Eric Borgos has been experimenting with different ideas, websites, and business models over the years including partnering with other individuals and organizations on his domain names.
In a recent story on his company’s blog, Eric shares his experience with partnerships. Although partnerships can be “sweet deals” as Rick Schwartz has proven, not all end up that way.
Before there was Webkinz, there was AdoptMe
Eric talks about Adoptme, a popular site he developed – and trying to get an AdoptMe Plush line of toys in stores:
In the end, I lost around $62,000, plus several years worth of time and effort working on it. The biggest problem was that my partners (some business friends of mine) took several years longer than expected to launch the toys and ran out of money, so I either had to finance them or scrap the project before we ever launched it, so I was pushed into financing it. I am still glad I did all of this though because it is not something I would have ever done by myself, and as evidenced by the huge success of Webkinz, it was a great idea.
Eric Invested almost as much time in FindRentals.com as Bored.com (which sold for $4 Million)
Eric also discusses the contrast between working on Bored.com and FindRentals.com – which he’s invested a lot of time and money into.
… it has grown year after year, at one point with a staff of around 25 people (many of them salespeople paid on commission). The site is a success, but I have not made any money from it so far. In the 9 years since we started FindRentals.com, I paid over $100,000 to my programmer to do work on it, plus monthly fees to the webhost, and I personally spent a huge amount of time working on it. I spent more time on FindRentals.com than any of my own sites, other than maybe Bored.com.
More lessons learned over at Impulse
Eric offers others lessons learned over at his company blog – including his experience with partnering on FindCash.com and Cyberworx.com.
Overall, Eric’s feelings on partnerships can be summed up by his opening statement:
I am not a big fan of partnerships. I know many big companies (Apple, Google, etc.) have been built that way, but it has never worked out very well for me. Many people don’t like partnerships because of potential personality conflicts or business decision making conflicts that come up and eventually ruin things, or because they don’t want to give up control of the business. But, those were not the problems I had. Almost every time, the problems I had came down to money.