My first 7 ventures: 3x Success, 4x Failure
Looking back as a 41 year old, I realise I have always been an entrepreneur. Lets start at the beginning, and see what we can learn from my past failures and successes.
My first ever entrepreneurial endeavour was when I was 16 years old, then again at 21, then a huge burst at 26. As you can see from this page from my personal notebook scribbled in 2016 things accelerated from there as I started to invest my money and my time to help other entrepreneurs.
SUCCESS: A backpack full of high-demand products
When I was 16, my parents went overseas for a month or two and left me at home with some money (presumably they thought I would spend that money on food.) Of course, what I did was spend all that money on alcohol instead and got really, really drunk a few times with my friends. It was so much fun.
But after learning what a really bad hangover is, I decided that getting drunk was not such a good idea. I also started to get a little hungry, and did not have much money left to buy food. I counted how many days were left between now and when my parents would return to feed me again, and I used the rest of my money to buy canned food, just to make sure that I would not starve. Logical.
I also had all this extra alcohol left over.
I decided to put it into a backpack and cruise around to all the underage parties every weekend, selling shots. It was a hit.
I made all my money back, and more, by selling shots at these parties.
In fact, I made so much money that I never ended up eating any of that canned food that I bought. When my parents returned, they asked me “why do we have so much food in the house?” and I told them that “Oh, I just felt like I should stock us up”.
This entrepreneurial endeavour taught me a few things – it taught me that money is a great resource enabling you to do things that you otherwise could not. It also taught me that there are inherent realities around supply and demand of products and services and that scarcity could drive up prices.
So my very first entrepreneurial endeavour was highly successful, profitable and left many happy customers in my wake… if was also brief, illegal, and misguided.
Thankfully there were no negative consequences for me or my “customers” (It was a more innocent time). Please forgive my youthful foolishness, and remember – I was only 16 years old at the time.
Enough inexperience to consider myself “experienced” (otherwise known as naivety)
A few years later I was admitted to Sydney University. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but everyone told me I had to choose something. So in a semi-protest vote I chose to study Astronomy.
Between getting into university and actually starting it, I got a job (completely by accident), working in advertising sales at the Australian Financial Review newspaper. I happened to be stunningly excellent at advertising sales, and was quite successful in a number of roles at the AFR and for the wider Fairfax Business Media group, working for their finance and investment magazines.
- courtesy of Fairfax Front Pages
At one point I was in the head honcho’s office negotiating a promotion and a pay-rise and he said to me:
“I cant pay you that much, you’re 21 years old for f*cks sake!”
To which I calmly replied:
“I totally understand but my next career move, whether it's here or somewhere else, is to that position on that money.”
I walked out of that office with the promotion and pay rise I wanted. I was also given my pick of divisions to work in, so I walked over to a manager who had previously tried to recruit me and told him that they could now give me the role and salary that I wanted and that I was glad we could start working together.
Such was my level of my fearlessness back when I was 21 years old. What did I have to lose?
At some point I was running a section of the newspaper entirely on my own and the editor invited me to model for one of the front covers:
SUCCESS: A quick side story about a side hustle
I decided that I enjoyed being in front of a camera and accepted an invitation from one of my advertisers to model for them… instead of money, I got paid in fine Italian suits (there were a few other perks of that job too) but I quickly learned that the better-looking people are, the higher the risk of them becoming conceited - including myself. It was a time of exploration and growth, and was a grand side-hustle for a time.
In fact, years later, to my great surprise, I came across myself walking down Pitt Street but realised that I had no trailing commission on my previous work (so negotiated a great deal on another suit to make up for it.)
All I really did here was form a deeper relationship than I had to with one of my clients. This relationship turned out to be a springboard into unexpected opportunity. I have carried that lesson forward every day since then.
Back to the story of how I thought I actually had some “experience”
Unfettered by a conventional education (or fear of being fired) I worked around and within the existing Fairfax divisions very creatively… and was responsible for a few first ever advertising initiatives:
The first time a Post-It note was stuck on the front cover of the Australian Financial Review newspaper as an advertisement was because of me.
The first time a multi-departmental collaboration (editorial / inserts / advertising / call centre) culminated into a highly successful and highly profitable initiative, was because of me.
Each time these ideas came to life, the leadership of these various divisions hit the roof and many people who were far more senior than me were embarrassed but, because I had a happy client and made the company lots of money, I never seemed to get into trouble. All I did was “connect the dots” and put concepts together in new ways. These days we call that “Innovation”.
Getting to the point, most of this work was all to do with finance and investment-related brands, sections of the newspaper and finance and investment related magazines… so I learned a little bit about that sector of the market – enough to think that I was “experienced” (which of course I was not).
I did have a great rolodex (what we now call a contact list, or “network”) of all of the finance and investment related advertisers in Australia. This brings me to my second entrepreneurial endeavour.
FAILURE: Tailored Markets
Two friends of mine and I got together and started an online trading company. It was called Tailored Markets and offered Forex, CFDs, Futures and International Equities. It was 2003.
We white-labelled SaxoBank’s technology platform and undercut CommSec with our pricing (none of which I truly understood). One of the three partners was an ex-day trader and the whole idea was that if he could bring a couple of his high volume clients onto the platform we would be profitable and could build the business from there. The other guy and myself put in the money (our life savings at the time) and I was going to handle the advertising - since I was such an “expert”.
I used my industry contacts to get ad design and production on “mates rates” and traded my valuable rolodex for a big double page spread in a newly launched Australian-Chinese investment magazine called Informed Investors.
