Slashdot Mirror
Dotcom Business Plan Archive Open for Business
prostoalex writes "The next time you launch a huge online enterprise designed to cash out on Nasdaq IPO, it might be worth to check the Dotcom Business Plan Archive, MSNBC warns. David A. Kirsch, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, is collecting dotcom business plans and stories about creative destruction. Alas, both archives require free registration. There have been other attempts at creating such a collection."
1. String together a collection of dotcom business plans,
2. Put them on a website
3. Attract as many users as possible
4. Don't make users pay to see these business plans (free registration is required), but attract advertisers who want their logos displayed alongside the glorious business plans.
5. Profit!!
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Fucked Company.
1. Collect dot.com business plans 2. ??? 3. PROFIT!!!!!
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Apparently there haven't been many attempts at running Slashdot submissions through a splel chekcer.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Google seemed to do pretty well, except for that whole investigation thing that is going on with them. Not sure what happened with that, anyone know? Sorry to be off topic. I like random posts.
Free Desk
You mean some of them actually had a written business plan?!
http://bugmenot.com/
I am very sure the collection might have some great plans of companies which failed because the inertia of the market meltdown. One could even find plans which would had been too advanced for that time. Those plans could be used now.
There have been other attempts at creating such a collection.
Indeed.
It's not all in your head.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's easy to look back now and scoff at what seem to be ridiculous ideas. "Sell catfood over the internet?" Yeah, well, that's what Petsmart is doing now.
The problem was not an abundance of bad ideas, it was that no matter what new market arises, in this case the Internet, the entrenched business community will usually be able to make significant headway into the new market beyond what a startup with a good idea can do. The cost of starting up a new company and putting into place the infrastructure to support doing business is much greater than simply adjusting an existing business model to take advantage of the benefits of the new business environment.
The result is that the startups get bought up, stomped down, or suffocated out of the market that they themselves created. The entrenched companies have the resources and mindshare to do that to the smaller companies. Only in a handful of success stories do we see a startup taking over a market where entrenched business was too late, too hesitant, or unwilling to take advantage of the new paradigm (Amazon vs. B&N/Borders).
The moral of the story isn't that you shouldn't bet the farm on a silly idea. The silly idea isn't always going to seem to silly if it takes off. Most of those dot-bomb creators are rolling in money. The ones who scoff are still making $40,000 a year writing articles for Wired.
So, unlike others who scrambled to get first post, I went and had a look at the archive.
Errm... it's a bunch of business names with a "submit information on this company" button next to them. So I did another search for listings with multiple documents and finally found a business plan after the tenth company I looked at which was Artex.com, business plan here.
Looking at the executive summary, these guys planned to take a $20M investment and be generating $136M in revenues in two years. Ah, the hubris of those great days would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
Anyways, so they planned to spend $3.5M on hardware/hosting/etc, $3.5M the guys actually doing the software development and $11.5M on the marketroids to sell the idea (and presumably the artwork). No doubt the marketing guys were being paid 3 times the software developers also.
Is software development it's own reward? Do marketing people get paid a lot to compensate them for their frivolous job and their vapourous life?
So does this mean there's no help for the huge online sock emporium I am currently running?
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
I've signed up and have yet to come across any business plans, though there are some more or less intriguing docs like photographs of marketing trinkets.
I have been to the site and found no business plans. there is no actual content. You are supposed to post the business plan of your failed company I assume. Can't see any reason for somebody with a failed business to post their business paln that didn't work. I don't even think this plan would have worked in the nineties.
Stay tuned for new sig...
I believe that this collection will be very useful to folks that are trying to see 1) what has been done and why it failed, 2) what assumptions (founded or unfounded were made), and 3) what want to see what failed but might work now.
Unfortunately, the study of history - in any form - is very underrated in the current global culture and in American culture specifically. It is suprising to me the number of folks that feel history is 1) uninteresting, 2) irrelevnat, and 3) useless.
