The creativity factor
The beginnings of any business start with an idea. Then, once an idea has been put into reality business ventures are concerned with daily operations and the future. That is why any new business requires creativity. New ideas and initiatives are both examples of creative thinking, which leads to innovation. In today’s competitive internet environment, only the very few have a chance to build not only a successful online company but one that has strong foundations for the future.
The owners of the best and most successful internet ventures are ironically often unprepared for the success of their products. The reason is more prosaic then many may think. Many of the biggest players on the market today never intended to make their sites a commercial product generating millions or even billions of dollars. In contrast, many of the most accomplished entrepreneurs wanted to create an online tool or portal or community, which would help them satisfy their need or just a need for creativity and fun it brings. The keyword here is passion for the creative process of building a website, seeing it go live and seeing it delivering the value it was supposed to.
“Give them value and they will come”
Once an online product has been launched, webmasters can expect three situations to develop: 1. Site is an instant hit and grows exponentially without any effort of the creator; 2. Site retains 30-50% of its users, which with aggressive promotion leads to steady and significant growth; 3. Site does not retain traffic well and can only get significant number of users thanks to intense and costly promotion. The first point from the three mentioned is extremely rare. Less than 0.01% of internet sites experience such situation (ex. Facebook, Twitter). The second point may be the case for 10-20% of online start ups. The rest of online ventures (80-90%) experience the third kind of a situation and fail within two years of operation.
Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon said as an advice to internet entrepreneurs that the success in gaining traffic online is to create value for visitors: “Give them value and they will come”. This simple phrase encompasses the most important point of this article: “creativity needs to be customer oriented”. The best sites around the internet are those which offer value, that may already be offered somewhere else, but not in such an accessive and effective way.