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Discover business opportunities on Internet. Advice to leverage the abundance of the net.

Successfully Running Online Businesses: Michele FinottoJuly 12 2007

So the time has come to publish my second interview (in the first one I interviewed the impressive indian kid-blogger Thilak Raj Rao). For today’s interview I decided to search for a person that’s not a blogger but that’s doing good businesses online, and then he came to my mind: Michele Finotto from 16bugs.com.

Michele is a nice programmer from Italy. Maybe you don’t know him but I knew about Michele from the very same day his web application 16bugs.com was launched. Yeah, maybe you didn’t knew about 16bugs.com too, but I know and I care about it because it’s a hosted bug tracking solution, or in English, a web application dedicated to help programmers to manage the [infinite] bugs that appear during every development cycle. I’m a programmer so I like those tools…

But Michele is more than just a programmer. He’s also a successful internet business man running his own consulting firm called Wonsys, enyoing a decent income stream from 16bugs.com and running two other web apps that are starting to get results: Unilife.it and Pagety.

Undoubtedly Michele is not among the stars th

Looking for good Business Opportunities? Think Globally, Act LocallyMay 27 2007

When looking for good business opportunities on the Internet it’s always useful to think about what businesses are performing good on the global scene and then analyze if it is possible to replicate their models on a smaller scale to make them better. This makes sense because it’s not always possible to transfer effective execution from big size to a smaller one: sometimes there’s a small but interesting niche that cannot be well served, or there’s not enough resources to cover every small market out there or the business depends on existing infrastructure that locally simply doesn’t exist yet.

A smaller scale can be perfectly your country because the juggernauts of online business are not always able nor willing to translate their success on every country with proper Internet access. This is specially true in non English-speaking countries where language, culture or degree of market development can be tremendous barriers for this kind of ventures.

If you are living in one of those countries and you were looking for an Internet business idea maybe you just have to google your way up to an existing successful Internet business and then try to adapt it to your local reality. Sure, you have to first determine if it makes sense to do it in such a scale but that kind of things are what makes business creation so funny, don’t you think?

What will be the impact of a free press appearance for your website?May 14 2007

Did you get an interview in a traditional press medium like TV, newspapers or radio and you want to know if it will be a good place to promote your website/blog? Well, any kind of serious advertisement you can do for yourself is good advertising but unfortunately traditional media appearances are close to be no appearances at all when it comes to online traffic.

Although it won’t hurt if you get your URL printed on screen or paper, the truth is that almost nobody will visit your website as a side effect of that appearance. Given that the URL is printed on a medium that’s not online and therefore it’s not a link, the few people that may have an interest in knowing more about you or your website will have to make the additional effort of remembering your name or your company’s name and then search for it in Internet, and you know that human’s memory is fragile.

So unless your press appearance has an online equivalent with a proper link to your web page you won’t get any significant increase on traffic from it. In fact, if you are lucky you will get 5 or 10 additional direct visitors on your website and a few more thanks to search engines.

But there’s something good that can result from this appearances? Sure. The good part is that although very few people will see your website, most part of them will be very interest

3 Geek Business MythsMay 12 2007

I recently found a post by Ron Garret about Top 10 geek business myths that tells some common misunderstandings that geeks tend to suffer the first times they deal with entrepreneurship issues.

As a geek I have personally made some of those mistakes in the past, but being very far from the Valley my mistakes have been a little different than the ones listed by Ron (I never thought that $5M are necessary to start a business because there’s not $5M available to start a business here in Chile). So I present you with 3 additional geek business myths I have seen and committed on my way as an “internet entrepreneur” mostly on the web applications field:

1. Code is the most valuable asset

   Yes, code is a valuable asset, in fact if you are on an internet business chances are that without code there’s no business. But guess what? your most valuable assets are your users, the people that make your service noteworthy.

   del.icio.us is a neat idea and i’m sure the code that runs it is good, but I can also do what they do in terms of code and so do you. What I don’t have is the same quantity of users del.icio.us has and that’s an advantage very hard to reach or surpass.

2. Marketing is worthless (in fact every Business operation is worthless)

   Chances are that as a geek you see business people as blood-

Got a Business Opportunity? Choose your Partners WiselyMay 10 2007

When discovering a business opportunity that you want to follow, it’s always wise to look for partners with skills that you don’t posses, but that can help you to fulfill those necessary tasks for the correct execution of the project.

For small internet business this is very common. Somebody has an idea and then she looks for partners between his/her friends. Now, if you are into this and you are a newbie to partner searching this can be a little tricky.

I’m sure that when looking for a partner you will mainly considerate those people that you know are responsible, talented but mainly that are more able than you in the skills you need in your team.

But there’s another factor you must considerate: entrepreneurial mindset.

Some people were done to be entrepreneurs. Others not. Those with the entrepreneurial mindset are willing to work for many months without seeing a dime from their effort, they are willing to work as many hours as necessary, they can lead themselves and they feel real passionate about their job.

Those who are not entrepreneurs can be extremely talented and skillful but if they are not in an employee role they feel lost and unmotivated.

So how do you separate the right ones from those that won’t help you? Well, you will easily identify people that don’t own an entrepreneurial mindset when they just don’t accept to be your partners because “it’s too risky”. But there are occasions when non-entre