After the dot com bust, Blue Mountain Cards is still standing
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by: al.sones
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Word Count: 451
Have you heard of Blue Mountain Cards? Back in the 90s there was a huge rush of companies trying to provide online ecard services. It seemed like everyone thought somehow giving away ecards was going to be a business model. What you must remember is that advertising revenue models were seen as very acceptable back then. This has no changed with people wanting to know where the real revenue is coming from. However, there are some painful similarities in web 2.0 to this idea of building big applications that will make money only from advertising.
Ecards are a difficult business space for me to understand. This is the space that is eating the lunch from the old paper greeting card space thats been around forever and a day. It seems like the classic case of doing something through technology that was previously manual. But you should look deeper. An ecard is not the same thing as a paper card. You buy a paper card at a store and physically write on it. An ecard comes from a company like Blue mountain cards and is completely electronic. The products here are just not the same. So in essence, the technology is really impacted the very product. You see this also in pcs, telephones, tvs and other electronic products.
So what exactly did blue mountain cards do that was so special? First, Blue Mountain Cards had a big lead going into the game. They planned well.. The top management at Blue Mountain Cards seemed to know that the ride would not last forever. So Blue Mountain Cards management decided to sell the company while everything was still red-hot. An amazingly well-timed move. Looking back, there are many things I wish I had done differently.
How is that in 2008 Blue Mountain Cards is still a going concern? One view is that the original builders of the business picked an once-in-a-lifetime period to exit the business and made an unprecedented amount of money.. I often wonder if management teams like that are really lucky or create luck due to their experience. The greeting card business is huge. Flawed business model or not, Blue Mountain Cards made a big dent in a market worth billions. I think this accounts for why they are here today. Its a textbook case of building a brand in a new market. The part that is not text book is how Blue Mountain Cards got out at the top of the market. I guess thats where a little luck goes a long way.
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Learn more about blue mountain cards, stop in at sendpapercards.com/index.cfm?Online-greeting-cards-for-free&AID=44.
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