Starting Your Online Business - Set Realistic Goals |
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In October 2006, Google announced it's purchase of YouTube for the sum of 1.65 billion dollars. This is enough money to make anyone stop and imagine exactly how much money that is.
This has also spawned an army of wannabe web entrepreneurs to come out of the woodwork and jump on the web 2.0 bandwagon in the hopes that they too will one day be the next YouTube.
Here's a wakeup call for those people: rather than trying to be next YouTube, how about simply being the next You?
What do you think YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen told themselves when they decided to start their online video project? I can safely bet that they opening statement did not start like:
- I want to be like...
- I want to be the next...
- I want to be bigger than...
YouTube's goal was to make it easy for people to share videos online. They wanted to help the masses by making their lives simpler. None of the big players on the ent together came to be because they want to be "the next" anything. They came to be because they saw potential in an idea that will help people.
What a concept! That is what viral marketing is about; help people and they will tell others how great and useful you are.
Concentrate your energies on helping others and you will reap the rewards. Because someone had a good idea and developped it into a really popular and profitable product, does not mean that this is the type of business you should be getting into. You have to work off of what your passions are, and I have never heard of anyone that got their passion in life by copying someone else's.
It seems too many web entrepreneurs have forgotten how to be original, which is why so many ideas never take off.
Find ways of drastically improving someone else's life and developping tools that you yourself would find useful. Develop and work that idea until you have something valuable and beautiful that others will be excited to use.
Lastly, realize one thing. Companies like YouTube are the products of the blood, sweat and tears of extremely hard working and intelligent people. For an upstart web entrepreneur to barge in and suddenly think that they can "be the next" or "be even better than" is disrespectful. Research these companies, and you will see that eventhough these are easy statements to make, they are extremely difficult to back up.
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