Oh wow... thanks so much for sharing your failures Lisa. I could go on and on and on and on and on about mine. I can be very hard-headed sometimes and it takes me a few bumps upside my head to finally realize I need to change my focus.

I made numerous attempts to try and re-invent the popular sites like MySpace, Amazon, etc. My first site was a mega store. But as you talk about on your site, I didn't have the traffic or credibility to make it work. Stores are very hard to make popular unless you have a very specialized niche. The reason is most people don't use search engines to shop for popular/regular store products. They just go to their favorite retail sites or they use one of the popular meta shopping sites like bizrate.com.

So here I was trying to create a store like Amazon.com and I think my traffic never got about 5 per day (and those were probably me!)

Then my 2nd failed attempt was the myspace-like site. Geez, Lisa I wish I had seen your video on myspace a year ago! I paid a guy to setup a mini version of myspace for me. And as we've talked about so much on this forum, I didn't have anything unique about my site to take away from the myspace users. I tried promoting my site to my group of myspace friends and a few of them joined up but never used it. Why? Because why would they when all their friends and things they like are already on MySpace!!

So my lesson was never to try to copy or re-create something that's already out here unless you have an idea that is so drastically unique you can actually steal part of their market share. And most people don't have the budget and/or expertise to do that.

To all you guys just starting out I cannot stress enough how important (and much easier) it is to just start off simple and do a content-only site on something you enjoy. START SMALL and work on your niche then expand if that begins to get popular. Forget trying to compete with Myspace, monster.com, Amazon.com and all these heavily branded sites. It's too hard to compete.