Business Projects we never executed
Thursday, December 20th, 2007When I was living in Tartu, Estonia during 2003-2004 the local TV station manager complaint me how difficult he have to sell proper advertisements and more difficult is to get invoices paid. The most of the local businesses there where small businesses, so I prepared a project to him where small ads sent as Premium SMS messages will start to scroll below the screen as CNN or BBC news bar as that where the actual advertising market was. Only local big business was a beer factory but they won’t order a commercial from him as they where national brand.
I sorted out the technology problems, negotiated good deals with leading mobile operator in Baltic States – Tele2 and with cable operators on all Baltic State countries to avoid high telecommunication license fee to air the channel.
I presented the project to him as he had lot of unique video material and instead tracing his unpaid invoices he could concentrate producing music videos. To my surprise, he wasn’t interested at all and probably still chases his unpaid invoices.
After arriving to Brighton, UK I asked to work for Dataline Software until I’m established. Dataline had developed online glass cutting optimisation service which they where thinking as non viable business project. Their pricing model was calculated by points so you will get some free points and when some complex optimisation need will come up you need to purchase points using credit card.
However as their online payment gateway was out of business, so sometimes they got phone calls and added points manually.
I found out that they have around five frequent customers, only one incoming link was producing traffic and they did not appeared on search engines at all.
When evaluating the competition, I tested five shareware applications frequently coming up on internet and from which only one was working properly. Others either crashed or didn’t carry out any optimisation at all. The only working shareware application was selling at $699 license. I didn’t found anyone else providing a similar online service. So my recommendation was that charging $99.95/£99.95 in year or $9.95/£9.95 per month and with some SEO and marketing efforts we could have business producing around £15K-£20K yearly revenues with minimal costs. However as the programmer who had written this application was always busy with customer projects, nothing had happened when I left from Brighton.
I met a guy in local Business Start-up Courses establishing a tourist stall in Belfast to sell unique photographic images from several artists. As those products where truly unique so we agreed that I will setup Internet sales for him. Having found the proper keywords with low KEI (keyword efficiency index) I expected 300-500 visitors per day with around 10% sales conversion rate. It could have been taken me two weeks to setup the website and month-two online marketing efforts to get his online business running with expected revenues.
So we started very enthusiastically. However, getting some elementary information from photographers-artists was practically impossible. Meanwhile some artists whose pages I have setup have discontinued some new ones coming on board, etc. I have proposed several times to launch the site as it is to start to earn money but artists have been against it. So its end of the year now and as there was problems getting hosting paid from the credit card provided, this site has now been cancelled. I have done lot of work without any result and haven’t yet earned any commission which was my original objective to get involved with his business.
