I have always been of the mindset that you don’t give away your gameplan for a new business to the general public. If you are looking to raise money to start it, sure put your presentation together for accredited investors.
There is an interesting story about Knitting.com and the knitting community getting all riled up by the owner’s comments about the industry and disrupting it.
One of the two owners is someone who we have written about before and has always been a sharp domain investor. Mike Jackness. Back in 2011 he flipped WebsiteHosting.com for $415,000 a domain name he held for just 4 months back in 2011. He acquired it for $190,000.
In November of 2011 he sold IRA.com for 7 figures.
It’s not listed on Namebio but Mike Jackness and his partner acquired Knitting.com for $80,000. The seller apparently wanted $150,000.
Emily Shugerman over at The Daily Beast covered the chaos that ensued after Mike and his partner Dave Bryant laid out their plan for Knitting.com in a blog post.
In an interview with Input Magazine, Jackness compared the experience to high school bullying and the Salem witch trials. The pair ultimately deleted their blog post and podcast announcing the venture.
According to the now-deleted blog post and podcast, the pair planned to fill Knitting.com with knitting articles and videos, using it as an SEO-friendly funnel into their actual business of selling knitting products on Amazon. And having a strong domain name was crucial to that plan, as Jackness explained in a podcast episode. Whether communicating with sellers, influencers, or potential employees, he said, “you’re going to get heard—at least they’ll open your email—because you’re from Knitting.com.”
The article goes on to say,
In the podcast episode, Bryant noted that a major draw of the knitting market was the lack of competition. He claimed the number of high-quality competitors sat in the low dozens, and that the rest of the market was occupied by “grandma who has a little blog that she’s run for the last 20 years.”
“It’s pretty unsophisticated competitors,” he said.
That is when all hell apparently broke loose. Emily did a great job of detailing just how hot things can get in the knitting world on social media. Places like Reddit, Twitter and Instagram apparently have lively audiences that engage in plenty of debates. They all seemed to come together to put Jackness and Bryant on blast.
You can read the whole article here, it’s worth reading in my opinion.
Don’t mess with granny who is obviously carrying a weapon
https://society6.com/product/my-weapons-of-choice–knitting-needles_print
Emily got the timeline a bit wrong, they posted about it on the 16th, knitters found it a week later and flooded the youtube video and the blog post, they then deleted the original post and the video but you still find the podcast if you google “ecomcrew podcast unraveling” and they replaced the blog post with a text addressing knitters. So knitters got “knittingdotcom” on Twitter and the two techdudes had to settle for realknittingdotcom which coincidentally is the name of another website, so I hope Jennifer will get traffic from that (she paid less for her site)
That article also left out the whole part about them saying racist things such as that knitters would not watch tutorials by chinese looking people.
Of all the articles that exist, the daily beast one is the most superficial one.
I wonder why they think it’s an untapped market, as Rito and Hobbii are already doing exactly what they are trying to do, except that the others did not publicly make fun of their potential clients and are not on record calling them grandmas and basically cash cows.
Stupid!