I’m fond of telling people that 9 out of 10 of my business ideas fail. I don’t just say it for effect. It’s actually true.

Of course this doesn’t mean that starting a business is risky. It just means that you need to go through a lot of ideas quickly, and inexpensively, to find one that works.

Some of these didn’t so much utterly fail as they did just not excite me after a while or didn’t really take off. It’s very possible that you could have a decent business idea, and it just isn’t quite the right fit at that point in your life. Anyway, I think it’s healthy as an entrepreneur to try a variety of things while still not being so ADD as to jump ship before an idea really pays off. It’s a delicate balance.

Without further ado, here they are…

1. GetItSmart.com
   

   This website I started way back in 2000 with a friend of mine. Basically, we resold and drop shipped computer hardware. Thanks to the incredible WayBackMachine which keeps a record of what every page on the internet looks like over time (they must be using ridiculous amounts of data storage) I was able to dig up a screenshot of what the site actually looked like back then (minus a few images).

   

   Basically, my friend and I found a couple distributors of refurbished computer hardware that were selling at a steep discount. These distributors also had absolutely no website front end that could present actual pictures and useful information to a buyer. Their catalog was practically just a list of serial numbers in an excel file and maybe one line of text.

   I decided to learn PHP and wrote a little script which would take the product lists from the distributors, come up with an appropriate picture and description (mostly by scraping from other sites), mark their price up by $100, and list it on our website.

   This business did ok for a couple years and we would occasionally sell some computers and make a couple hundred bucks. I remember feeling an incredible RUSH doing this and I think it is what first got me addicted to becoming an entrepreneur. It was an incredible feeling to just be some kid who threw up a website, and we would have people from all over the U.S. call up and make orders. Little did they know they were talking to a 16 year old kid sitting in his bedroom, giving me their credit card number.

   Why it failed: A few reasons. The dot com bubble burst and people stopped buying computer hardware. I also went off the college around this time. Finally, my business partner decided to take a bunch of money out of the account and ultimately went to jail for credit card fraud. This was the first of several unsuccessful 50/50 business partnerships. You can read here about why I don’t believe in doing those anymore.

2. Club Promoter
   

   For a while in college I decided it would be fun to be a club promoter. I’d seen some of my friends do it, and they seemed to pull in a large amount of cash occasionally, plus there were other benefits like they seemed to hook up with the hottest girls.

   The tough part was finding a club manager who would take a chance on us since we were totally unproven (I had a few friends together on this one too). Essentially by going out and drinking a lot we finally found a manager who gave us a Thursday night to prove ourselves. In case you don’t know, Thursday is a “dead” night for most clubs. They make all their money on Friday and Saturday so basically he was risking nothing by giving us a Thursday when they probably would have been closed anyway.

   Being the geek I am, I brought a technology aspect to the business. Within a week I had written a script (are you seeing a pattern here?) to scrape email addresses off Facebook for people at our University. We soon had a list of about 1000 email addressees plus our own list of friends. We would then set up drink specials that “only” students from our school could get and send out email blasts.

   We had fun for a while, and would basically make money in a couple different ways. Sometimes we would do a “cover charge” at the door (which we would keep) or sometimes get a percentage of bar sales if we hit certain sales targets.

   Why it failed: Primarily because the bar industry is full of shady characters, especially bar managers. Each week it was a negotiation. We would end up having to cover certain costs like the DJ or security. We could never get quite enough people to really PACK the place. College students were poor and didn’t want to spend money. I think a couple nights we actually came out negative. We did have a hell of a lot of fun though.

   Here is a picture of me doing a “Zoolander style walk off” at a fashion show themed party we promoted. If you aren’t sure what that is you need to watch the movie Zoolander immediately. Good times.

   

3. Corporate Blogs
   

   This idea I developed over a discussion with a mentor. Basically, we realized that blogging had a lot of potential and most big companies didn’t really get it as a lead generation tool.

   The idea we came up with was to help companies get their own blog going and market it. Our pitch was something like this: “we’ll set the thing up at zero cost to you and take all the risk, but if it starts to generate leads then you’ll pay us 20% of the new business generated from the blog, if it generates nothing then you pay nothing!”

   This pitch was well structured for a fledgling company because the idea of “i don’t make money unless you make money” works if you are totally unproven.

   Why it failed: It wasn’t a “bad” idea, but I decided it would be annoying and too much work to deal with big companies and try to get them to understand the concept. As a lifestyle choice, this was not very passive either, and I thought it would be a struggle to find the right people in a company to generate the content for the blog (a huge component).

4. Interviews With Self-Made Millionaires
   

   The idea for this business was to do 1-hour interviews with self made millionaires, and sell them as a subscription product. Basically, you’d pay $20/month or something and each month you’d get a CD or mp3 of someone who had started their own business and become rich.

   I even did a few of them which you can get for free here and here.

   I liked the idea of subscription products. After all, at $20/month I would only need to get about 250 subscribers and I’d be pulling in $5,000 a month (the production and distribution cost is very low).

   It also had the side benefit that I’d get to meet a lot of important people. There is no easier way to get someone’s time and attention then if you say you want to interview them (we are all a little vain I suppose).

