When you start a company you start down a path to not only create the legacy of your own being, but the legacy of a company. I’m sure a lot of people don’t sit back and think what legacy they want their company to hold, they just want to make it rich, but at 9rules we always seemed to keep that in perspective. Of course we had a plan of how we wanted to grow and the different ways we could make money, but we wanted to stick to a couple of principles no matter which way we decided to grow or how we wanted to make money.
In any decision we make we always ask ourselves if this will be a benefit or detriment to our Members and our readers. If it ever is we scrape the idea, no matter how much money it might make us or how popular we could become. Because of decisions like that we get asked what our business plan is and how do we make our money? We always have to smile back and ask why does that matter if all we do is continue to help out people.
If 9rules was to disappear tomorrow would our legacy be that we just couldn’t make a dime (we do make our money, just saying) or that we created something special to a number of people? What about any other web company that has started up in the last two years, what’s their legacy and were they even around long enough to have one? Today is our Round 5 and as of this writing we have been averaging over one submission per minute.
One submission per minute…
So many people were waiting for us to open the doors for this round that we had 100 submissions in the first 15 minutes. It’s hard for me to offer advice on how to make a lot of money since I haven’t done that yet, but I can offer one piece of advice that I think should apply to any company. Stick to your founding principles that aim to do good and even if you succeed or fail in other areas such as financials, you can walk away at the end of the day with your head held high.
Still going for those millions though.
Originally posted on October 25, 2006 @ 1:58 pm