Dragons Den Tonight 9PM New Series

[Ashton]

There are many website operators who have no idea about the technical aspects of a website. Do you think most company owners give a damn what language their website is built with ? They pay someone in that field to do what is required. Its a bit like expecting a high street retailer to know what type of bricks or cement was used on the building, it is not that important to them.

I wouldn't expect large company CEO's to know what language their website is coded in.

I would expect someone who's business is in 1 website, and how that website runs is essential to their business to know what it was coded in - Hilary may have been asking the question due to having her own developers and checking compatibility.

It's the same in my mind as going in their and not having any idea of your finances - you have to know your own business entirely before approaching investors.

As it is, she still got investment and its a good, obvious idea that hasn't had proper execution (until maybe this)

Ok - how would the indication of insight into technical stuff help a dragon make an offer?

It show's good awareness of your own business, people who are really passionate about their business care about it and know the details. As I said above, it could also be to gauge compatibility with her own development team. You don't distribute 10,000 pallets a night for thousands of different companies without having some system in place.

 

[BREWSTERS]

"I offer £25,000 reward for the capture of the coward - double if his arms are broken first."

Fair enough!

I'm going to the local hospital to see if there's anyone in there with two broken arms who wants to go 50/50.

 

[cm1975]

As far as I could tell, she's a one woman band, so she would be dealing closely with any outsourced developer.

Questions about the technical aspects of the website could give an indication of how much time and money needs to be invested in the online presence. It might also give an indication into the scalability of the site.

Let's not forget that the website crashed during the show, so surely technical questions are valid?

 

[mojoco]

I wouldn't expect large company CEO's to know what language their website is coded in.

I would expect someone who's business is in 1 website, and how that website runs is essential to their business to know what it was coded in - Hilary may have been asking the question due to having her own developers and checking compatibility.

It's the same in my mind as going in their and not having any idea of your finances - you have to know your own business entirely before approaching investors.

As it is, she still got investment and its a good, obvious idea that hasn't had proper execution (until maybe this)



It show's good awareness of your own business, people who are really passionate about their business care about it and know the details. As I said above, it could also be to gauge compatibility with her own development team. You don't distribute 10,000 pallets a night for thousands of different companies without having some system in place.

I disagree. It is essential that website functions the way she wants it to in order to fulfil the concept. What the site is coded in is largely irrelavent, so long as it does the job well. If all business's knew the technical aspects of site development, you guys would have no work !

 

[Ashton]

I disagree. It is essential that website functions the way she wants it to in order to fulfil the concept. What the site is coded in is largely irrelavent, so long as it does the job well. If all business's knew the technical aspects of site development, you guys would have no work !

Even if the website runs perfectly as it is, it is still important to know even the most basic of questions to answer an external investor. Whilst it may be a moot point what it is coded in, the question may have been to find out how aware she was of her business.

I know not all business's understand the technical aspects, however a 1 woman band who is hoping to get an investment should be aware of such a basic thing.

Also referring back to my point - if the site didn't work that well, or perhaps they wanted to change it to their own products, Hilary probably does have a asp.net development team for her pall-ex framework.

The successful entrepreneurs I have worked at, either freelance or with various studios have ALL taken an interest in how the site is coded. Whilst this isn't necessary, it does show care and passion about their business.

 

[Blossom]

I disagree. It is essential that website functions the way she wants it to in order to fulfil the concept. What the site is coded in is largely irrelavent, so long as it does the job well.

It's a basic question though. If someone owned a restaurant I would expect them to know where they bought their furniture from.

If all business's knew the technical aspects of site development, you guys would have no work !

There aren't very many people here who are very technical, and even the ones that are don't necessarily have the time to do everything themselves.

 

[bedazzledaz]

Going away from this investment the thing I didn't understand about the last guy, solar energy or something, he made £600k profit last year and was giving away 25% of his business, why the hell did he do that? why didn't he just employ a few really clued up people to move him on to the next level and keeping full control of his business?

 

[dragon]

Going away from this investment the thing I didn't understand about the last guy, solar energy or something, he made £600k profit last year and was giving away 25% of his business, why the hell did he do that? why didn't he just employ a few really clued up people to move him on to the next level and keeping full control of his business?

