Amplebosom.com hits it big

Sally Robinson (right) is the brains behind Amplebosom dot com

By the BBC's Charles Miller

An internet startup run by a Yorkshire farmer's wife is set to outperform most multimillion dollar dot.com businesses.

Sally Robinson has converted one of the outbuildings of her family farm near Helmsley, North Yorkshire, to a dot.com office.

She has three computers, and a stock of underwear for "the larger lady", and believes she can make Amplebosom.com profitable on an initial loan of £80,000 from her local bank.

Other, much larger businesses featured in the series Inside Dot Coms have had millions sunk into them without any immediate prospect of breaking even.

Good prospects

By conventional business measures, Amplebosom looks like a better investment than most bigger dot.com companies

Don't give up your day job, and be prepared to work for nothing

Sally Robinson

Sally Robinson's husband John, who has run the family farm for 20 years, is looking forward to joining the ranks of dot.com whizz kids: "I don't want to be a millionaire, but I wouldn't mind sleeping with one," he jokes.

Sally still runs the farm's bed and breakfast business. She advises would-be entrepreneurs: "Don't give up your day job, and be prepared to work for nothing until you get your idea off the ground."

When it comes to designing the site, Sally has no time for fancy technology and a trendy image. She advises dot coms to keep their sites simple and friendly: "Why complicate it?"

More conventional dot.com entrepreneurs - who tend to operate from large offices in the centre of London or San Francisco - believe that their companies' losses are a necessary part of capturing a big slice of emerging internet markets.

If the internet continues to develop at its current pace, they argue, anyone who puts themselves ahead of the game now, will have a priceless advantage in future.

We are still in the copper ages of the internet

Ernesto Schmidt

"I believe we are only 5% into this whole internet thing," says Mark Fletcher, founder of an email group company OneList, which recently merged with eGroups, and is heading for its stock market flotation.

Fletcher, who was brought up in Silicon Valley, believes there are complete internet industries that have not yet been thought of.

Ernesto Schmitt, founder of the London-based Peoplesound.com, believes "we are still in the copper ages" of the internet.

Since the downturn in stock market confidence in technology businesses in March, it's not yet clear whether the optimism of the big businesses, or the down-to-earth approach of Sally Robinson and other small dot coms, will turn out to be the best bet.

Inside Dot Coms: Tales of the Electronic Goldrush is on BBC2 at 2320 BST from 5-8 June. Sally Robinson features in Episode Two, Making It Big, on Tuesday 6 June.