Quiet Friday Night

I overslept this morning and accidentally skipped the only class I have today. I went to bed too late last night and had trouble getting up this morning. I unwittingly turned off my alarm clock in my morning stupor (instead of hitting snooze). I am definitely not a morning person. I’m very groggy for about 10 minutes after getting up.

Anyway, I hit the gym shortly afterward with 2 friends. Was in there for about 2 hours. Doesn’t sound as intense as it seems - we were taking longer breaks between sets and chatting. Then we had lunch for another 2 hours, just basically chatting about various things. We then wanted to play basketball, called up a bunch of people, but found out there was no place available to play.

All of tonight, a Friday night no less, I’ve been working on my business plan and doing research. I’ve been doing research and reading up on the industry almost every night. That’s also the reason I slept late last night. I was reading up on things until 3 AM. If you don’t already know, the general idea of my business plan is to provide web hosting and other related services to businesses in the Ithaca area.

Unfortunately tonight, I found 3 more direct competitors in Ithaca. That comes to a total of 5 web hosting providers. They certainly have not captured the entire market - they all serve different clients. The problem is not so much about quality of service or pricing either - I can beat all of them on these factors - the problem is finding new customers who don’t currently have websites and capturing market share by converting my competitors’ clients. I’m also starting to think about actually creating a different brand/company to provide services (i.e. dedicated servers, server management, reseller hosting) to these hosting companies, essentially becoming THEIR service provider or supplier.

Another problem is what I should do when I graduate from Cornell - how do I continue the business in Ithaca or should I plan an exit strategy? I actually thought about running the business for a year or two and then applying to Cornell business school. Then I’d be in Ithaca for quite some time - is this something I want to do?

Some of my engineer friends sometimes speak about business processes in such simple terms. They have no idea - I’m really racking my brain with so many issues I need to think about and plan out before even making any commitments to starting up.