Lessons Learned - Obsession and Copyright

To show that even the more experienced entrepreneurs make mistakes, today’s article is about two mistakes that I have made recently. One of the many keys to success is not to be afraid of making mistakes and to learn from what mistakes you do make. Hopefully you can pick something up from what I have done wrong in the past.

1. Obsession can be costly

When I first learnt about mini sites, I spent a substantial amount of time researching keywords whilst trying to find a profitable keyword combination. Now when I say substantial, I meant that I was spending several hours a day trying to find suitable combinations.

Although I found about 4-5 low quality combinations, I found myself being very tempted to buy the matching domains without researching the keywords more. So it could have cost me a lot of money on domains alone (and my investment capital is still very small at the moment). Thankfully I stopped myself from buying the domains for the mini sites.

The Lesson: The obsession with making money had left me making irrational and poorly researched decisions. This is where you should remove emotion from business decisions, and rely on just logical justifications.

2. Copyrighted terms in a domain name

Earlier in the year, I came up with an idea to create an online points calculator for Weight Watchers. For those of you who know about the points system for Weight Watchers, you know that points are a way of comparing different foods by considering calories and saturated fat content. Every food has a certain number of points, and so I was thinking of creating an online calculator that achieved the same result as their actual portable calculators.

I checked for a domain name, and found that WeightWatchersCalculator.co.uk and .net was available. So I bought them both there and then at a cost of about $40. However, once I had bought them, I started doing more research (what I should have done well before getting the domains).

From some simple web searches, I discovered that Weight Watchers International (i.e. the trademark owner) is generally quite aggressive regarding copyright infringement. I thought that using the Weight Watcher trademarks in the online calculator would be very likely to attract legal action.

Although my intention would not have been to abuse their trademark, I still didn’t think it was worth the risk. Therefore I decided to write off the $40 that I spent on domains and let them expire.

Copyright footer from WeightWatchers.co.uk:

© 2008 Weight Watchers International, Inc. © 2008 WeightWatchers.com, Inc. All rights reserved. WEIGHT WATCHERS and POINTS are the registered trade marks of Weight Watchers International, Inc. and are used under licence by Weight Watchers UK Limited and WeightWatchers.co.uk Limited.

The Lesson: Don’t choose domain names that use trademarks or copyrighted text. It’s just not worth the legal issues that might arise.

Conclusion

I’ve since learned to take more time over decision making to avoid emotions becoming a dominant factor. And I’ve also since learned that staying away from copyright infringement in domain names is a very good idea!