

How to waste 90,000 Dollars in three months - TimSelman

Take a busy entrepreneur, throw in some megalomania, let it simmer in a sauce of confidence and voilà: the money is gone!<p>One day, I dropped my computer. It gave me an idea: setup a network to connect freelance computer specialists with individuals with computer problems. It was the start of Guidion which now serves 500,000 customers with a turnover of millions of Euros a month in The Netherlands.<p>But I wanted more. The power of working with freelancers fascinated me. This evolved to Hoofdkraan.nl, a Netherlands focused Odesk type business.<p>We have been working at this for three years now and it&#x27;s going well. But when I was offered the chance to buy the website pimtim.com that was serving the entire world, I couldn&#x27;t resist.<p>It sounds a lot better when you’re able to say you lead a global company than when you’re about to conquer Maastricht. Pimtim.com was like 99 Designs but without the clever business model. I thought it should take off by simply changing the model and adding marketing.<p>After we made the first adjustments, we waited. And we waited and waited. Nothing changed! The only noticeable change was that we were a lot busier than before, now running two companies.<p>The international aspect that sounded so cool also meant working with foreign languages and various currencies. People designing logos from within a Mongolian yurt had to be paid in their local currency, the Tugrik. To sum it up: we failed.<p>What did I learn?
Don’t get distracted. Perform a lot more research before getting involved in any new activity and thoroughly assess how much distraction that new activity gives.<p>Besides knowing when to start it is also important to know when to pull the plug. Sometimes the only good decision is to say goodbye. Was that the best solution? We’ll see. Rest in peace pimtim.
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simantel
I don't understand - if Pimtim was worth $90k three months ago and not much
has changed, why not sell it?

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samspenc
How did you "waste" $90,000 on this? Spent it on servers, coding, etc?

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rfnslyr
There's other ways to waste $90k, you could just send it to me!

