Treat It Like A Business
Tyme, a random dude and myself got into a heated discussion over at Expert Idiot not too long ago about 9rules and the direction we were going. To be honest I don’t think much about that conversation except for one point that was made by Marcus that continues to ring in my head.
If I could offer you one piece of unsolicited advice it would be that you start treating 9rules like a business with a definitive goal to either sell for a certain price (ideal) or maintain a sustainable income (difficult).
Now for anyone this can be good advice, but I wondered what is so different from treating your company like a business and treating it like a passion or something else. I didn’t know how I was personally treating 9rules. Maybe I was treating it like a business and that is how I conduct business. Maybe I was treating it like a hobby. Maybe I was simply treating it as the one thing I believed in online. Either way to Marcus it didn’t seem as though I was treating it like a business in his sense of the word.
And to be honest with you…thank all the toes on the llamas of the Andes mountains for that.
You see as a business you are almost obligated to let go of anything that doesn’t make money. Something not working? Toss it aside and move on. From a business perspective then 9rules would’ve been let go a long time ago. Not because it didn’t make money, but because after so long it didn’t make X amount of money. Because there had been so many changes you would’ve let it go for something more stable maybe. Or even better maybe a new set of leadership should’ve been introduced to guide 9rules to the glory land.
Have you ever been involved in something that where the people behind it didn’t have a passion for it? It sucks. Maybe our fault early on and for the last couple of years was that we didn’t have a passion for money. We didn’t always do what was the “right” thing to make our big money maybe, but hell if we knew the exact path to take we would’ve taken it from the beginning. Not like we chose our own path for shits and giggles.
You see, we do treat what we do like a business. We aren’t always serious because business doesn’t always have to be. Our business is more about the three of us and how we interact with people than the bottomline and maybe that is completely foolish on our part. However, we also wouldn’t have been able to try and fail as much if all we did was focus on the bottomline. I’m not saying it’s the best approach in the world to business, but it was our approach.
Do we have our new approach nailed down now that we have been through the trial and error stage? We sure think so.
Posted April 30, 2008 with 6 Comments
Mike Rundle # —
Well let’s apply Marcus’ comment to other “businesses” that are currently millions of dollars in debt — like Twitter. The Twitter team has millions of dollars and has spent around 2 years working on the service, and it still has many stability and uptime issues. Oh, and they have $0 in revenue. Does that sound like they’re treating like Twitter like a business? Compare that to 9rules. We’ve never had uptime issues, we’ve never taken any money (not in debt, not beholden to outside investors), and have been generating revenue since Day 1. Now that we’re around Day 900, we’re generating a whole lot more revenue than before and it increases every month. As Marcus said in other entry, creating a business with sustainable income is hard, but we’re doing that. Oh, but we’re not treating 9rules like a business. I can’t really figure that part out.
Eli James # —
I believe he thinks you’re not treating 9rules as a business because of the mistakes you make - like how you’re going back now and splitting the blog network from the community. ‘Real’ businesses don’t make foolish mistakes like that - if they do they rarely bounce back. (Points to palm here, who split into palm and palmone and just about lost the PDA market). But Marcus fails to see that just because a business makes mistakes and changes doesn’t mean its owners don’t treat it seriously. And he also forgets that some rules of the behemoth business world don’t apply to small Internet startups. The Internet, after all, is ever changing. You lose one battle but you still can win the war.
Mike perhaps gives the best counter argument. You’ve got cashflow from day one. Now that’s healthy business.
Mike Rundle # —
Well for one thing, when talking to members and the many, many people who wanted Notes/Clips/social features, they all thought it’d be awesome. Many, many people were excited about the features and used them heavily. Splitting it off had nothing to do with traffic slipping, nothing to do with advertising dollars dropping, but had everything to do with our future expansions and plans. It wasn’t a failure by any stretch, but we have bigger plans and they needed the split.
To be honest here, member content doesn’t do a lot for us in terms of things you can measure. Member content gets people coming to 9rules and then immediately leaving, potentially forever if they found a blog and then subscribed to the RSS feed. I’ve said many times that the typical usage pattern for a 9rules.com visitor is to 1) come to 9rules, 2) find some blogs they like, 3) subscribe and/or bookmark them, then 4) never come back to 9rules. We added Notes and Clips to keep them at 9rules and it certainly did its job, and now that we did the split we’ll see the same type of user patterns that we used to see.
I’ll never feel that adding social features to 9rules was a business mistake. A business mistake would have been to never add any additional features to 9rules and not grow. We added things we wanted to add, and we grew. Now, we have bigger plans and they involve making another big leap, splitting the sites. We’re not splitting because the social features screwed us up, we’re splitting because to grow larger (not 9rules.com but “we” as the entire entity of 9rules and all other sites we run) it’s the best decision.
Eli James # —
Good way of putting it, Mike. I’ve been thinking a lot about Marcus’s perceived notion that 9rules isn’t treated as a real business. Why, why, and why? Is it because you guys made a misstep and admitted to it?
When you switched the member agreement to force community participation there was a lot of retaliation and there were people who brought up valid points that 9rules had lost its focus. That community and quality content were two different things. So yeah, you guys stopped and admitted those people were right, that you made a mistake, and I think Marcus sees this as a weakness. Or rather he sees the lack of foresight to what happened as a weakness.
So I’ve been wondering: how do great companies out there deal with their mistakes? I’m sure they HAVE made mistakes before - they’re only human - but how come some companies seem to be doing ONLY the right thing? Like Google, for instance. They’ve never made a huge f***up that affected their business model. Or Apple. When was the last time they made a mistake and admitted to it?
I’m trying to think hard of a mistake Apple’s made, and the most I can come up with is the bricking of the iPhone. And did they apologize for it? Hrmm …
Mike Rundle # —
I think one thing that Marcus may be forgetting is that 9rules and other sites we own, we’re still in the shadows. We’re not super popular. We can make mistakes and get back on our feet before it really impacts too many people since we’re still growing. More than 80% of the traffic to 9rules and to Chawlk is brand new to the site… new users, new people to talk with, new people who have no idea what 9rules used to be but only know what it is “right now” and that’s what they see. We just need to make sure to stay on point and keep executing, keeping pushing forward.
Tyme White # —
Um…when did we say that? Do you have a link to where we said that we made a mistake with that participation agreement?
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