Discounting a Venture

There are a bunch of new startups popping up around the web every day. A bunch of new products are introduced each year through retailers. And a lot of these things fail. A lot of people predict that some will be “epic fails,” but these same ones can become extremely successful. I remember when the iPod first came out, I thought to myself: “Who the heck would buy a $300 MP3 player from Apple, when you can just buy a CD player?” …I know how foolish of me to think that…The owner of a many iPods. My apologies to Apple.

There are numerous startups on the web in beta, so how do they get out of beta? Well to sum it all up, either the startup is a success or failure by how popular, lucrative or useful it is. For example, John Reese’s blog syndication concept through Blog Rush announced that it was shutting down today. He said that there were millions of impressions, but the click through rate was just horrible. He didn’t fool himself, but instead he decided to pull the plug on Blog Rush because it simply was not a probable concept to keep running. You can read his blog post on income.com about how he was decided to shut down Blog Rush. This proves that even smart and successful entrepreneurs can have failure under their belt. Now the idea he had was great, but for some reason it was just not working. I used blog rush for a little while myself and I can say that I truly thought the concept was great, but it didn’t work too well for me either.

I have had some failures under my belt as well. I believe it is just something entrepreneurs go through to be successful. You cannot expect to be great from day one. Now this doesn’t go to say if you have a great idea you should be skeptical about it, but you shouldn’t be afraid to reconsider keeping it going if it’s not working out to be useful or lucrative. You should never get one sided with anything that you are doing and you should be able to run an analysis of how much sense it makes to keep it going.

Obviously when something is not going as expected, you should not pull the plug right away, but you should be more conscious of it. By keeping a close eye on it, you will be able to make a better judgment as to whether or not to keep something running.