Success Online Business Testimonials

Kim Haas, CEO of Womans-Net

Editor's Note: Success online business testimonials can be tremendously inspiring. This interview with Kim Haas is not only inspiring but has a number of valuable tips that you can apply to building any home based business. Since this interview, Kim has gone on to create many other successful businesses.

Describe your online business, and the kind of process you went through in choosing your business. Were there past business experiences, good or bad, that helped you to find your current online business success?

Womans-Net is an online community for women. I started this business in May of 2000 as a collection of my own bookmarks of sites for women that I thought were helpful. I started adding articles and sharing the site with my friends. As my collection of articles and links grew, so did my traffic and my experience in helping women find what they were looking for online.

After several months, I started adding scripts to make Womans-Net more interactive. The whole thing just kind of blossomed like a flower and grew into what it is today. In the process, I learned a lot about writing my own scripts. The site is now a huge community where women can learn about doing business online as well as a place to meet others, develop friendships and business contacts.

Overall, it's been a great learning experience for me. My own knowledge continues to increase and I am fortunate enough to be able to share that with others in order to help other entrepreneurs build their own business.

Why did you choose your online business? For example, what aspects of the business were attractive to you? Did you do market research or other kinds of preparation before beginning?

I love being in the service industry. It's really a great feeling to watch other women come to my site and learn how to start a business for themselves that they can work from home. I've seen many of them give up and go on their own way, but I've also seen others build their business into a huge success!

I didn't research the need for my site. I figured that if I needed it, others did to. I wouldn't recommend taking this route to anyone else. I just happened to get lucky - there's really no substitute for researching a need for your product or service before investing into your own business.

What business strategies have worked well for you and helped your online business to become successful?

My business strategy is really quite simple. If one of my ideas don't "fly" within a couple months, I simply get rid of it and try something new. I find that I am able to pinpoint what consumers want and need better that way. When I introduce a new product or service, the good ideas always take off fairly quickly because they are well received from my visitors.

Not everything I do has been a success though. I've had lots of ideas turn into huge flops, such as Mentor Moms, traffic exchanges, and online classes. All of these projects turned out to be wasted time. Fortunately, I'm full of enough ideas that I never run out of new things to try.

What kind of challenges did you face in your online business, and how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge that I faced was when I made the decision to offer memberships rather than to give everything away free. It was difficult for me at first to understand that what I was doing actually had value that people would be willing to pay for.

It was difficult to find a happy medium on pricing which would offer good value for the price paid. It took quite awhile to adjust pricing to a level that was comfortable for me to turn a small profit and was still affordable for the average work at home mom.

While I may never get rich, I have a wonderful feeling that I am able to help other women get their own business started. I am able to offer them a way to network with other moms who are doing the same thing, help them avoid the pitfalls that many face when starting a new business, and offer them affordable advertising on a high traffic site without breaking their budget.

Our community is helpful too because the other members are so supportive and encouraging to one another. It's become a sort of family where all the members have the same types of goals and they all help one another try to reach those goals.

What inner qualities do you feel have contributed to your online business success?

Probably my addictive/compulsive nature is the biggest factor. I'm the type that can't put down a project until it's finished. Womans-Net will never be finished so the fact that I love what I do, combined with my desire to constantly improve things, keeps Womans-Net growing on a regular basis.

What advice would you share to women just starting out in business for the first time?

Never give up! Many times I see women who are expecting to earn a lot of money really fast. It just doesn't happen that way. It takes time, dedication and perseverance to build a business.

You have to make people aware of your product and make them trust you. You have to keep working at it constantly. It takes several years sometimes to reach the goals that you want to reach in business. You can't just throw up a website and expect to get rich over night.

Once you have given up, you may never know what you could have achieved if you just kept trying a little longer.

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