Think it was 600k sales no?

 

[Lovekraft]

Im with dragon, i really wouldn't expect her to know what language it is coded in, thats why she paid the developers to do this. Not being a web developer herself she wouldn't know any difference between languages so it is not relevant to her side of running the business.

Even if she did know what language it was coded in, this knowledge isn't really going to be of much benefit to her unless of course she goes on dragons den and is asked this question...

 

[bedazzledaz]

Think it was 600k sales no?

Sure T/O was more like £5m

 

[Skinner]

The language a site is coded has everything to do with scalability and a little with stability.

 

[dragon]

Sure T/O was more like £5m

Think that was forecasts for coming years iirc?

The language a site is coded has everything to do with scalability and a little with stability.

Well of course, any business person getting a website done with alot of potential should ask that - but still imo they don't need to know if it's C+/php/asp.net or whatever, as long as it does the job efficiently etc... imho!

 

[bedazzledaz]

Think that was forecasts for coming years iirc?

His forecast was £9m, here says it was £5m

 

[dragon]

His forecast was £9m, here says it was £5m

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006vq92 (see around 47.00mins)
I stand corrected - £5m t/o was projection for this year with profit sept this year £600k

 

[Blossom]

Well of course, any business person getting a website done with alot of potential should ask that - but still imo they don't need to know if it's C+/php/asp.net or whatever, as long as it does the job efficiently etc... imho!

A dragon is bringing money, marketing, contacts and expertise to the table. What is she bringing? A website she has no clue about, a couple of deals with suppliers, and two domain names.

The language question was just one factor in proving that she doesn't have much web sense, she didn't have much business sense either, all she had was an idea that Amazon or any other big retailer could swipe in a second...and it would be a marketing campaign for them, not even a full on website. The only benefit she has is from going on TV, which didn't give the best first impression as her website crashed, and I'm sure plenty of people are recreating her idea right now and will do a lot more with it.

Easy to replicate the whole thing with £2k or less, never mind £60k for 25% or whatever it was.

 

[wb]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...-Hewitt-the-worst-ever-Dragons-Den-pitch.html

Her site received 1.4m hits on Sunday after the episode was first shown – up from around 200 hits a day – and promptly crashed. She had been warned to prepare for several hundred thousand but not more than a million. “I was devastated,” she says.

But the traffic has continued to rise and ThePresentClub has added 1,500 wish lists in the last week, taking its total user base to around 4,000.

The article doesn't make it clear whether those figures are page views or unique visitor "hits", but assuming there were 1.4m visitors that managed to view the website at some point during the week, that's an extremely poor conversion rate (around 0.1%).

 

[Edwin]

The article doesn't make it clear whether those figures are page views or unique visitor "hits", but assuming there were 1.4m visitors that managed to view the website at some point during the week, that's an extremely poor conversion rate (around 0.1%).

I would guess it's the old-fashioned "hits" i.e. the number reported by Webalizer as "hits" - in other words, the number of elements (HTML pages, graphics, external javascripts, external CSS files and so on) that were loaded. That's >> pageviews, and pageviews will be >> visitors.

 

[Edwin]

There are many website operators who have no idea about the technical aspects of a website. Do you think most company owners give a damn what language their website is built with ? They pay someone in that field to do what is required. Its a bit like expecting a high street retailer to know what type of bricks or cement was used on the building, it is not that important to them.

Except that there is a huge difference in that websites are portable. So if you decide to go with a new hosting firm (or a new developer) you NEED to have at least some basic knowledge of that sort of thing! And if you're the only person running your little business, this isn't info you can delegate.

 

[Domain Sponsor]

I too also had a similar idea last year to thepresentclub.com, the only difference being:

Family and friends would send money for the wishlist item +10% . The owner of the site, would then order the item on behalf of the user and send it directly to them.

This way they would retain the invoice, lets say from Amazon and can deal with returns directly with them.

Also with moneyoff sites such as quidco etc. As the siteadmin you could theoretically achieve greater profits.

New Dragon gets my thumbs up so far.

James

 

[Retired_member41]

This idea will never work, Dragons have made a mistake on this one.

It will be gone soon, at least in its current format.