I proudly saw “my” company brand in a real life magazine ahead of huge corporate advertisers and sat back and waited to be dripping in success…
Of course the exact opposite happened – which is to say that the tiny amount of advertising we did achieved nothing because we had zero brand recognition (or trust), and the partner who was an ex-day trader failed to bring on any of his high volume clients onto our white-labelled platform. Because we had no volume, eventually Saxo Bank cut our deal and apparently no one gave two shits that they could trade cheaper on a platform that they never heard of before – presuming they heard about us at all.
In fact, we failed quickly because we had no idea what we were doing, but just enough experience to think that we knew what we were doing. That’s called being naive.
I was a great employee: Old-world Corporate to old-world SME, to new-world Technology Scale-Up
I worked for years for Fairfax, one of Australia’s largest and oldest publishing groups (which I loved).
I then worked for 6 months in one of Australia’s tiniest and oldest (read: old-school) publishers (which I loathed, but I doubled my salary in doing so).
I then worked for years at a fresh innovative technology scale-up that grew to be Australia’s largest provider of online market research “sample” (which means people doing surveys). I loved that job and that company. This business taught me how to convert my sales skills and fresh innovative approach into growth strategies and business-building capabilities. It nurtured my entrepreneurial skills to help them grow beyond measure. They also gave me the best business card I have ever owned:
Change of Relationship/Home/Job - and the launch of 4 companies - all at the same time.
Then in December 2009, I quit my job, bought an apartment, and started a relationship. (A psychologist friend of mine tells me these are the three biggest stress events in peoples lives.. and I did them all at once, in the same month.)
I also launched 4 companies.
Everyone told me that I should only launch one and focus. But I was not sure which one of them would work so I committed myself to a diversified focus. This is now called taking a “portfolio approach”.
As of the time of this writing, I am 41 years old. Back in 2009, when I started 4 companies all at the same time, I was 26 years old. Pardon my French, but I really did not know what the fuck I was doing. So I made quite a lot of mistakes. I called them “fuck-ups” back then. We now call mistakes Learning Events, Growth Opportunities, Learning Experiences, or Development Points. Language has softened.
It actually turned out quite well because by the end of the first year 3 of my 4 companies has failed. Including the one which was my primary focus.
FAILURE: YourCashBack
A platform where online shoppers could share in the commission paid by merchants to affiliate sites. Back then merchants would pay up to 10% commission to other websites, called “affiliates” that sent traffic that made purchases. YourCashBack took the 10% commission and gave most of it back to the user who made the purchase.
I did a lot of research on a business in the UK called Quidco that had the same model. They turned over GBP10M and I wanted to bring that model to Australian online shoppers.
I raised $40k from a friend, worked with an amazing designer and got the site built by a solid dev house. BUT… my strategy was to build it well and rely solely on SEO traffic. Sadly, only a trickle ever arrived. I had built Rome, but never got any Romans!
When I did the math on the tiny amount of traffic I did get, I realised that this business model would only ever work at significant scale… which I did not have the knowledge or resources to achieve.
Today, 15 years later, there are a few successful businesses with the same model, which makes me feel that at least the concept was valid.
FAILURE: SAJOTO
Remember when 3D was brand new? Well that was around 2010.
Three guys teamed up SAlvador, JOsh, TOdd, to form SAJOTO. It was a bunch of websites that were going to capture the tsunami of SEO traffic from people searching for things like compare3dmovies, compare3dgames, best3dtech etc
We built a network of websites and re-published price comparison feeds from GetPrice to commercialise our traffic.
But it turns out that no one really cared about 3D stuff… people were not sitting at home watching their fancy new 3D TV wearing 3D glasses… or at least not after the novelty wore off. So once again the SEO traffic never arrived and our business model failed.
FAILURE: PLAYERNET
This was another network of 64 websites specifically designed to capture SEO traffic across all forms of online gaming, gambling and sports betting. I had one investor who had made a lot of money in this space and we had a “long-tail” strategy to build many specific sites to capture long tail search phrases ie www.bestnodepositonlinecasinoineurope.com to capture people searching for “best no deposit online casino in europe”.
Yup, you guessed it, once again no meaningful SEO traffic turned up.
The above three business models all relied totally on getting free SEO traffic from Google.. but it turns out that back around 2007-2009 the barrier to entry for people with an idea to publish a website (like me) dramatically lowered. Consequently, new websites, even if they were very specific or well made, did not receive free SEO traffic anymore… Google had changed the rules. People now had to buy traffic to get traffic. This dramatically changed the economics.
SUCCESS: GLOBAL REV GEN
I originally started this business because I realised that every website needed traffic and buying traffic was complicated.
I originally wanted to call this business REV GEN, but revgen.com was taken, so I purchased globalrevgen.com instead. It was a pragmatic decision which turned out to point that company on a winning trajectory.
The story of GlobalRevGen or “GRG” is a long one which is worth an entire newsletter on it’s own…
Over the last 15 years GRG has suffered Three Strikes but luckily they were spread out over the years so we survived them. (Had two of them converged we would have gone out of business).
GRG has also experienced Three Strokes over the last 15 years. The interplay of which had been the source of it’s ultimate success.
Today GRG works for two thirds of the Universities in Australia and helps brands from startups to listed corporates advertise and market themselves in over 50 countries. GRG employs people from 10+ nationalities across 3 continents and had established the very best company culture I have ever experienced.
Stay tuned for that story coming soon.
Thanks for reading.
SK