bendunne.com seems to be a no-show

Ben Dunne has bought hours of radio air-time on Newstalk over the last month telling everyone about his new website that would revolutionise buying of stuff and doing of things that was coming on the 19th of October. It caught my eye because nobody does a hard launch on the Internet. The accepted wisdom is to soft launch/beta the website first to iron out the kinks and build up some content and then put out the ads. Out of curiosity I took a look at his site today and it’s an empty page for some reason, so that marketing investment is largely wasted.

He (or his advisors) is exhibiting a strange naïveté about the ways of internet business for someone so successful in other areas. Geography is immaterial and operating costs are minimal so there’s lots of competition for eyeballs and wallets. Your business either needs to be either new, better or cheaper; and preferably at least two of the three. Bendunne.ie or his previous attempt tenderme.ie (also launched in the same way) is none of these.

Adverts.ie, an offshoot of boards.ie, crucially realise that the buyers don’t come unless there’s a large volume of sellers. The only way to get a large volume of sellers is if you have a large volume of buyers (like eBay), or you make it cheap enough that they’ll list there products on the off chance… Crucially by charging a fee bendunne.com are reducing the volume of sellers as who’s going to pay for a listing on a site with no track record? Adverts.ie makes it’s money by embedding Google AdWords advertising in the listings and allows anyone to list for free. They’re listing 1000+ items each day and generating serious traffic, and traffic = money.

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Published:: 10.19.09 / 7pm

Category:: Business, Internet, Technology

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I’m a 30 something Irish guy that works in the IT business. Inside the trade I’m interested in Linux, Internet technologies and mobile hardware and services. Outside, I enjoy a good book, a nice beer and decent game of rugby……

P.S. This is a personal blog, and while I do have a professional involvement in a lot of the technical topics I mention in some of my posts, they do not reflect company policy or ethos.

Daniel Corkery 2.11.10 / 5pm

Hi Gary

Seen your comments regarding bendunne.com and I would like to introduce my website to you and maybe get your feedback. The website is called http://www.getabuilder.ie/ maybe you could give me your honest opinion.
Currently I receive about 30,000 page hits a month and I am about to launch our advertising campaign.
Any tips

Regards
Daniel

gary 2.22.10 / 11am

I like the site as it stands at the moment (particularly the semi-blind bidding model), but without knowing how you plan to generate revenue from the site I don’t know how it’ll work out. Everything is free for the moment, but it’s crucial that whatever fees are introduced do not do anything to limit the volume of jobs offered or taken up.

Tenderme.ie was a bust because tradesmen were having to pay to submit each bid without a guarantee (or even a good chance) of the resulting business. this structure is very like madbid.com, where you pay a fee before you make a bid. What you don’t realise to start with is the site are making a ton of money out of all the bidders, not just the winning one. It’s more of a lottery than an auction.

A more logical way to operate would be for the winning tradesman to pay a fee (possibly a small percentage of the contract value), on completion of the work. Obviously this would require a bit more of a formal structure, but it’s fair on all concerned and actually incentivises tradesmen to bid on more jobs as they only incur a fee on business they actually win.

Mairead 3.17.10 / 7am

Hi Gary,

I would also like some feedback on my site http:// http://www.sellmix.com ,which is basically a site offering free advertisement for business and a place to sell or buy goods.
I am in the process of introducing a trade section (www.trade.sellmix.com open to all sections of business large and small. I have 20,000 page hits so far this month double last months total for the whole month.
I am a one man band and have secured a top 10 google spot re. buy & sell Ireland enquiries but still finding it difficult getting people to post their adverts.
Any advice? limited budget to work with here..

Regards,

Mairead.

gary 3.22.10 / 1pm

Hi Mairead,

The site itself is fine. It’s doing the same things in the same way as bendunne.com or donedeal.ie. It’s all about cost and return. People are reluctant to spend time & money posting an ad if not enough people are going to see it. I can spend €3 with Donedeal.ie and get on a site with 110m pageviews per month (see http://www.irelandmetrix.ie/topsites.html) or spend €1 to get on sellmix.com which does 1/5500 the traffic. That makes it 1833 times more expensive in like for like terms to advertise on sellmix.com.

If you want to get this type of site off the ground you need to shrink this multiplier, by either reducing the cost or increasing the volume of the traffic. Even reducing the cost can only go so far, because the seller still needs to take the time to write the ad.

When it comes to building volume, unless you have a USP you can either do it slow and cheap or throw money at it to build traffic fast. I have no concrete numbers but my gut feeling is that donedeal.ie aren’t relying on search engines for a huge amount of their traffic. The valuable visitors are those that visit regularly and/or subscribe to the newsletter/RSS feed. These visitors are gained the old fashioned way, through advertising (expensive) and word of mouth (slow).

Given what I’ve seen with sellmix.com and getabuilder.ie, I think the only way to compete is to be disruptive. Copying the market leaders isn’t good enough. Ben Dunne tried that and threw a ton of money at it and he’s only turning over €100 a day. Sorry, but that’s the way I see it.

Gary

mike joyce 5.11.10 / 5pm

found it useless

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bendunne.com seems to be a no-show

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