Search engine marketing and internet advertising designed to generate search engine traffic and help a website succeed on the internet.
It turns out that James and his Dad, having presented their search engine and internet advertising business idea, were sitting in their bank whilst their business advisor explained that the bank was skint and could they lend the bank a few quid when a visiting member of head office IT staff walked by the office. The business advisor called the IT chap in to have a look at James's search engine; more out of politeness than anything else.
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Having explained that the bank didn't back 16 year old school boys, basically because banks don't know what they are doing; the IT chap suggested they get in touch with the Where On Earth Group and James takes up the story from here.
"As it happens, I was about a third of the way through reading The Golden Web by David Miles and Paul Herbert who are both part of the Where On Earth Group; but I hadn't got to the part about where they back new internet businesses. Much of the motivation to become an internet entrepreneur had come from reading the little I had read and I had been concentrating on building Boogami and not continued reading the book. Everyone who wants to make money from the internet should read the Golden Web." He says.
"So whether it was coincidence or luck I don't know but my dad and I went straight home and sent an email to them explaining what I was doing. Amazingly, I got a telephone call from David Miles within an hour of sending the original email who said he thought they may be interested in what I was doing and the next day I received a phone call from Paul Herbert the CEO. That's when things started to happen and they haven't stopped happening since."
So a fruitless meeting with the bank turned into an introduction to one of the most influential companies on the internet. Unless you are involved at the high end of the internet, you may not have heard of the Where On Earth Group but if you use the internet a lot or are involved in web development you will almost certainly have come across companies that they have backed or used systems they have developed. Success on the internet and the Where On Earth Group are synonymous when it comes to launching any new internet company.
David Miles says: "We get thousands of emails every year from aspiring internet entrepreneurs who have got a business idea for the internet. Most don't get further than the front desk, about three hundred get forwarded for a further look and we will normally end up backing a handful."
There are numerous reasons why most business ideas get discarded and they are usually the same reasons why most internet businesses fail or make little profit. You cannot just depend on traffic coming through the search engines, you have to have a business idea that is going to create media interest and you have to have a product or service that will capture the imagination of the public.
David Miles says: "Most people who approach us have just got an idea; they haven't bothered to do any research nor put a business plan together. James had done a lot of research and his father had put an exceptional business plan together. James and his father were under no illusions about the level of investment required to make Boogami a success and understood that they needed backing to pay for the PR, marketing, advertising and to put an infrastructure in place with staff capable of handling all the back end systems and administration."
Miles and another colleague drove down to Kent to meet with James and his parents and it was obvious from the outset that James was a very special young man with a bag full of innovative ideas that he wanted to implement through his search engine. It wasn't the fact that he had built a search engine, nor the fact that he had coupled it with selling a million pixels. The million pounds raised through selling all the pixel advertising was going to be small beans compared with the income that could be generated if the marketing and PR for his search engine paid off.
Where On Earth knew they had a potential multi million business on their hands. Their PR people were already salivating at the thought of going to the press and media with the story of a sixteen year old school boy who had built a search engine to help his parents pay off their mortgage. This was the story that they would be running with; the PR and publicity that they would receive was worth tens of millions of pounds and it would run and run.
"Had James been in his twenties and come to us with the idea, I doubt if we would have looked too closely at the business proposition." Says David Miles. "It was the fact that he was only sixteen; had built a first class search engine and was not doing it for himself but for his parents. Plus of course he had a number of other ideas that he was already developing and we knew we could take the whole package and give him a real chance of competing against all the other major search engines and becoming a real internet success."
You don't have to be sixteen to get major media attention but you do need to have a good idea that is going to change the way people do things to give your PR people something to get their teeth into and be able to create media interest. If you don't have those requisites, the alternative is to spend millions on internet marketing and advertising and that is why most businesses never get off the ground; the cost to profit ratio just doesn't add up.
Boogami was almost ready to go but Where On Earth wanted to get all the search engine advertising and internet marketing organised before the official launch.