Bookfinder turns 10 and offers some tips to online businesses

[mandy]

The press release includes an interview with the founders, and it contains some great insight into how a small company (just four people) got (and continues to be) successful.

Pick a great vertical, and stick to it:
We love books. Passionately. As high-tech bibliophiles, our team spent a lot of time grappling with unique problems inherent in book search to design a better way to find and buy books. We decided not to develop generic product search tools. Focusing on the book search vertical helps us offer the best possible product, serving the various types of book shoppers, a surprisingly diverse group (from deal-hunters to collectors).

Shut up and listen:
The used and rare book trade is centuries old, and some sellers and collectors have spent lifetimes in the field. We, on the other hand, started off with relatively little experience with bookselling or book collecting. While developing our product, we were reading up on the trade, lurking on industry mailing lists, and talking to hundreds of sellers and collectors. Our users taught us the subtleties of Long Tail book search. All we had to do was listen...

full article: http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blo...48739.html

The year was 1999, and boy, were they heady times. Napster was born, a domain name was sold for $7.5 million, and I had just graduated from UC Davis, joining an old friend to launch an Internet startup.

It was in these first years at BookFinder.com that I had to learn new skills, everything from accounting to business planning, things I never expected to deal with. I had imagined that working at a web startup meant coding all the time but there was so much more involved.

It was pretty early on when I realized I was incapable of dreaming the big dot.com dream. I couldn't in good conscience tell potential investors that we'd make hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years. (Or maybe we could have done it after all, but that would be a very different BookFinder.com.) So, we decided to think less like a startup and more like a small business...

the complete 'Bookfinder turns 10 weblog articles: http://journal.bookfinder.com/archives/date/2007_02/