I have to admit, I rarely watch TV programmes such as the Dragons' Den, but as this week's [July 08] included an online business, I gave it a look. And I realised why I never watch these shows.

OK, let me say upfront that I am a lecturer at a provisional UK university. I am not a multi-millionaire businessman [person?] with a portfolio of successful ventures in my CV. However, I have been around a while, I have had my own [successful] retail businesses - and I do have some common sense.

However, whenever I have taught/supervised students on our 'enterprise' module, when they present their proposed businesses to me I always lead with one question : who are your customers? And I mean who is really going to hand over their cash for your product or service? Take the new trendy café or bar in the city centre, for example - the answer cannot be 'everyone who shops in the city centre' or 'everyone who wants a good night out'. No, who? Give me a specific demographic - and tell me why they will go to your establishment and not any one of a few dozen other similar places within a square mile.

You get my drift - this is what I end up shouting at the contestants on the Dragon's Den, and boy ... was I shouting loudly at the 'Diamond Geezer' who proposed selling diamonds from his diamondgeezer.com website.

And here is the rub: three of the judges offered him money [venture capital] to the tune of £255,000. Yep, in other words, they were confident that enough people would buy diamonds online - from a non–recognized brand - to turn a profit.

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh

For goodness sake, some people are still reluctant to buy £4.99 books online from Amazon [a top-five web brand], why on earth would anyone make online purchases of diamonds costing thousands of pounds? Note that diamond.co.uk is a car-insurance website.

Furthermore, the judges accepted the contestant's claim that the site ranked at 12 in Google for "diamond" and on the first page for "diamond engagement ring". Hmmmmm, not on my Google they don't. Both were so far down I gave up looking. And no sign of any 'sponsored listings' either - perhaps that's what he wanted the quarter of a million pounds for? Note to judges, apply due diligence before handing over the cash.

I also had a quick look at the website. I gave up after two images on pages linked from the front page failed to download.

If you hadn't already realised ... it is this willingness of venture capitalists - who should know better - to invest in half-baked online business models that caused the dot bomb collapse at the beginning of the century. I thought that had ended ... apparently I was wrong.

Footnote: I am delighted to say I am not the only one who shares this opinion, a week or so after I had written this I came across this article: Would you buy a diamond ring from this website?. It's author goes a long way to answering the questions I raise in the 'what's in it for me' section for this musing - with 'trust' being the over-riding issue.

copyright Alan Charlesworth : you are welcome to use any of the content of this site - but if you do so, please reference it properly