Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi

I had my first go at a startup about two years ago. It turned out that it was not this idea that was going to make me rich. A couple of months ago I finally pulled the plug of the website and decided to write a few words on my hard earned lessons. What was good, why it went wrong and what I`d do again next time.
There are probably no new revolutionary ideas, it just another startup gone wrong. I would be happy for any feedback on the blog. Is it interesting for others to read?

http://bountybox.net/blog

Thanks a lot,
Steffen

"Changing the name of even a small application is expensive. It`s not only the code that needs a thorough revamp, but all marketing up to this point is undone, however simple and low budget: word-to-mouth, newsgroup postings, backlinks, search engine rank. It doesn`t matter if you have a big budget or not, changing the name will undo x months of marketing regardless of how much money/time/energy is put into it"

Why didn`t you just link your new site names to the original site?  This way you would have paralleled your marketing efforts rather than just throw them away.


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Steve Mann
Internet Videographer
MannMade Digital Video
My Email

Hi Videography

Thanks for taking a look.

I did redirect the old names to the new ones. So I kept the visitors that would go to the old site but still I lost two very important assets:

• Brand recognition
  
• Search engine rank
  

My point is that however little there was of both in absolute terms, it was the result of a full marketing campaign with my budget constraints and I had to do it (almost) all over again.