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One of the most successful sites I've built in my first company was a culinary recipes portal. It was the early 2000s, still recovering from the first internet bubble, which, by the way, didn't hit that much in Romania. We were, basically, just starting.

The Context

This culinary recipes portal was just one of the more than ten projects we were juggling at the same time, hoping that one of them will catch some wind. It was, in many ways, similar with what the crypto land looks now. If you know a bit of C programming and how to fork a repository from Github (let's say, the Bitcoin repository), then you're pretty much set. Of course, you should add some juice to the initial Bitcoin logic and build on it, pour some communication and marketing, but you know what I mean. I think half of the top 100 crypto currencies is made of just Bitcoin clones with a bit of flavor on top of them.

So building vertical portals in the 2000s was exactly the same thing, only the difficulty was to know how to set up a web server, how to write some code (PHP was at version 3 and it was still competing with Perl as a server-side language, if you can imagine that) and hook it up to a database. Add to this access to internet, which was scarce, and you have a relatively accurate image of the whole context. So, if you knew how to do this, you were pretty much set.

Eventually, two portals from the pond grew faster than the rest: the culinary recipes portal and the car portal. I will talk about the car portal in a future post. What matters now is that both had a significant amount of traffic (close to 1 million monthly unique users combined).

The Business

Advertising was never my first choice when it came to monetization. I always looked for services first and only then, as a way to complete our revenue stream, we were also considering advertising, but mostly in the form of special projects (co-branding, branded sales, etc).

And that's how we got to the most important vector of monetization for that culinary recipes site: online food ordering. We were actually pioneering this, because it was like 10 or 12 years ago. It took a few months to convince the first restaurant to publish their offer on our site, but then it became easier. In a couple of years, we were covering our functioning costs only from the commissions we got from online ordering and we even made some profit.

I even got to the point when I had to hire someone to keep the relationship with the 15 restaurants that we were listing in the portal. She was very creative and intelligent, but not very organized. But since she had a lot of good ideas about how we can strengthen the partnerships, I encouraged her in this position.

One of her best ideas was to create a special evening with all the partners, in a cosy restaurant, to know each other better and to find new ideas. It quickly grew into a rather big event, with a 50 seats venue booked, gifts and promotional materials. I was really looking forward to participate to that event and I fully trusted her with all the logistics.

Then, one Monday evening, I get a phone call from the venue: "Aren't you guys coming in?". "What?", I answered. "Well, it's half past 6 and you have the location until 10 PM, so you'd better hurry". I immediately called the project manager and asked her when it's the event. "Tomorrow evening, she said". "Are you sure?". "Well, yes, there were a few problems with the date, because some of the partners couldn't make it today, so I postponed it for tomorrow.". "Did you tell to the venue manager too?", I asked, starting to understand both the problem and its size. Silence. "Uhm, I guess. I don't remember", she uttered.

So, it turned out that everybody was announced, but the venue manager. We had to cancel the entire event, accept the loss on the promotional materials, and move forward.

The Outcome

My lesson was to accept the fact that I didn't know how to delegate. It was too lose. I knew I was micromanaging everything so I went to the other extreme: I let things unfold without verifying. This incident was just a symptom of something going on much deeper. It took me a few months to understand what I did wrong and how to make it right again. Eventually, I learned how to delegate, but every time I sense some danger in this area, I remember this failed event.

So if you can remember a lesson 10 or 12 years after you took it, I guess it was a good one, isn't it?

image source - Pixabay

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This post is part of an experiment I run on Steemit.

Each of the posts related to the entrepreneurial mistakes will be set up as "Decline Payout". But if you like the post, you may contribute directly, by sending me whatever amount of SBD or Steem you consider appropriate. I will keep 20% of the proceedings and the rest will be redistributed equally among all the contributors.

I will publish the reports in the following day, in a separate post, which will NOT be setup as "Decline Payout". The proceedings from that post will be redistributed equally to all the contributors as well (minus what I get as Steem Power, that I will keep).

You can read more details about the methodology and metrics of the experiment here.

Previous posts in the experiment:

• The Fuckup Files Experiment - Report Number One
• The Fuckup Files Series - Episode One: "I Thought I Was Really Good"
• The Fuckup Files Experiment - Report Number 2

So, if you like the experiment, if you think it will bring value, you can start participating in it right now, by sending me Steem or SBD using the following memo: "fuckup files episode two".

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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