Persistence. Is it working hard and not giving up? Sure. When you are starting a new venture you must work ridiculously hard and not give up. But many people do this, but aren’t persistent. They lose steam after a while and sell out or shut down. I think the definition of persistent is refusing to lose.
We first started work on eagle-trade in October of 2008. Sure we made a ton of mistakes but we were learning. At the end of last year, over a year after we began, we were having a bunch of issues straitening out the site redesign. The site was previously hideous and we really needed a new design. While we were working on this new design we brought on a couple guys who would do web programming in house which we were really excited about. We were also discussing expansion strategy and realized that in order to have a scalable website, we would have to start from scratch (you do not want to see the mess of code and files we have). We would also need to re-brand.
At this time the redesign was taking more time and money than was planned (and we gave a lot of leeway). We hadn’t done much promoting of the site that semester because it was always supposed to be done “next week.” So there was very little traffic (which is even worse for a user generated content site). At this time I wanted to simply shut eagle-trade down and relaunch with the new, re-branded, scalable site when it was done. I argued that our brand was dead and we would be better off with a fresh start. Two of my partners argued that there was still more to learn and we should stick it out. We had a lot of discussion about this, but thankfully two of my partners talked us out of it.
Why do I say thankfully? Because when we had two weeks left of classes and the site was in decent shape. And we decided to move forward with marketing. And something amazing happened. Over the last couple of weeks of the fall semester and the first couple weeks of the spring semester, the site grew tremendously. The brand we had been building for the past year was still in people’s heads, they just needed to be reminded. And not only did they come back, we had the most successful transactions between students we had ever seen.
What does this have to do with persistence? I didn’t give up, I just wanted to jump over to the new thing. But what this shows is that it takes time, but I honestly think that most businesses close because they don’t give it enough time to develop.
I am going to leave you with a story told by Jay Conrad Levinson (the guerrilla marketing guy) at this year’s Entrepreneur Magazine’s Growth 2.0 Conference. The story went a little something like this:
He was called in by a cigarette company to create a marketing campaign. This company was the 31st ranked cigarette maker in the country and had a brand that was perceived as feminine. So he built an brand image around real Texas cowboys. The campaign was a big hit and came off well, but at the end of the year they were still ranked 31st. But the company decided to persist with it. Who is this company, today, one of the largest cigarette companies in the world, Marlboro.
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