Written By Ryan Martin
www.iThinkubator.com How many times do you imagine the average entrepreneur changes or alters his or her business plan. One big mistake many businesses starting out make is following there business plan like a road map. A business plan is a guide to keep you focused and busy constantly building and adding on to your final product. I began my quest six years ago with one thing in mind and that was to provide Boston nightlife information online for free. I had hopes of generating enough traffic to maybe make some advertising dollars on the side. So I started my beta versions / prototypes but I never finished the complete project due to a massive disorder I have, I think the term most commonly used is A.D.D. (Another Day Dreaming). It took many years to do so, but I am now prescribed Strattera and I have the focus and drive to complete tasks fully. I think I'm wandering off a little so lets get back to the point of this piece. In the beginning of 2006 I developed www.neEvent.com which is short for New England event. My plan from the start was to deliver online nightclub, restaurant, lounge, sport, music, family and adult entertainment event information and services. I wanted to give the users the ability to get on v.i.p. guest lists for participating events. This was the main focus of my winning strategy which I believed would bring the users and eventually make some money. After months of planning, development and testing I launched the site in February. I set up newsletters, event alerts and other campaigns to collect email addresses and contact information. By May things were going better then expected for the short period of time on the web with minimal capital for advertising or marketing and very little search engine exposure. How else can I make my internet destination sticky, I needed to give the users a reason to come back to the site other then to browse events and get on guest lists. I looked around and everywhere you look, local news, national magazines, your brother and sister, your best friends, everyone is using MySpace. So the question is how can I capitalize off of this new phenomenon and utilize their successful business strategy with my business plan. It took about one hour to come up with the idea and about one week to develop and integrate with www.neEvent.com website. So I built an social event portal giving registered user the ability to add themselves to an event list or guest list and then view other user's profile page who are attending the same events. Now you can find other users who have the same interests in events as you and you can contact them via email or phone and then meet up with them at the event which you both are attending. That's what I would call Social Networking! MySpace.com + CitySearch.com = neEvent.com It's only been one month but so far and I have 300 registered users who are using all of the features we provide. Let's see how things end up six months from now. |
