the site that stormed my 'patch' before are still there, their investment money looks like it has kept the alive. Site content is limited, and they only have 125 businesses on the local version of their site! This is after over a year and a whole team. I managed 30 in a month by myself with nothing but bags of enthusiasm and a 'personal approach'. I can't see how they are making enough to maintain themselves for much longer... Maybe they will go bankrupt and be another statistic.
Got my creative juices flowing again and am looking at relaunching my first idea as their model still doesnt offer what mine did! Just gotta make a few more tweaks to dolphin first, get it beta launch ready once more...
What did I learn from all this?
Well, there were a few things that stand out, maybe not the things that a business seminar would teach you.
The investment that I needed, at least at first was 'my time' and not 'someone else's money'. That may come in handy later, IF NEEDED...
If you're trying to sell a site, you will get rejected A LOT at first! I was successful in maybe 1 in 10 (which I think was actually pretty good for nothing but screen shots!)
Business owners, like the personal approach. They welcomed the fact that I put the effort into them, I spent at least 30 mins talking with each 1 in 10 that joined up. I asked questions, listened and learned about their business needs! In the most part, the smaller businesses would be the ones who were positive to me. They often 'lived' their businesses also so by listening to them, I learned about their lives. They appreciated this and wanted to see me succeed!
Sometimes, timing comes round again! My first launch wasn't on time, now though I can see the gap in the market is widening and the potential competition STILL has not filled the niche I was looking at...
Maybe it's time to push that boat out again!
What about you?
Whats your Dolphin experience so far, if it's been good, please share some of it to encourage others.
If it's been difficult, maybe other can encourage you if you share!
Either way, I'm interested to hear :-)
