Evolution of OuterSports.com

Our decision to focus on selling outdoor products was based mostly on the fact that the supplier we had for those products was the largest and easiest to work with. If you go the route that we did and try to avoid having a significant inventory (which obviously increases your risk), your product selection will depend heavily on what suppliers you can find. I’ve found that there is a wide spectrum when it comes to the flexibility and cooperation of distributors, especially when it comes to small startup online stores. I’ll discuss in another section some things you can do to find the right suppliers for your online store. What you are looking for are suppliers who are willing to ship products directly to your customers each time you receive an order, and who don’t charge prohibitive fees to do so.
After we decided to focus our store on selling products for hiking, climbing, and camping, we knew we needed to find a new domain name, something that sounded like an outdoor store. We checked on the availability of a bunch of names using a domain registrar, but most of the names we wanted were taken. My brother came up with the name OuterSports.com. It was available and sounded good, so we took it.
We applied the experience we’d gained from RandomDeals.cc to building up OuterSports.com. Although we were more knowledgeable about how the process worked, we still didn’t have a lot of money to inject into the business, so we had to build it more slowly than we wanted to. However, as I discussed previously, we did see incremental improvements. At first we added about five hundred products to the store. Then we started getting links to our site by finding sites to exchange links with us, submitting our site details to online directories, commenting and contributing to forums and other community websites. Orders began to trickle in, and it wasn’t long before OuterSports.com had surpassed RandomDeals.cc.
About that time, I met a girl who I’d later marry. We dated for a few months until she went to France to study for a semester. While she was gone, I continued to build up OuterSports.com by adding products, getting links, and handling customer service issues (taking orders, charging customers, submitting orders to be processed, etc.).
In the spring of 2003, I received an entrepreneurial scholarship from Brigham Young University, where I was attending school. The scholarship was given to me for my work with OuterSports.com, and it required that I spend the summer working full-time on the business. I also had to submit formal reports to the scholarship office about what I was working on and detailing the success I was having. A couple months later, I got married and moved from Utah to Texas with my new wife so we could spend some time with her family before going back to school.
The scholarship I’d received validated my belief that the business my brother and I started had some serious potential. If experienced business people thought our small online store was worth giving a couple thousand dollars to a student, our business had to be worth something. The requirements for the scholarship motivated me to focus my efforts and move forward. Over the course of the summer, I took over handling the entire operation, and I was able to greatly improve our profits by continuing to market the site. In March of 2003 we were making about $2,000 per month, obviously not enough consider the store a career. During the month I returned back to Utah just before school, the site had made almost $4,000 in profit, and the signs showed that we had some serious momentum.
The plan that I’d discussed with my brother dictated that once the business was large enough to support him and his family, he would quit his job and work full-time on OuterSports.com. Then, as the business grew even more, I would finish school and devote my full attention to the business, and we’d build it together. Those plans abruptly changed when I returned to Utah after my scholarship summer in Texas. Just before school started, I received a phone call from my brother, who told me he and his wife had decided that they didn’t want to share a bank account or the business with me and my new wife. He simply asked me to move on and do something else.
As shocking as that turn of events was, I knew that I could start again with a new line of products, a new domain, and a new online store. Based upon my experience with the transition from RandomDeals.cc to OuterSports.com, I knew that building an online store wasn’t a one chance only situation. In fact, even after I split from OuterSports.com, I’ve seen three of my brothers build and successfully operate online stores selling products ranging from outdoor equipment to nursing scrubs to jewelry. Each of these stores has taken advantage of the formula my brother and I figured out when we began building RandomDeals.cc. If you have the patience and the willingness to invest time into following the same formula, I’m confident your successful online business is on the horizon.