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20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

forbes.com

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Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#41

Post by pitdesi »

taylorbuley wrote: post #33
AlexC04 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thank you so much. I was interested in the article, but couldn't continue reading past the labels. I'm surprised that forbes.com (ostensibly a reputable magazine) has gone with a "2leep" style layout. Adsense "clickbombs" everywhere and completely unreadable. This is 'content farm' quality at best, which is a shame because it seems an interesting article.

I'm sorry you feel that way. As a Forbes developer, I can tell you we are trying to make the site as usable as possible. If you have any specific feedback I can pass along drop me an email at buley.reports at gmail

EVERYONE feels that way. I don't bother sending around Forbes links anymore because they require so many clicks. One piece of advice - make a printable page that way we don't have to click so many times

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#42

Post by tastybites »

Fatheadz - awesome idea. I probably couldn't be described as 'big' or 'fat', but my head is wider than normal, which means 90% of sunglasses look absolutely ridiculous on me. I can only wear 150mm+ lenses, such as 'large' Ray-ban Aviators, which are 150mm exactly hinge to hinge (I've measured).

Fatheadz is one of the only sunglass websites that explicitly states the width, in mm, of their frames.

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#43

Post by SHOwnsYou »

vaksel wrote: post #10

revenue != profit. take the Fiero guy...sure 2 mil is impressive...but car parts are expensive...and his profit margin is most likely only 7%(seems to be the average for car parts)...which turns his 2 mil into $140K.

Agree that profit margins can be very thin, but in this case the Fiero guy is probably doing pretty well.

If the Fiero parts guy is primarily selling to end users (which it looks like he does), his profit is probably closer to 33% per item. Standard markup for auto parts to private customer is 1.5x

Source: Family run auto repair shop for 20+ years.

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#44

Post by robryan »

taylorbuley wrote: post #33
AlexC04 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thank you so much. I was interested in the article, but couldn't continue reading past the labels. I'm surprised that forbes.com (ostensibly a reputable magazine) has gone with a "2leep" style layout. Adsense "clickbombs" everywhere and completely unreadable. This is 'content farm' quality at best, which is a shame because it seems an interesting article.

I'm sorry you feel that way. As a Forbes developer, I can tell you we are trying to make the site as usable as possible. If you have any specific feedback I can pass along drop me an email at buley.reports at gmail

You have a whole heap of space, why would you overlay the text over the image, it also feels like their is more advertising space than content space.

An ideal layout would be all one page, it would have the text nicely under or around the images. Even if the ad in the top and side bars was still there at least they wouldn't seem like the most prominent thing on the page.

The NYTimes does all this quiet well, they page but at least their pages are quiet long. They may even have the same amount of ads on the page but the content is so much more dense that it doesn't feel spammy.

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#45

Post by vaksel »

patio11 wrote: post #34
vaksel wrote: post #10

revenue != profit. take the Fiero guy...sure 2 mil is impressive...but car parts are expensive...and his profit margin is most likely only 7%(seems to be the average for car parts)...which turns his 2 mil into $140K.

Prior to quitting my day job, I was propositioned by an Englishman living in my town to improve his website, which he had hand-coded in PHP. There are several million owners of vintage Japanese cars in the world, there are several thousand places locally you can find a carburetor for a '82 Camry (I have no clue if that actually makes sense -- work with me here), and there is precisely one man in town who can match up…

yes when you have a monopoly you can charge anything you want and people will pay it.

The Fiero example is different, since it's an "iconic" car, which means there are plenty of aftermarket suppliers/vendors who sell this stuff(usually other enthusiasts), so he can't really gouge.

Plus, since its a GM product from the 80s/90s..everything is interchangeable...which means he can't really charge a premium for Fiero stuff, since those exact parts can be found in any number of other Chevy, Pontiac products.

For example the 4 cylinder that came in the Fiero, also came in Chevy Astro, Camaro, Citation, Lumina, S10 and Pontiac 6000, Phoenix, Celebrity, Grand Am, Firebird, as well as Buick Century, Somerset, Skylark and Oldsmobile Cutlass and Omega.

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#46

Post by replicatorblog »

patio11 wrote: post #34
vaksel wrote: post #10

revenue != profit. take the Fiero guy...sure 2 mil is impressive...but car parts are expensive...and his profit margin is most likely only 7%(seems to be the average for car parts)...which turns his 2 mil into $140K.

Prior to quitting my day job, I was propositioned by an Englishman living in my town to improve his website, which he had hand-coded in PHP. There are several million owners of vintage Japanese cars in the world, there are several thousand places locally you can find a carburetor for a '82 Camry (I have no clue if that actually makes sense -- work with me here), and there is precisely one man in town who can match up…

Great story Patrick. I think a lot of people equate physical products with low margins, but often that is not the case. Music and media focused startups are a great example of this. After license payments the profits of even a successful company like Pandora are tiny. Compared to a number of physical products/ecommerce companies where margins can be 30-50%.

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#47

Post by dhh »

Where's the justification for most of these businesses actually being worth 20 million dollars? I mean they're awesome stories, but when you have $1-2 million in revenue and have to deal with physical products, you won't exactly have millions in profits. So if you're generating, say, $200K in profits, who exactly is going to give you a 100 P/E and pay you $20 million for that business?

Why does Forbes need to go the bullshit "How This Kid Made $60M" route to rouse interest? Can't it be awesome enough in itself that someone is making a very fine living selling labels or socks? Oh no, unless they're worth eight digits, they're not worth talking about. Sad.

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#48

Post by thecoffman »

dhh wrote: post #47

Where's the justification for most of these businesses actually being worth 20 million dollars? I mean they're awesome stories, but when you have $1-2 million in revenue and have to deal with physical products, you won't exactly have millions in profits. So if you're generating, say, $200K in profits, who exactly is going to give you a 100 P/E and pay you $20 million for that business? Why does Forbes need to go the…

I read it as "here are 20 different one million dollar businesses" which seems more in line with the numbers presented.

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#49

Post by dhh »

thecoffman wrote: post #48
dhh wrote: post #47

Where's the justification for most of these businesses actually being worth 20 million dollars? I mean they're awesome stories, but when you have $1-2 million in revenue and have to deal with physical products, you won't exactly have millions in profits. So if you're generating, say, $200K in profits, who exactly is going to give you a 100 P/E and pay you $20 million for that business? Why does Forbes need to go the…

I read it as "here are 20 different one million dollar businesses" which seems more in line with the numbers presented.

Ha. That would make sense. And this would qualify as a terrible fucking headline as it can be read as (20 million-dollar) businesses, (20) million-dollar businesses, and (20 million) dollar businesses.

Forbes is terrible.

Re: 20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

#50

Post by zach »

pitdesi wrote: post #41
taylorbuley wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry you feel that way. As a Forbes developer, I can tell you we are trying to make the site as usable as possible. If you have any specific feedback I can pass along drop me an email at buley.reports at gmail

EVERYONE feels that way. I don't bother sending around Forbes links anymore because they require so many clicks. One piece of advice - make a printable page that way we don't have to click so many times

I certainly agree. The real problem is what mandatory interstitials (not in this case, I see), AdSense boxes next to content and tiny amounts of content per page do to a site. They exude an aura closer to desperation than success. I'm guessing Forbes readers can pick up on that better than most.

I know internet publishing is a tough business, but we all know there's a problem here.

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