Tweet

Lesson #1: Go With Your Growth

Article Overview: “Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day,” recalls Filo of Yahoo!’s early days. “We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. As it became more popular, it became pretty clear we would have to get more people involved.”

Lesson #1: Go With Your Growth

“Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day,” recalls Filo of Yahoo!’s early days. “We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. As it became more popular, it became pretty clear we would have to get more people involved.”

From day one, Yang and Filo realized that if they were going to stick around for any significant length of time, they were going to have to adapt from being a one-trick pony to being a comprehensive company with a wide range of services. It was with that goal in mind that the two began to put into place their strategy for growth, embracing it at every step of the way.

“We worry about staying competitive as well as continue to come up with new things,” says Yang. “What I can say is that look for Yahoo! to continue to push the envelope on what we can offer for free, as well as a continued focus to develop the Yahoo! set of services around the world.”

Yahoo! progressed from being a simple list of interesting sites on the Internet to being a searchable directory of more than 14 key categories, including Arts, Business, Entertainment, Science, and Health. But while in the early days, the site relied on Yang and Filo to personally sift through and document each of the sites, they realized that with growth that type of system would no longer be feasible.

That is why Yang and Filo decided early on to integrate the AltaVista search engine into its directory. Now, Yang and Filo would no longer have to personally track the increasing number of sites online. Instead, they could rely on content-based searches – a growing trend down the road.

That was a starkly different approach than the one taken by one of Yahoo!’s early leading competitors. The McKinley directory offered not only lists, but also reviews of web sites, in an attempt to offer a more comprehensive and useful online service. Yang, however, felt that strategy would only result in stagnation.

“Okay, just think about it for a moment,” he says. “I mean, just look at this. Web sites change all the time; this one is not the same as it was yesterday. So how often are they going to review their reviews? Will those reviews really be current and meaningful? I mean, with a few thousand sites it might be practical. But with 100,000 sites? How many sites can one reviewer review in one day? I mean, it would take an army. We get a thousand requests each day to have sites added to our list.”

The major difference between Yahoo! and its competitor was not the website reviews in and of themselves, but rather the strategy and foresight behind them. “I think in this business you really have to prepare for the scale involved,” says Yang. “And if the business model won't scale up, then in the end it won't work.”

Related Articles
  Who Is Your Proud Family?
  Why are People Never Taken to Task?
  5.1 There can be little diversification without an optimal trade policy: Economic Report on Africa 2007
  Three Marketing Lessons from Realtors
  The Gravity of Failure

Article Tags: altavista search engine, business entertainment, goal in mind, health, interesting sites, length of time, mckinley, science, searchable directory, stagnation, trick pony, yahoo, yang and filo



