Regrets: Part 2 of 2
May 29, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzContinuing my post from yesterday, here are two more of my regrets:
2. MovieVault.com
Movie-Vault.com was the first or second domain I ever purchased. At that time, domains were a lot more expensive than they were today, where $35-$70 for a domain was considered “cheap”. Also at that time, there were obviously a lot more domains available since the domain market wasn’t nearly as saturated as today.
So with these two things in mind, why on earth did I register such a poor domain such as Movie-Vault.com? The $35 or $70 I paid for the domain was a lot of money to me at the time. I was in grade 12 or so, and the US-CDN exchange rate was very high at that time at close to 1.5x, making that $35 or $70 actually $50-$100. So, I had no excuse for grabbing such a domain name. Basically, I was very inexperienced at that time and didn’t really know what I was doing. I had ‘shrugged’ off the dash because “MovieVault.com” was taken, and I wanted “Vault” because it sounded cool.
Now, that isn’t my regret. I was very new to web publishing and obviously had a lot to learn. My regret comes in several years later when MovieVault.com was being sold for $400. The domain was owned by a large domain acquisition company, which was an early version of today’s parked-domain acquisition companies. However, all of their parked domains were also available for purchase.
I had considered purchasing the domain. $400 was still a fair bit of money for me at the time, but that wasn’t the main thing holding me back. The main thing holding me back was pride. I didn’t want to admit defeat for choosing “Movie-Vault.com”, and was angry at the owners of MovieVault.com for doing nothing with the domain other than trying to resell it (I’ve obviously since changed dispositions on that aspect of the domain world); that was the real reason I didn’t purchase it.
The next time I checked the price, which was probably 6-12 months later, it had increased to $800. I believe this is because as my own Movie-Vault.com site grew, so did the number of incorrect type-in’s from people trying to visit my site who ended up on MovieVault.com instead.
A year or so later, the price was around $4,000. The domain is now owned by a different company and is not for sale.
My regret? Letting pride get in the way of a business decision.
3. AGLOCO
Finally, my most recent regret has been AGLOCO. This is a perfect example of a missed opportunity.
John Chow had originally blogged about the announcement of AGLOCO back in November 2006, and I had quickly skimmed over the post. He then followed up within the next few days with several more AGLOCO posts.
Since I had only skimmed his posts, I had pegged AGLOCO as a sketchy, pyramid/MLM, “get paid to search” program, which, let’s be honest, is basically what it is (with sketchy being a debatable adjective). I had no interest in being involved in such a product/service, and shrugged it off. I didn’t want to get involved or promote such a service to my readers.
I do not regret making that decision. What I regret is not doing more research or thinking more before making it. The whole “get in early while you can” message didn’t enter my brain as it was too saturated with the “This is an antiquated idea and business model” message.
It’s now many months later and the AGLOCO toolbar still hasn’t been released, although it’s ever-so-close, so my decision to not invest the time and resources into promoting AGLOCO may have been correct after all, but my mistake of not thinking more before making it is still my regret.
I finally decided to sign up on April 14th, 2007so I could have it reviewed on PublisherSpot, and also because John Chow was signing up so many people. In fact, John Chow has signed up nearly 20,000 people so far and is among the top 5 AGLOCO users with the most referrals, period. A lot of this is due to the fact that he is, after all, John Chow, but I think it’s safe to say that a major reason he signed up so many people is because he signed-up so early.
I’ve only signed up 3 members so far. If I had started to promote AGLOCO when I first had the chance, who knows how many people I could have signed up. Maybe 7,000, maybe only 10. But now I’ll never know.
I don’t think you should be down on yourself about AGLOCO… it still hasn’t proven anything to anyone and for all you know JC’s 20,000 signups will go to waste 😉
It doesn’t matter if AGLOCO makes nothing. The fact was that I hadn’t considered how much of a difference it would make in regards to getting sign-ups if I had signed up early.
I also regret not having referred JohnChow to AGLOCO, but that’s another story, lol!
The title to your posts should read:
Lessons Learned: Part # of #
never regret
You are either lying about those being your biggest regrets, or you are living a pretty good life with almost flawless decision making. 🙂
Yeah but Movie (hyphen) Vault is worth more than $4,000 so you had the last laugh. 🙂
The other MovieVault doesnt haf me or Sunfrog! Its THEM who should haf regrets! Wheeeeee!
Not really relevant to this post, but can anyone recommend some good forum software (preferably free).
I know Tyler uses vBulletin, but I really don’t want to pay so much. I downloaded PHPBB off a recommendation from SitePoint, but it looks horrible. Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I just was wondering if anyone had suggestions.
Thanks
phpBB is fine, as long as you play around with different skins. Just like in WordPress, it is really easy to customise and set yourself up with a different theme to make your forum unique.
Try phpbbstyles.com for a start and good luck.
– Martin Reed
I feel the same way about AGLOCO, I read John’s first post about it, and didn’t care much. Only months later I read more carefully and signed up. I now have 126 members, but how many could it have been if I had joined earlier?
By the way, we’re both part of the huge John Chow network.
I couldn’t care less about Agloco. Sure, Chow will probably go off and make a few thousand a month in recurring income (before Agloco goes bust), but seriously. I value my reputation and standards higher than Agloco.
BTW – dropped some linklove for you. 🙂 http://www.techzi.net/articles/2007/05/29/entrepreneurs-making-a-living-online/
Good point, Agloco seems to be a bust…again.
I read John Chow every day. I have a lot of respect for his abilities. He actually got mad (textually, on ProBlogger) at me when I described AGLOCO as a “pyramid scheme”. But no matter, it is what it is to me and it is what it is to John.
John is a lot smarter than many give him credit for, though. He posted a good analysis a few weeks ago about how many visitors AGLOCO has sent him. He really has little interest in AGLOCO’s success or demise except in terms of what those 20,000 “downlines” do to his visitor stats.
Myself? I think AGLOCO has a certain “fishy” odor about it and I think they are devious in registering the corporation in China (to avoid US/CA consumer protection and securities laws) and they are dishonest in making the statement “you will own a share of the company”. Those who signed up may, in fact, gte some money but they do not own a “share” and there is nothing in AGLOCOs TOS that indicates any plan to do so in the future.
Good call to those who have stayed out of AGLOCO (in my own opinion, of course).
As far as these posts … illuminating but you should call them lessons, nor regrets. If you don’t have failures/make poor decisions in business you are absolutely not doing enough business.
Awesome sir.. though i am from india ,i love ur site and also dream to become like u someday
[…] on to the topic at hand, I noticed Mr Cruz did a blog entry on Regrets I liked the idea better than this post It got me thinking about neglecting my main site late last […]
Yeah, AGLOCO is not going to earn much money for most people. It is definitely a pyramid scheme, and I wrote about why its business model is flawed on my website.
You should definitely not regret that decision. Mr. Chow is probably the only one who’ll make money off that thing.
Did you ever continue with affiliate marketing?