So I have been thinking a lot about my business model lately as well as the traditional paradigms for e-commerce sites. Typically, on the internet, people strive to be the best. They want to create the “next big” thing; the killer app that will revolutionize the way people buy or communicate online. In short, they want to be the #1 in their category, whatever that may happen to be.

But I don’t think this is neccessary.

In terms of DubCorp, my business, I think this stems from the experiences of my youth and what I have come to realize and accept about myself. And this, I think, stems from the notion that there is no such thing as a business, outside of the individuals who manage it. And in this case, that’s me. So in order to understand my business, I have to understand myself. This exercise leads me to an oasis of self-awareness that some people would find unsettling.

You see, I have never been the best at anything.

I’ve never won absolute first place in anything my entire life. Not once. But I always get close in almost anything I do. I’m the 90% guy, but in every category. I’m the jack of all trades, master of none.

In HS, I almost won an amazing scholarship that would have paid for my education for my entire life, no matter how long I decided to study or what degrees I wished to pursue later on in life. But they only gave away 2, and I was just in the top ten. Before that, I won 6th place in the World in a program called Odyssey of the Mind, which is cool, but still isn’t a victory. In college I was the #9 sales manager in the country for a publishing internship with SouthWestern Company (the door knocking company), but 8 kids beat me. I was the #2 singles player on my HS tennis team, sat second chair trumpet in Junior High, and one time made it to the fourth round of the county spelling bee when I was 12. I’m the middle child.

So I’ve never won shit. But, I always finish in the top 10%, and I think there is maybe a small bit of excellence in that very thing. Usually champions have glory in a small segment of their lives, and fall into mediocrity in the rest. To never scrape the middle, but never taste the top, is perhaps an asset that can applied to the way I think about my business.

So the idea has occurred to me, to never try and be the best in any of my businesses.

When I owned QuikCondoms.com (before the new owners trashed it), we were never the best. We got smoked by Condomania every month, but we still had a great little business which had the potential to make a ton of money. And the technology needed to operate the #2 or #3 online condom site, is the same technology needed to operate the #2 or #3 t-shirt site, or contact lens site, or any site for that matter so long as the market is niche enough to not attract a host of well funded corporations. It’s also the same as needed for duplicate businesses in other countries and languages, which can multipy your site tenfold alone.

If the market potential for a medium to small sized online condom site is $1 -$2 million dollars per year, then the trick is not to try and become the #1 site, which is extremely difficult, but rather to find 25 categories and repeat what you already know how to do. Because for people like me, beating the average guys is easy, it’s beating the one guy who’s better than me that’s damn near impossible. But 25 e-commerce sites, each doing $2 million per year is actually a $50 million a year business. But there are no targets on your back and none of your competitors worry too much because you’re not trying too hard to kick their ass on price like they’re used to. And your technology costs are amortized over 25 sites all being run on the same servers, with orders being filled by the same employees, and running the same software.

Even the idea reeks of mediocrity. Simple e-commerce sites in small niche markets that only have a market potential of a few million dollars is not the arena for the Dagny Taggarts of the world. Most big thinkers are sitting the whole day in coffee shops trying to napkin-scratch the next wave of social bookmarking or envisioning how blogs will work in Web 4.0 on the hopes that it gets bought up by Google even though it never brought in a dime of revenue. There’s something very traditional, almost blue collar, about building a commerce site and trying to make money the old fashioned way by selling goods for a little more than you paid for them.

It’s so 1999.

But I think there may something here that has solid foundations.

So that’s the declared goal.

DubCorp is going to become the most average business in the world… but we’re going to do it better than anybody else.

— jdubblog

i wonder what james would think of this. when we have conversations about web development, he knows a lot about how to bring in a lot of money quickly, regardless of what the idea is.

conversely, i’m always obsessing about whether the idea is good or not, not caring about money…or rather, theorizing that if the idea is good enough and well executed, money will follow.

i think this might be why some of the most legendary projects are produced by pairs or teams of people, collaborating, arguing, and hammering out wonderful things.

as an aside, i think the idea of a business model being an exercise in self-awareness is not just a quirky , poetic, one-liner type thing, but an absolute essential to beginning any serious project.

— travisekmark

 As I slowly approach the tail end of my very long and very impractical liberal arts education I’m understanding more and more why it is that people major in something like business.  I have become more and more interested in learning about business models and theory lately, especially when Connor and I talk about how we can make money off of making beer in our kitchen.