The Pursuit of Making Money OnlineHow to Make Millions - FootyCS on TLC
Business June 22nd, 2007
Earlier in the week, I was watching some television late at night and came across a show called “How to Make Millions” on The Learning Channel. It seemed to be dedicated towards Internet Business and had a slew of successful internet entrepreneurs giving commentary throughout the show.
This particular episode (is there more than one?) featured Henry and Zach, who were two first time web entrepreneurs who believe they’ve got the next million dollar idea: an internet Action Sports Contest. Whether I agreed with them on their Web 2.0 idea or not, this show certainly caught my attention.
The episode summary read: “Track each critical business decision as they attempt to create and launch their first website”. The show kept true to the summary as we were able to watch the site take off from the early stages of development to a seemingly semi-successful launch.
Though they made it to launch, and their website appears to be functional, the two entrepreneurs made many errors. I don’t want to give too much away but thanks to one team member’s cockiness towards venture capitalists and the other’s inability to speak up they missed out on prime funding. They also made critical errors in business planning, market research, and securing a second source of income while they were blowing their life savings on a website that may or may not succeed.
In the end, everything turns out alright for our duo because after all, it is television. That being said, the show itself was very well made and I think all aspiring internet entrepreneurs should watch it if possible and if anything - learn from these two’s mistakes.
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June 22nd, 2007 at 9:49 pm
The site requires horizontal scrolling at 1024×768. It’ll never work.
June 25th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
I agree Dan. I wish them the best of luck but I’m not sure that it will be able to generate the sort of revenue that they are looking for. I’ve been wrong in the past however, and in cases like this I hope that I’m wrong again.
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:26 pm
I too watched the show and in all honesty I cannot say that I wish the two of them the best of luck. Henry and Zach launched this website as a “means to an end” in hopes of earning revenue so that they could make their lives one giant vacation. First off, you have to love the work. Second of all they were late for all of their appointments. The had no sense of professionalism, extremely poor attitudes, and horrible work ethics. I commend anyone for taking a chance but these boys just don’t deserve to be successful.
July 5th, 2007 at 9:01 am
I agree Paul. As I watched the show I wandered, what the hell is this guy thinking. “If they want to be a part of my site they are going to pay for it .”(it was something like that) What an arrogant comment. This guy has no idea what kind of dedication it takes to run a sucessful business, nor does he deserve to be sucessful at business. He just wants an easy way out. They want out of the “working world”, typical of the later generation. I don’t know how the site is doing, but if it works I hope it works and stresses the $#!+ out of them for a while!
July 15th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I’m an aspiring Web 2.0 entreprenuer and my site is currently under beta, I too caught the episode of these guys and I wish them the best of luck but I have to admit I was very upset watching how they handled an opportunity many would die for, I mean come on, “No business plan”? Granted alot of sites out there make millions without a business model, but aleast make the damn meeting on time with the guy who’s going to give you money to get your dream off the ground! “No market research”? I mean these guys had no answers for none of the questions the VC’s asked and yet the VC’s still asked these guys the golden question, “How much money do you need”? And these guys just blurted out a number and when they asked what will the money be used for the two kids didnt have their financials prepared
I hope in the upcoming months I get atleast one opportunity these guys got, and my advice to those two gentleman is, “You didn’t fail at pitching to a VC, you learned the way to not pitch to a VC”
July 17th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
They went into the meeting of their lives seemingly either terribly unprepared or possibly lacking the fundamentals / experience.
They did have a business plan and market research, but it appeared sketchy at best.
I question what role the TLC crew played in perhaps setting them up to look like failures in the eyes of viewers. Anyone else agree?
July 17th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
you know admin, I sent paul an email talking about the same thing. I wondered how much of the show was “made for tv”. It would have been boring if everything had gone right and there was no attitude, because in the end we still don’t know if they will actually make a million dollars on the net.
July 20th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
[…] month ago, I posted an entry criticizing the owners of a niche YouTube-like contest website called FootyCS, which awards prizes […]
August 17th, 2007 at 11:18 am
I saw the episode and would really really like to show it to my best friend who also wants to be a web entrepenuer. Does anybody know how to find a copy of the episode? I’ve looked on youtube, also on the TLC website, and it doesnt look like it is scheduled to air anytime soon.
Thanks in advance
September 4th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Don’t bother watching this. These two morons have no clue what they are doing. Late to meetings, no plan, no research, the one guy has an IQ of twelve and the other is afraid to talk in front of people. I think TLC invested some money in making a program like this, and then got stuck with Beavis and Butthead - dead serious.
I’ve made my millions in the web game, and these two knobs will be back at Burger King in a year.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
This has just been shown in the UK on Discovery Real Time - and I have to say it was very frustrating to watch.
It may have been the way the show was cut but they didn’t come across too well which was a shame as the idea sounded okay - maybe not “the best thing since slice bread” but I’ve seen worse on the web.
I just had a look and the site has a Google Page Rank of 5/10 however it doesn’t appear to be working.