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Dotcom Business Plan Archive Open for Business

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the recipes-for-disaster dept.

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."

19 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Recently submitted business plan by fembots · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  2. Also known as... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fucked Company.

  3. Nice one by dmccarty · · Score: 5, Funny
    There have been other attempts at creating such a colelction.

    Apparently there haven't been many attempts at running Slashdot submissions through a splel chekcer.

    --
    Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
  4. damn registration by applegoddess · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://bugmenot.com/

  5. Great ! by allden · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Lots of businesses don't make it by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Lots of businesses don't make it by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 3, Funny

      $40,000/year would be a nice raise for me. Then again, my bosses are assholes.

  7. Re:ohhh, I've got one. by jgalun · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're a moron:

    A) Microsoft didn't buy an old broadcast network. Microsoft doesn't own NBC, they partnered with NBC. Big difference.

    B) If Microsoft was really bothered by Slate recommending Firefox, they would have tightened their control over an operation that they wholly owned. Selling it - so that it has even more freedom to criticize you - makes no sense in those circumstances. I thought we were supposed to be afraid of corporations controlling the media - not afraid of corporations selling their control of the media!

  8. Not much of an archive by satans_advocate · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Not much of an archive by servognome · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Do marketing people get paid a lot to compensate them for their frivolous job and their vapourous life?
      I wouldn't call marketing frivolous, at least in their importance to a business.
      Just go to a drugstore, right next to the $1.99 Wal-ynol is a $4.99 bottle of Tylenol. It's the same medicine, but somehow people are convinced the name brand is better. Sure the chemical engineers can figure out new ways to make each bottle 10 cents cheaper, but the marketing folks can convince people to pay $3 more. Which do you think is better for profits?
      Some marketing person convinced us that $5 for a cup of coffee, or $100 for a pair of shoes is reasonable; They even convince people that american beer "tastes great"!
      You shouldn't dismiss the social and psychological side of business. Too often the "better" product doesn't sell as well because people think the other product is "better."

      --
      D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
    2. Re:Not much of an archive by Zangief · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You are right, but there is a problem. In this case, the marketing guys took the $11M, said "Sure, we can sell this, leave it to us, we know better", and let the company sunk, and went to the bank laughing all the way.

      An ethical professional would have said "You know, this business will die, horribly. Selling catfood through the internet isn't going to work, at least not today. Keep your millions, this advice will cost you $X thousands dollars".

      The IT guys couldn't know this. It isn't their work. But it was the work of the marketroids. So, at least these people had frivolous job and vapourous life.

    3. Re:Not much of an archive by Zangief · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, of course today it looks stupid, because today we know what happened. But back in the day, some people (of course the minority), MUST have realized what was going on.

      In fact, Paul Graham did realize that Yahoo stock(which had employed him) was priced waaaay above reality. And acted accordingly. He sold his stock, and told his friends to do the same.

      He was a programmer. Yes, he had a lot of business vision. But the market guys should have had a lot more of this than him. It was their fricking job.

  9. They are only collecting plans at this point by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 2, Informative


    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.

  10. Will be very useful... by jordandeamattson · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  11. The dotcoms did not fail.... by slashname3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The dotcoms did not fail.... by vidarh · · Score: 2, Informative

      While many VC's did catastrophic investments, most of them are VERY good at protecting their investments from ending in the founders pockets until they've sold out, or the company has gone public. I'm sure a portion of dot-com founders that burned their VC's badly still managed to get out with lots of cash, particularly for companies that survived until some time after an IPO, but the majority likely were stuck with peanuts.

  12. Former professor by LeiGong · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  13. This ones perfect by dbIII · · Score: 3, Insightful
    1. Become CEO of old unix company.
    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.

  14. startup.com by hrm · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Reminds me of a great documentary, startup.com, about a dot.com that wanted to do something or other that would make tons of money.

    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.