A brief history…part I

I was having a chat with friend of mine on MSN. He is also an aspiring young entrepreneur and he was commenting that I appear a lot more focused on my business than some of his other friends who like to talk business but have trouble taking actions towards creating something. I asked if these friends of his were still in school and he said yes. I remembered back when I was studying I knew one thing, I didn’t like the prospect of a day job when I graduated and running my own business was definitely the way I wanted to go. I just didn’t know what sort of business I wanted to start.

Now that I have been running BetterEdit for a number of years and having started and closed or sold a number of other small enterprises along the way I can look back on what I have done and how I learnt to focus and take action, at least more than I used to and only on one project at a time! However I think a brief history is in order so you can see the processes I went through to get as much focus as I have now.

My story might provide you a valuable lesson, as often when you start a new business you have lots of untested ideas, grand plans but not a lot of focus on the little things and as a result you don’t take actions. A lot of business is trial and error and a journey of self discovery for the entrepreneur - he or she has to like what they are doing for the business to succeed after all! But you have take trials to make those errors or you won’t learn what works and get past the theorising and brainstorming stage. Nothing is more exciting than when you make that first sale.

I started BetterEdit around 2000-2001. I received the initial brain spark from www.cyberedit.com (now http://www.essayedge.com) after reading a news article in a Yahoo magazine about Geoff Cook the founder of the business. Geoff started his business in 1997 editing students’ entrance essays to get into colleges in the United States. Without going into too much detail, Geoff’s business was very successful and he himself became a millionaire. This article from Wired Magazine is one of the most important publicity articles Geoff received and really helped to increase his exposure and inform the consumer of his business.

I took the idea and applied it to the Australian marketplace, which is a bit different because students don’t have to write an entrance paper to get into university. However there are a lot of international students with English as a second language in Australia, so I believed that proofreading and editing could be a market. At the time I had just completed a group project which was a perfect case study. One of my group members from Asia had awful English and I spent a whole night editing his writing. I had also just learnt HTML and was eager to build websites as I was falling in love with the Internet. My mother’s partner was out of work and being a trained teacher was quite a capable editor, so I had all the ingredients. I spent a couple of days building the website and a business was born.

Fairly soon after that point however I left the business to focus on studies. I wasn’t in the right place in my life to devote the energy BetterEdit needed. The business started and basically stagnated for a year, however it was working because we had a few loyal clients, it just wasn’t growing because no one was doing anything to tell people about it. Fast forward to 2003 and I had just returned from a trip to Tasmania with a girlfriend. This was meant to be the start of a fruitpicking journey around Australia but ended prematurely. I also broke up with my girlfriend. I had no job, I was a business graduate with no desire to return to studies and no commitments to anything. Talk about opportunity!

I decided to give BetterEdit a really good shot and went to work on it. Over the first few years without me my family had managed to locate one or two good contract editors by sending job notices to the local universities. I checked that they were still willing to receive work, which they were. The website was still up and the email systems were working fine. All I needed to do was get the word out that our service was there.

Next blog entry I’ll talk a look at my first steps at marketing an Internet business.

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager