Biz-find; 4 years old and still turning down InvestmentHow one guy has created one of the leanest B2B Lead generation website businesses on the Internet with zero budget and Investment.
Biz-find have amassed over 4,000 registered businesses who have added themselves to the sites, with an average 40,000 visits a month, and 24,000 registered members, yet it is one of the leanest business models on the Internet. “It is a testament to the Internet; that people can; either in their spare time, or leave full time employment, have the chance to follow their dreams and become financially independent.” “The cost of running Biz-find may come as a shock to many, yet one must understand the restraints we have had to deal with, we all have our challenges in business; ours is a simple one; do we take Investors or just run and run till we are big enough to go it alone? It’s incredible to me to look back and say we did it with next to ZERO marketing budget but it did cost me 4 years of my life and some scary moments in the first years where I was begging our hosting company to keep me alive and wait a few more days for just 11 bucks!” Alan Johnston the owner told us. “Now, many think we are run by many and have a lot of staff, due to the size of the business and proliferation online, but in fact it is just me and a team of part time contractual telesales people. We have no office or the usual overheads many businesses have. I can start and run simple websites through CMS, my strength is in marketing. I use Odesk and Freelancer when I need complex web design this has saved costs massively for us. Our costs are less than $200 a month which makes Investors very excited, yet in the past year we have turned down two; Million dollar offers, one from an Incubator team in Bangkok and one from a team of Investors in the UK who wanted to take us down the crowd funding route, nervous times for me as the owner, but I survived this long without them, and a couple more years won’t hurt. Like most start-ups the Investors wanted too much equity. Sure it’s hard returning to your desk in your small condo and carrying on with upgrades and finding leads for our sellers and the time and energy that takes on your own for a payout that reflects what a team of three people (1 full time and 2 part timers) can manage, but as my Mum always said everything (including a salary) comes to he who waits.” http://biz-findthailand.com is hailed as the new Alibaba by many, yet the owner winces when the comparison is mentioned. “Alibaba is a runaway success and I hope the Chinese economy holds out for Jack, but I believe we are totally different, because of the way we approach business, we are at the front end a simple business directory with the usual upgrades with videos and social media sharing, but we are the only site that offers a lead generation service whereby we actually send customers to our sellers. Alibaba is a portal for sellers mainly. Our process was simple, start a free online business directory in 2012 with a meagre budget, blog and share like crazy every week; wait 4 years for it to grow to a decent number, add more sites to the range and wait for them to grow, then in the last half of 2015 we started to contact our directory members to offer them free upgrades in return for leads we then give these products and services that our directory members are sourcing, to our members who have sellers memberships. The best call you can ever give a business is when you ring them to tell them you have a fresh lead for them and give them the name and the number of the contact. The entire dynamic of the contact call changes, it’s actually a pleasure to call businesses. This was always my dream to turn the internet around from a platform where everyone is selling and making so much noise trying to be heard above all the sales messages, to one where we marry buyers to sellers in the most simplistic way we know we can. It’s amazing what information our Directory members give you to save them the time of looking for products and things themselves and for a free upgrade which will mean more clicks and shares for them. I think also the fact that we are the leading Social Media training company in Thailand with the largest social media reach than any of our competitors using social media bar none, this reach we use every day to share our blogs and directory members to, which made us the target for a number of approaches from Investors. I am not saying no to investors, but like in love; you can’t rush it, and it’s better to say no when the fit is not near as dammit perfect. End
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