Related Forum Posts
Dan Kennedy Marketing Methods - We haven't sent out the physical letter yet as the person owning the list wanted to make modifications to the letter that we knew would work well but the List owner had a point - it didn't reflect her personality so her clients would know it didn't come from her. Lesson learned for me. We're back to the drawing board with the list owner more involved in the development of the letter and emails. I should have known better being a Business Analyst in my day job that you never leave the end-user out. So Evan we haven't had the opportunity to test any of it yet but it's been a fun process for me to stand back and look at.
It's not easy - Evan, It's not easy to franchise a business! Franchising requires a strong business model, significant capital resources, and very talented people to be successful. There are over 3000 franchise opportunities out there, most (80%) don't have the three criteria I listed above. The biggest benefit to using franchising to grow your business is that you bring in someone else's capital and human resource. What you are giving up is control in operating that business. I have seen successful companies get in trouble attempting to franchise their business, franchising requires a different skill set than simply operating units. Growth would have been much easier if they had just opened their own units and sought grown from within.
Different Hats - CEO Sales & Marketing & Leadership Development Company Strategic Vision 10 Alliances & Growth Strategies 10 Hiring & Managing People 8 Mentoring 8-9 Strategic Planning for Clients 10 Execution of Marketing Campaigns 9-10 (i have great people who do the nitty gritty) Financial Management 9 Bookkeeping 3 (outsourced as I really hate the fine details like GST0 Administrative Follow Up 6-7 (again have great staff) Writing & Publishing 9 (getting better all the time!) Speaking 10 (so I have been told) Self Promotion 9-10 Web development & Promotion 6-7 (learning more and have brought on players who are 10+) Babysitting Employees (1 - wont do it, that's why I work so hard to hire and motivate the people I have) Great topic Kevin!! Jude
Sports is queen! - About four years ago I started a webzine called The Thunder Child, devoted to science fiction and fantasy in all media. Growth was verrrrrrrrrrrrry slow at first, but has gradually picked up so that now I'm making a respectable income from my amazon.com and google adsense. (Well, from adsense, anyway. Amazon is a drop in the bucket compared to what adsense brings in.) Last year I put together a website showcasing the Tennessee Lady Vols (who won the NCAA championships last year), and just two weeks ago I put together a small website for Jacoby Ellsbury, a rookie outfielder for the Boston Red Sox - called a "phenom" and already very popular. The Lady Vols site has about 20 pages...the Ellsbury site has 5. Compared with The Thunder Child that, started out with about 20, and is now at about 1,000 and growing. Well, the hits on those two sports sites are more than three times what the hits on my Thunder Child site was during the first year of its existence. Since I've been a sports fan all my life, I reaaaaally wish that I'd started a sports webzine four years ago instead of this sci fi one, because I think my income now would be treble what it is. No doubt about it, sports rules!
$3000 per mo Site for Sale: $65,000 OBO - $3000 per mo Site for Sale: $65,000 OBO Content and Community Driven Pet Websites ________________________________________ Profile: Two Pet Related Websites Price: $65,000 OBO Age of sites: 2 years 4 months Monthly revenue: $3300 (plus or minus a couple hundred) Key details: Growth Year over Year: 641% Uniques: 200,000 per Month Page Views: 1 mil + per Month Referrers: 10,000+ Monthly Search Engine Traffic: 61% Members: 7500+/- Articles: 318 Blog Posts: 189+ Forum Posts: 256,000+ Topics: 19,000+ Adsense Revenue: $1500-$1700 per month Kontera Revenue: $900+ per month Direct Advertisers: $90 - $300 per month Monthly Server Costs: $100 Monthly Advertising Costs: $0 Total Profit Per Month $2500 - $3000 Organic Growth Month over Month: 10% +/- (Zero spent on advertising – all word of mouth and search engine) Software Licenses: All Open source and thus free: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Zen Cart, PHPLIST, WordPress, SMF, and the rest Custom Programming. Software Editions: All software running latest releases. Uniques Last Month: 200,000 Page Views Last Month: *2,000,000+ per month Referring Sources: 1,000 different referrers Referring Keywords: 60,000 Search Terms First Page Results: Thousands of keywords and keyword combinations Indexed pages (Google): 65,000+ Indexed pages (Yahoo): 26,000+ Google page rank: 5-6 (Lots of 3’s and 4’s throughout the sites) Pages of Content: 60,000+/- Alexa site rank: 124,000 (way off the mark due to audience profile) Compete Site Rank: Much closer but still off.. See image Brand Value: All Original Creative and Content including Logo, Forum Template, Front-end, CSS, Code, Images etc. Extremely well made to render fast as well as accessible, to both humans and search engines. Search optimized throughout. Description: I actually posted this for sale almost 11 months ago but didn’t take any offers. Since then traffic has increased almost 650% and revenue has increase by almost as much, closer to 600%. Revenue comes from direct advertising ($150-$350 per mo) but primarily Google Adsense ($1500 - $1750 per mo) and Kontera Links ($700-$900 per mo). Letting go as I’m working full time and just started Business School… I just don’t have the time. However, these sites are ripe for one to build a better business direction. I started these sites as the pet industry happens to be exploding, exponentially and almost parabolically. Google “pet spending” to find a glimpse. Some articles you’ll find: “The Growing Pet Industry Is One Trend You Can Bank On” "In the past 10 years, pet spending has more than doubled to an estimated $38.4 billion for 2006." "According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the pet industry is now the seventh largest retail segment in the country." “We have only begun to see the tip of the spending iceberg" “Pet Spending at All Time High” "Pet ownership is on the increase in the US, and the amount of money spent on pets is dramatically increasing too." The two sites are content and community driven websites with 350+ health related articles on pets, a pet blog that discusses current issues, and a very active message board and community. They compliment each other perfectly and as such are being sold together as a package. The templates are completely custom designed and CSS powered. They would be XHTML Strict Compliant however we’ve included a couple of things that just wouldn’t let it pass. There are almost 8000 members between the two sites. Several hundred more between the blog subscribers and the email list subscribers. At one time we had a store (its all still there however it’s been shut off) and we had about 200 customers. The store lasted only about a month and a half as our careers just didn’t allow us to provide the customer service this site deserves. We also had a drop ship company that worked out really well, (and we still do if we want them). Much more work than our careers had time for. The logos are custom. I’ve got the logo in vector version for Signs and tee shirts. The Design is custom. All software front-ends are custom and running clean - open source applications. Runs extremely well. The entire 2 sites run on a dedicated server that runs about $100 a month.. The sites run on a LAMP environment, meaning Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. All of the software is open source and requires no fees. We run PHPLIST, Zen Cart, and SMF Simple Machines Forum. The blog is Word Press. The article system is completely custom however the back end panel is ran simple from phpMyAdmin – straight to the database. I think there is enormous potential with the two sites as the brands have a very loyal following and is growing by leaps and bounds. It has been mentioned in 10 or so online and offline newspapers (that I am aware of) as well as a magazine – all of which will be provided. The site was featured as Yahoo’s Site of the Week. The site was forever (and perhaps still is) the number one pet site viewed on StumbleUpon.com. The blog also has 177 links from 56 sites according to Technorati.com and ranks 52,000. The database is huge. It’s full of fully owned content, images, customer data, subscriber data, members etc etc. The brand really sells when it comes to tee shirts and calendars. We have a drop shipper when needed that we buy tee’s at 4 dollars a shirt. Each shirt sold for $20 so there was a great margin. The two sites have a solid existence and are trenched well into all the major search engines with perhaps thousands of first place results for keywords and keyword combinations. The majority of traffic is all organic from Google, Yahoo and MSN and it will stay that way forever. The site was built solidly by SEO pros with Search Engine Spiders in mind as every part of the site is search friendly. All pages have been correctly and lightly coded. The database powers the meta tags, title tags, h1’s, h2’s, image titles and bold tags. The site has tens of thousands of dollars put into the design and functionality. petsite4sale@gmail.com


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

A Guide to Franchise Financing

Earn More Money - Easy Home Business Ideas

Top Ten Home-Based Businesses

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.