Beating the trend and riding the technology wave.

“…(he) showed the company the immense traffic Nullsoft was getting to its site as people were downloading Winamp…(He) returned to Frankel (the creator of Winamp) with a six-month advertising contract…and a check for $300,000.”

I’m reading another Internet business book at the moment (yes I read a lot of entrepreneur books), ‘all the rave – The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster‘ by Joseph Menn. The paraphrased quote above comes from a brief section in the book about Winamp, the extremely popular shareware MP3 player. Frankel, the fellow that built the software and distributed it on his website didn’t want to run it as a business but a mate came to him suggesting he should. He told his friend to go see what he could do and he came back with a cheque for advertising worth $300,000. Nice. That would make for a good day.

From there on Winamp went on to be a succesful business and is still the leading MP3 player on the market today. This story demonstrates the amazing opportunity there is on the Internet, even if you aren’t looking for it. At the time MP3 was a technology that was taking over the world. Winamp was a geek’s little piece of software that he gave away to others for free because he could. The software was simple and met a rising need, word spread, traffic skyrocketed and a $300k cheque came in out of the blue.

The best bit about this story is that anyone can replicate it if they determine (or guess) a trend for a mass market need before it happens. The Internet, and Internet technology, is going to continue to evolve. There will be another MP3 like revolution. In fact there will be many. Some will be huge (think about movies – when will there be a MP3-like encoding for movie files? – the 3MB full length film, I’d download that!) others will be in a smaller market niche. Some are happening right now and others are in development for tomorrow.

All you need to do is think of what will catch on, develop a piece of software or a website or even just register the .com (mp3.com anyone?) before the trend hits or anyone else does, and you could have a nice big cheque too!

Okay, easier said than done of course, otherwise everyone would be doing it. However it doesn’t hurt to stay abreast of trends in technology and keep your ear to the floor for the next big thing. And remember, if you can dream it, someone else out there can build it for you, so don’t let a lack of technological skills hold you back.

Yaro Starak