While hope springs eternal in the breast of the American entrepreneur, an inevitable consequence of business is that some will fail. 2010 was no different. Consequently, the Creating Wealth Show has decided to take this opportunity to mark the passing of a few you might have heard of. Lend an ear. Learn a thing or two.
Wesabe
This personal finance website went live in 2006, but closed its doors in July of 2010. The idea was to take advantage of the growing Web 2.0 crowd to help people manage their personal budgets and make better financial decisions. Wesabe actually got off to a decent start with almost $5 million in investment capital, and signed up 150,000 members during the first year of operation. But the wheels began to come off when Mint.com came online shortly thereafter with a better name and easier interface. Before long, the soon-to-be-taken over by Intuit company (Mint) had 300,000 users and $117 million in venture capital.
iParents
This social network for parents and families came online in 2008. The idea was good, but the idea ran into a little buzzsaw of a company called Facebook which, at the time, had not made much inroad with that demographic. Founder Don Milley downplayed his company’s demise as being completely a product of Facebook, preferring to blame it on a failure to build a community. Whatever reason you want to assign – it’s gone.
Large Format Digital
This brick-and-mortar business specialized in applying large size advertisements to the sides of panel trucks. From modest beginnings in 1998, the company was churning along in 2008 with $3 million in revenue and 15 employees when the owners made the fateful decision to borrow one million to build an installation facility, having calculated it would save costs in the long run. Unfortunately, the day they signed on the dotted line for the business loan was the day Lehman Brothers imploded. Large Format Digital saw business decline by 50% almost immediately.
The moral to these stories is you can do everything right and find yourself a victim of circumstance, killed off by better competition or other events you have no control over and couldn’t have foreseen. Our best advice is follow your dream and don’t worry about what might happen. Try your hardest, stay optimistic, and you never know, maybe you’ll be the next Facebook.
The Creating Wealth Show
Flickr / smemon87
