Only failures need apply

Thedot.com failures are starting to pile up

By BBC News Online internet reporter Mark Ward

Someone was bound to see the growing numbers of dot.com casualties as an opportunity for a new web business.

Now Californian entrepreneur Nicholas Hall is building a dot.com success out of dot.com failures.

Hall has started up startupfailures.com, a website that helps entrepreneurs who have seen their internet businesses crash and burn start all over again.

In true Silicon Valley style startupfailures has gone from a good idea into a thriving web community in a matter of weeks.

Now the site is visited by thousands of people per day looking for help and advice on starting up their next online business.

Having a failed business in the US is like a rite of passage

Mark Simon,
The Chemistry

The website has a ready made community that it can tap into. Hall estimates that only 6 out of every thousand business plans get funded and that 40% of businesses fail within the first five years of operation.

In the last week high-profile web retailer Boo and startup Netimperative have gone bust. This Friday Entertainment Express is expected to close its doors.

Dot.dom crash

Hall says he is more than qualified to run startupfailures.com because he has founded two companies that flopped and worked for a third that went belly up.

Startupfailures offers advice to entrepreneurs on how to bounce back and get their next venture going.

With startupfailures.com Hall says he is not looking to go for an Initial Public Offering (IPO). "I want to focus on keeping it real and focusing on serving the community," he said.

This time around he is hoping that he has got it right and that nothing succeeds like other people's failure.

"Having a failed business in the US is like a rite of passage," said Mark Simon, founder of dot.com networking company The Chemistry.

Mr Simon said that British attitudes to failure were slowly starting to see that failure was not always a bad thing. Mr Simon said he has started a business that failed but he learnt a huge amount from the process.

"There are very few entrepreneurs in this country that have got it right first time," he said.