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Page 113 GO IT ALONE!
When Guglani cofounded Emoonlighter.com (under the original name A2Zmoonlighter.com) it had three employees. The $400,000 came from angel investors. The company achieved profitability in November 2001. As the company was changing its name to Guru.com in 2004, it had just nine employees. Several elements of the company’s development are noteworthy applications of the ideas expressed here: - Guglani believes that his company succeeded because of its focus on achieving profitability. “We outmaneuvered our competitors by concentrating on profitability. We focused on achieving the shortest path to profitability while our competitors tried to outspend one another to capitalize on the first-mover advantage,” he says. “In some ways, once we achieved profitability we were free to take more risks.” Guru.com is now the world’s largest online marketplace for freelance talent.
- Emoonlighter.com has remained flexible. It started with the idea of providing existing workers an opportunity to earn extra income in their free time: It was, in effect, a matchmaking service for people who wanted to moonlight on weekends and at night. This made sense in the full-employment economy that existed at the height of the dot-com boom. Later, when the full-time job market softened, Emoonlighter.com shifted to serve as a matchmaking service for people looking for full-time projects. As discussed earlier, successful businesses often end up making money in related but different areas from the ones they anticipated at launch.
- The firm has succeeded with such a small employee base by outsourcing as much as possible. Guglani notes that he anticipates that he will outsource more functions when “his employees are sufficiently experienced to manage the outsourced provider. We need to understand it in-house first,” he says.
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GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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