   Why it failed: I think this was a good idea actually and it could still work. For some reason I just couldn’t get excited about it after a few months. It was a pain to set up the meetings with these people, schedule them, and then mix the audio/upload it etc. I enjoy just having conversations with people about business all the time, but this formalized interview thing just took all the fun out of it. And somehow it didn’t feel right to sell it afterwards, I’m still not entirely sure why. For some reason I found myself subconsciously avoiding it, and if I wasn’t really excited about it then it would be hard to do a good job.

5. Being a Business Consultant
   

   I briefly entertained the idea of becoming a “consultant” to people who are starting up businesses and even registered a domain name to promote myself. This idea quickly fizzled though.

   Why it failed: I had lots of experience, but not a ton of success yet. It would have been like the blind leading the blind. Also, people starting businesses are generally poor and have no budget for consultants. Oh yeah, and it would have been trading hours for dollars. Not passive enough.

6. Model Crowd
   

   This was somewhat similar to the club promotion idea, but some time later I decided that what really made a club successful was if attractive women showed up. If attractive women showed up, then men would show up, and if men showed up they would spend lots of money trying to impress the attractive women and the bar’s sales would be high. It all revolved around hot girls.

   Therefore, I figured if we had a bunch of attractive women, maybe clubs would pay to have them show up…either by giving them free drinks or a small stipend. This would be part of the clubs marketing budget to show they were the “cool” place to be.

   I promptly went out that night with a clipboard and began cruising bars recruiting girls to sign up for our newly formed “ModelCrowd” business. Notice it has a double entendre…model as in fashion model, and model as in “well behaved and a good example”.

   My pitch was simple and remarkably effective (I’d say it had about a 95% close rate). It went like this: “Hey you’re hot, want to get paid to show up at bars? Here put your email on this list.”

   Why it failed: Honestly, about 24 hours after conception, the idea seemed kinda stupid. Even if some club owners did decide to hire these girls, how much would they be willing to pay me (a couple hundred bucks?). Plus, these party girls would be very unreliable employees and who knows when and if they would even show up. In terms of developing an active social life, this might have been an interesting idea, but in terms of a business idea it didn’t have much merit.

7. Evolved Guns
   

   I met up with a mechanical engineer who also happened to be doing some really cool gun designs in his spare time. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to design a custom handgun with him even though I had practically zero experience in this area. We soon christened the new company “Evolved Guns”.

   After a while, we came up with a really cool design that looked like this:

   

   It was not a handgun from scratch. Instead it was a modified 1911 (one of the most popular and venerable handguns out there today, many companies make their own version of it, the original design which came out around the year 1911 is still widely used today, which is a fascinating story in itself).

   It had some neat stuff, like a laser grip (when you squeezed it a red dot laser would turn on to show where you were aiming), a compensator what blasted fire out the top (sort of like nostrils) to reduce recoil, a super light titanium frame, and a black chrome finish that was nearly impossible to scratch.

   I spent a lot of time and money on this one. The design went through 6 revisions, there was a MOUNTAIN of red tape to get the federal firearms license from the government, we played with lots of parts, milling equipment, etc.

   Why it failed: Ultimately, I couldn’t find a manufacturer for it and never even got one made which makes me sort of sad after all the work (the picture above is of a CAD rendering, not an actual one). If anybody wants to take a crack at making this thing send me an email, I have all the CAD drawings which you can use for free. Twice I had a major manufacturer lined up that fell through. Ultimately, I had to let it go for a variety of reasons. One, I was sort of out of my league here and had very little experience in manufacturing or mechanical engineering. Two, the insurance and license was expensive. Three, the price tag of the gun was getting pretty high (about $3,000) which made it a toy for rich people. And it was totally impractical for “typical” gun owners who were concerned with self-defense or hunting. Four, it was giving my parents ulcers. Five, again bad situation with business partner. Learned a lot in the process though :)

8. Brian’s Evolution
   

   This was the first blog I started. It was more of a personal blog. I eventually scrapped it though and started this blog (Breaking Free) instead.

   Why it failed: It was focused too much on me, and no one wanted to read it. When I started StartBreakingFree.com it was more focused on helping other people. Personal blogs don’t have much earning potential I don’t think.

9. The Breaking Free Challenge
   

   This was a companion website I thought about making for a brief while which would help people get their first business started. Each day for 30 days it would give them a task like picking a domain name or doing some marketing, and they could write about if and how they accomplished it.

   Why it failed: I decided not to do this idea because it was too structured. Businesses aren’t this cookie cutter, and I realized after getting into it a little bit that the steps I was creating for each day wouldn’t apply to everyone. I think this might have worked better for a more specific idea like a “30 day challenge to creating a blog” or a “30 day challenge to lose 10 lbs” or something. But for “starting a business” it was too generic of a goal.

Anyway, that’s it. You can see I have been all over the place with my ideas.

The ones that have worked have been the exception. But whenever one doesn’t work, I take it as a valuable learning experience and know that it will make my next one that much more successful.

By the way, ShoeMoney has a great post on this same topic which you might enjoy reading. It seems to be a common theme among entrepreneurs. Success comes after a lot of failure.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

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