I will be registering for this site (and for those of you that refuse to register, TANSTAAFL), and exploring what it makes available. I think I will learn a lot.
And if you don't buy any of my arguments above, just remind yourself that this is a collection of the business plans that got funded by VCs. It can't hurt to look at them and use them as models if you are seeking VC funding someday for your idea.
Yours,
Jordan
Why does everyone keep saying all those dotcoms failed? The basic business plan was to convince a venture capital group to turn over money. The "founders" of the dotcom then used the money to play around for a year or two doing all kinds of fun things and buying expensive toys and throwing parties. Then they had one hell of a garage sell as they unloaded all that expensive equipment.
Saw this first hand at a storage service provider called Sanrise. Burned through something like 200 Million dollars in just a couple of years. Left more than a dozen Hitachi 9900 raid arrays and huge tape libraries all over the country.
Heck of a party while it lasted. And for the CEO and a few of the founders I am sure they extracted a very nice sum prior to the final implosion.
So all in all I would have to say that most of the business plans the dotcoms used worked just exactly the way they were suppose to. They extracted a huge amount of money from venture capital groups. The fact that most of them had silly ideas just makes the venture capital groups look very silly.
That aired way after the crash?
Way to be timely, folks!
Access Businessplanarchive's archive with this u/p:
username: firstborn@mailinator.com
password: firstborn
I atteneded an undergraduate entrepreneurship class at UMD's Smith School taught by Dr. Kirsch. He's a great professor and is very passionate about archiving the .COM history. He used a lot of these business plans as part of his class. For each lecture we would do a case study of successful companies like Starbucks and many unsuccessful businesses. I must of read over a dozen business plans and case studies as part of his course. I think this resource is great for business professors and MBA students studying entrepreneurship. It showed the businesses that turned out to be failures were the ones that wrote the business plans to find money but didn't bother to follow through on it. The successful businesses were the ones that stuck to the original plan (assuming it was a good plan) and used it as a roadmap. You would be surprised by how many companies used astronomical figures like "$15 billion industry by 2005, with only a 1% market share..." Looking back at articles written in the 90's about rejected business plans, it made sense that so many were rejected... Business school and intro business/marketing classes should be required to teach these business plans as part of the ciriculum.
... how the fuck i'm i'm supposed to get funding for my plans?
They just generate less and less funding in each new round of venture capital.
2. Claim all *nix is belong to us.
3. Get press by launching an unwinnable lawsuit against IBM.
4. Get the company you run to pay millions in legal fees to your own brother.
5. Watch share price grow as press releases hint that your tiny company can get IBM and millions of users to pay up or go out of business.
6. Cut and run as the company implodes, and become bankrupt if necessary since all the cash is stashed with relatives or otherwise unreachable.
7. If any of the company remains, sue it for letting you be such a wanker.
8. Use your enhanced reputation to become CEO of a small and old soft drink company, and think about how it must have really invented coca-cola.
1. Come up with sensible, mature business model. ... oh, wait ...
2. Develop a real, salable product.
3. Profit
I'm the Professor at Maryland who has spent the last two plus years collecting the business plans and related documents. [...] Sounds like we need to improve the search functionality so you can find stuff you want to see.
Indeed. Also, an overwhelming percentage of entries seem to have no info on them besides the company name and description. Maybe the "browse by one or more documents" should be made a checkbox instead of one of the browse options?
Surfed through a bit, didn't seem that good, with essentially lists of companies that folded, and a sporadic link to some pdf copy of an unfinished memo describing a vague business idea, or less.
When I first started searching for this stuff, I wanted to see what a real business plan contained..
Check out http://www.bplans.com/sp/; click on Sample Business Plans for some very thorough plans, but that page has some other stuff that might be useful (marketing plans, etc), although be warned, the company sells business plan software, among other things.
