John Mellor: CEO & Co-Founder WorkInSports.com – Work In Sports Podcast - a podcast by Brian Clapp - Work in Sports

Sports entrepreneur and Co-Founder of WorkInSports.com, John Mellor, joins host Brian Clapp on the Work In Sports podcastHey everybody, I’m Brian Clapp VP of Content and Engaged Learning at WorkInSports.com and this is the Work In Sports podcast…I guess it’s time for a little history talk... But not too far back, we’re not talking Roman gladiators or Mesopotamia. We’re talking about 22 years ago, when the internet was the most fertile ground in the world. 1998 ish -- everyone was on the hunt for their dot com get rich quick idea. Internet companies were formulating daily, popping up all over the place and establishing a new culture and expectation for workers. My wife worked for a few different dot com startups in this time and their culture was much different than the buttoned-up, role defined, performance review world I lived in at CNN/Sports Illustrated. They had the stereotypical ping pong table in the lobby - a slide going from the 2nd floor down to the first, they had pods of working desks and at random times someone would play the theme song to the family feud and they’d all drop whatever they were working on and rush to compete against each other in an online version of the game. They’d play half-life throughout the day and have food catered in. The culture and work environment was awesome -- unfortunately, the product of most of these companies was speculative at best. INvestors wanted to throw money at these companies, despite their lack of financial fundamentals or even a product worth getting behind. BUt again. The investor flocked because they all told themselves this is a new world, we have to adjust our way of evaluating these companies… and the money is really green coming out of these wins. The venture capitalists wanted their lottery ticket, they all wanted to get in on the action and get in early on the next big thing. So now you have these really young companies, led by young visionaries without much business experience being handed tons and tons of money to make their idea grow.In this era, this concept of money and growth translated into advertising and branding. So many dot com companies went crazy trying to get their name out there. One of my wives companies...true story...hired a guy who was considered a bit of a viral youtuber back then, to hand out company-branded velvet pouches with $5 in coins in them at Times Square. Just randomly giving out $5 to people and thinking - oh yeah, this will have a return on investment. Sure sure sure.21 different dot-com ads were run in Super Bowl 34 in January 2000. These ads amounted to nearly 20 percent of the 61 spots available,[1] and $44 million in advertising.Let’s run through some of those companies and see how things played out for them…* E1040.com* Epidemic.com* Lastminutetravel.com* Lifeminders.com* OnMoney.com* Netpliance.com* Ourbeginning.comWe could go on. Perspective -- OurBeginning.com's revenue jumped 350% in Q1 of 2000, but its $5 million in advertising costs were still ten times what its customers spent.[8] Short-term gains were not enough to recoup advertising losses, and Pets.com, Computer.com, and Epidemic.com, among many others, would fold before the end of the year.Why is this important? -- well, a couple of reasons. 1 don’t forget the fundamentals - in everything you do it’s important not to get swept up in the hype and wishing, it’s important to stay focused and rely on what is proven and works.

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