Profiles of Successful Entrepreneurs
or Are You Nuts or Just Plain Crazy?

There have been many studies aimed to pinpoint the common characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. If you distill them down these deliberations define entrepreneurs as 3 parts ego, 3 parts rebel and 4 parts chutzpah. This month I thought it would be interesting to take a look at three folks who have stepped up to the plate and hit homeruns.

Yahoo for Overture
Way back in 1998 there were lots and lots of Search Engines. So it wasn't too surprising that the knowing minds of technology and finance scoffed a bit when Bill Gross announced the launch of his newest enterprise, GoTo.com. In fact, they thought he was flat out crazy.

GoTo, later renamed Overture.com, was the first of the pay-per-click Search Engines. Put simply, at Overture.com website marketers bid on keywords. The higher the bid, the better the ranking.

Here is how it works.

• I open an account with Overture.
• I fuel the account with a credit card payment of $50.
• I bid on the keywords I think are best for my site. Let's say I want to be in the #1 position for the word 'puppets'. Currently the high bid is $1.00, so I place a bid of $1.01. Now when someone types 'puppets' into Overture.com's search box, my site pulls up at the top of the heap. If the searcher clicks on my site, Overture automatically withdraws $1.01 from my account.
• When my account gets below a certain dollar amount, Overture sends me an email, advising me to put in more money.

In 1998 no one could understand why website marketers would pay for placement when there were so many other options available for free. But then that was before most of the free-wheeling dotcoms went broke.

Overture did a lot of being in the right place at the right time. One by one they added some laudable distribution partners including Yahoo, AOL and MSN. With this affiliation, a highly ranked Overture listing pulled up at the top of these big boys too.

You may notice there is one top-dog missing from the affiliate list, Google. They thought the pay for placement plan was so good, they invented their own. In the process they lured away AOL and some other notable partners from Overture's stable.

But Google didn't get its hands on Yahoo. As the years passed, Yahoo became more and more dependent on revenues from Overture which is one of the reasons they have been profitable for the past five quarters. So what's a business giant to do? On July 14th Yahoo announced they were purchasing Overture for $1.63 billion. Not a bad piece of change for 5 years work.

Mopping Up
It was the boat deck swabbing (or maybe messy family floors, depending on which story you read) that lead Joy Magano to invent her first mop. "I remember sitting at the sewing machine sewing mop heads," Mangano said. "I had this stick in front of me with all sorts of contraptions and things to put together." Her family and friends thought she was crazy. (Do you see a pattern developing here?)

Mangano received her first real break when the QVC shopping network consented to giving her "Miracle Mop" a try. At first the sales were ho-hum and management decided to pull the mop off the air. But Mangano convinced them to let her give the presentation instead of their own staff members. 20 minutes and 18,000 mops later, all doubt vanished.

In 1999 HSN, previously Home Shopping Network purchased Mangano's company. Joy Mangano stayed on and has just kept inventing. In 2002, her products racked in approximately $32 million for HSN. And I'll just bet Mangano's piece of the pie is a generous one.

One Smart Cookie
Meanwhile, Mark Hughes of BuzzMarketing is cooking up a different kind of fortune. He has contracted with five major fortune cookie bakeries to allow him to place advertising on the backs of the paper fortunes. Collectively, they churn out over 7 million cookies a week.

"It's simple math," said Hughes. "How many direct mail pieces get delivered and never opened? I was searching for a one-to-one ratio." Fortune cookies come pretty close. According to recent research by Buzzmarketing, 96 percent of people read their fortunes, and 67 percent of people read them aloud to their fellow diners. The fortune-cookie ads cost $8 to $13 per thousand cookies. (Do the math if you have the time.)

Hughes didn't get the "are you crazy" treatment for his wild idea. He had already tried and succeeded with it while he was Vice President of Marketing at Half.com. But I'll bet he would have seen more than a few raised eyebrows if he had funded the venture with his own check book. When Half.com sold to Ebay, Hughes took the idea and ran with it.

Now that he has the cookie fortune lined up, what's next for Hughes? Tokitos, of course. For those of us who are not Tex-Mex gourmands, a tokito is a "sweet and crunchy dessert cookie, with a hint of cinnamon"--the perfect vehicle for a pithy paper advertisement. With over 80,000 Mexican restaurants in the US and a Hispanic buying power of $380 billion, Hughes is convinced it is a great market for Buzzmarketing.

I must admit if any of the three of these successful entrepreneurs had presented their idea to me at the beginning, I might have been a bit skeptical. But then, I have made my living studying the Internet, creating websites and manufacturing puppets. So this pot would have had a hard time calling those kettles black.

And so it should be. I think the learned researchers should add one more element to the entrepreneur equation. That being a full 10 parts of 'crazy'.