A Start-up Journey (Competition Sucks)

This is the twelfth post in this series, click here to read the first one.

Ugh… competitors. Why you gotta be dancin’ at my party. Hey… that’s my booze, put that down, and stop pukin’ on my prospects with your stuff.  These are just a few of the things they are probably saying about me. Yup… since I just got here, I’m crashing their party. But I don’t know anybody here… how am I gonna get noticed. Lampshade? Hmmm…

Like I said at the outset of this series, there are no new ideas, only competition you have not discovered yet. So here we are with this new spin on our plan, an Expert Webinar Marketplace, and I hear about these Business Expert Webinar guys. I start doing my market research, after the fact. What the hell? There are several people going after this space. I shoulda figured, Webinars are Hot right now (shameless plug).

Most of the sites I find are generating their own paid content, fine, that’s not my market. But the Business Expert Webinar guys are standing right in the intersection of me, and my idea… and it looks like they have been here a while. On the bright side, they do seem to have a lot of webinars on their system, so I guess the idea is good.  I got my “Proof of Concept”, without all that trial and error. Time to dive in and see what they got going on.

Looks like this operation is run by a guy named Lee Saltz, and he looks like a pretty bright guy; must be if he came up with the same idea that I did. Maybe even a little smarter because he came up with it before me. I am sure if informed about our operation Lee would say something like “Competition is great, help shines a spotlight for us all” or something profound like that. Whenever anybody says that, they are not really happy about it. But, at this stage, I doubt that he has even heard about us. His site looks very web 1.0, so that’s good. He also seems to be promoting a bunch of other services and “Expert Webinars” is starting to look like an “oh yeah, we got those too” thing. Wait a minute, maybe that means this angle is not a strong as I had hoped. I mean it seems like he has hundreds of them in his system… maybe his cost of living is just higher than mine.

To be fair, we are not actually competing “directly”. Their site is a portal of listings with the ability to collect money and then send people on to a third-party webinar platform. We, on the other hand,  are a webinar platform with a marketplace frontend. So I guess our “Frontend” competes with them. Now we formulated our revenue model before we heard about these guys, so I figured I better compare to see where we need to make changes. What’s this? A $499 setup fee? I had not even thought about that… damn, that Lee is very smart indeed,  maybe we’ll add this later, after we’re established. Looks like he has also got some limits too, only 12 webinars a year and looks like the attendee price is set at $99. Not sure why that is necessary, we’re starting out with up to 52 webinars a year and you can charge whatever you think people will pay. Maybe we’re being too generous… How about the revenue share? We decided to keep it simple at a 50/50 split. Looks like on their system you get either $20 or $40 per attendee depending upon whether they came from their efforts or yours. Seems almost like pitting the presenters in competition with them to get attendees first. They have several other revenue opportunities which feel mostly like affiliate stuff that I doubt many presenters cash in on. I mean I can promote my own event and get $40 per attendee plus exposure, or I can spend the same effort promoting someone else’s event and get $20 each and help their exposure, hmmm… let me think about that one.

I conclude that Lee has had the luxury of having this space all to himself and therefore able to set the terms. We decide we need to change nothing to have a better deal for presenters. But I am likin’ that setup fee idea for the future.

Next Post: Re-Pivoting

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