Learning from mistakes, and forging new territory

In 2006, I was selling about 1000 DVD's weekly on eBay. I was riding a wave of DVD sellers who were leaving the site, and I was grabbing all their customers. I was, in fact, so confident that I would be doing this for another decade even more successfully that I cashed in my former job's 401K just to invest in my business.

Then, when thing just couldn't get any better for my business, we saw Netflix streaming movies at the beginning of 2007, Amazon Unbox in September 2006, Youtube and Youtube like sites flooded the internet, and the fading of the era of physical media began.

I had one chance were I could have maintained my business. I could convert my business to integrate high definition inventory, which was just beginning in 2006. My distributor had a whopping 150 HD-DVD and about 100 Blu-ray titles in stock, and consumers with enough money were spending $500+ to get the players for these formats. However, I was not as smart as I would like to think I was.
Exhibit A is my blog post I made in mid-2006, decrying the fools who would make the day of the DVD and VHS obsolete. The only problem? I was the real fool.

Note the arrogance as I wrote that post. I was absolutely certain DVD was always going to be the better, and cheaper option. After all, I had sold them incredibly well for 5 years, so I had no reason to think that would end, right?

As luck would have it, I was not as foolish as I could have been, and began a small site dedicated to this emergence of new media. I called it "House of Blu - We Are Blu-ray" and began advertising and marketing it online. I gained modest success, but by the time I launched in 2008, the floodgates had opened and thousands of titles were available.

Take a look at my site as it existed:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090209131936/http://houseofblu.com/

My message here is to learn from your mistakes. When I continued selling movies online, I continued selling the same old kinds of DVD's I had always sold as my primary source of inventory, and never gained a single new customer. When I began looking at what was selling in my niche, I found a couple areas with pre-viewed pro wrestling and Blu-ray where I could make a terrific mark on the category. To this day used Blu-ray is doing very well and I have moved on to a new one to replace the wrestling that faded.

It is all about planning and honesty. No one wants to fail, so we cling onto what has always worked. 

Now, it is about what is working today.