Enjoy.
this isn't a sig. i type this (including the two dashes), every time i post, just to make it look like a sig.
So many funny and tragic things happened there that to this day I'm not entirely convinced that it isn't a mockumentary a la Spinal Tap.
For us in old Europe it was a double treat, because we'd get to experience both the dot.com madness, as well as the "standard" American business practices, like the "Monday morning shout" and other weird (for us) motivational stuff.
Definitely check this documentary out if you haven't already.
The real problem I see, with many of these ideas, is not that they weren't good. It's that too much money was thrown into starting up a company based on a pipe dream that it will be worth 100 times what it's real-life true worth will really be.
When you throw $100 million dollars of venture capital on a business that really requires only $5 million, what you end up with is a bunch of antsy investors who can't wait for the return on their investment. Many of these companies had sustainable businesses that could have perhaps become $5 million/year businesses.
However 3 things can kill it:
1) The huge amount of capital. The company managers obvious will find some reason to spend it, and it's usually done on really stupid things, like paying $80/CPM to serve up some ad banners that yielded something like 0.3% click through. It was just one scam after another. People spent money unnecessarily, and companies charged exhorbitant fees for ridiculous things.
2) The return on investment is obviously no longer there, when you plunk down $100 million to yield a business making perhaps $5 million a year. If the initial investment had been $5 million, it would've been a GREAT startup.
3) Expectation of a fast exit strategy that will yield a huge payday. This type of mentality led to really sloppy and poor planning, in terms of resources and commitment. Everyone went in with the expectation that they come out multi-millionaires. This is just not realistic. Any time you start a business you have to be ready to run it for the long-term.
Obviously, there were some really zainy ideas, but I'm only talking about the ones I thought actually had potential.
eTrade SUCKS
We shall see how long Slate makes it on it's own or if anyone actually buys it. Nothing cracks the whip like a demonstration of the no viability of your whole business. In the mean time, the author and the editor will be canned.
It's control as much as all the shine on BS you get from NBC is. None of them has reported on IE and M$ exploits very well but the public knows it anyway.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
With the dot com bust/era/it's all the creative nerdy adhd closet cases.
..and all the creative types. and all the shit that goes with it.Think they won't because it's virtual.
.. time and time again.
.. a new toy .. thing.
...ugh. SEE-THROUGH.
.. doesn't mean it's
trying to do "own businesses" with all this virtual CRAP that ain't needed.
It's the mindset which goes with the dissorder
known as ADHD. Which I suffered from
and the GOVT really fucking hate it un all.
I know, I tried
Failed every go.
It's all to do with mind set.
Think they won't because it's "virtual" reality.
and they won't. thus dot com era = FAILURE.
Big ass BUST.
it was just a woohoo
That was blown out of all proportion..
by media and press.
Because it's an exciting new toy.
let's try it here cos where socially inadiquate
fuck-up's else where.
behind a screen of corporate BULLSHIT.
then attack each other over meaningless crap.
Such as IPO's and all that cack.
which is just sooo
SCO. etc etc etc.
SCO's the next one to go down.
Just because it's virtual
not a real person at the end.
and this is what other people fail to see.
time and time and again.
because it's cheap. just laziness.
the easy way out.
psychology of real life, applies to psychology
online. no difference.
There is a real person behind that screen yo!
There is a real person behind that art yo!
There is a real person behind that "dissorder" yo!
There is a real person behind that "big flashy expensive car" yo!
and fuck you, if you think otherwise.
I already used my dot.com's business plan for toilet paper.
My dot com is going to make it where the others have failed. Our business plan is infallible.
I don't exactly know how this IPO stuff works, but I can't wait to allow people to make the claim that they own a tiny portion of my Weasel Balls.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Originally, 'creative destruction' meant reallocation of capital to uses that generated higher return. But, in the context of a weblog of the boom, maybe it means 'creative means of capital destruction.' :-(
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
You suck nasty, stinky ass.