Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

http://designerzone.com/ is probably my first failure (I no longer own the domain).

In 1996 whilst at AOL, one of my fondest memories was learning how to build Web sites so I could teach the trainer, who could then teach the technicians.

Friends at the time, laughed at my idea of building a site about the town I come from. They all thought it should have been based on sport. I provided information and pictures of beaches, restaurants, hotels and the usual tourist attractions. With the exception of Yahoo! (indexed by humans), my site was placed in the top five results on just about every search engine. I guess it was easy back then as there wasn’t much to compete with. I remember saying I could charge the hotels and restaurants for advertising, to which my friends laughed and said ‘yeah as if that will ever take off’.

I used the domain http://aol.wexfordirl.com because aol.wexford.com was taken. The site attracted a lot of visitors from the US, many of whom asked if I could make travel arrangements or recommend where to go and what to do. Some asked if I could help track down their families. Perhaps that was yet another missed opportunity. Anyway, the whole idea got me thinking and I eventually decided that I wanted to sell designer clothes for men online. Why? Well, because I used to buy from sites that I felt were crap compared to mine and given how easy it was to appear at the top of every search engine, I figured I was in with a chance.

I conducted market research and continued to study how search engines worked over a six month period. I knew what men wanted, where they came from and the sizes that would sell. I had tens of thousands of email addresses belonging to people who signed up to the research and I had the International Sales and International Marketing Managers at AOL US on board. It was all good to go in late 1996 when there were very few Web sites selling designer clothes. That said, all but designerzone.com was taken, so I bought that. However, when the girl who was going to handle the buying fell ill, I decided to dump the entire idea. I put it down to inexperience. Why didn’t I just get someone else to do it? Ah well.

Come to think of it, I wrote an ebook entitled ‘how to setup an online shop within 24 hours’, based on my research and review of all the products available at the time. Again, I never bothered to publish/sell it. I’m confident that I could have sold a few copies too because there was so little information about ecommerce on the Web. I don’t think the word was even used back then.

So, advertising and selling designer clothes were the two real missed opportunities. Anyone can come up with an idea though. Only those who execute their ideas should be praised. Am I sorry? Absolutely not. We are the sum total of all our experiences and I wouldn’t have ended up with Segala had I gone down a different route.

I’ve had other failures including a marketing agency, which were much further down the road with the employment of staff and rented offices etc. I thought I’d focus on my AOL days because of the recent attention it has been given since the purchase of Bebo.

What mistakes or missed opportunities can you talk about?