To Begin at the Right Time

Many ideas appear simple, but only after they have been put in practice by someone. On the Internet, you either have to come up with something first or you have to do it better than your competition. In addition, you have to be lucky to have all the right circumstances.

Both parents of Michal Meško (24) are physicians and so he had to communicate with his father who was completing a fellowship in the US over the Internet and e-mail at a time when most people in Slovakia didn’t even know what it was yet. It was 1995.

The path to his Internet bookshop was not straight, even though the books and writing was always a part of it. Michal has been using computers since he was six. In addition to his graphic design skills, he also has programming skills. Moreover, he put these skills in practice when he was publishing a school magazine that has become a role model for all similar publications. With respect to marketing, it was a small miracle – they sold four hundred issues at a school with only two hundred and fifty students. The recipe was simple – just include an anti-exam coupon. When a student presented this coupon to his or her teacher, he or she was assured that they would not be examined on that day.

At the age of fifteen, Michal Meško – together with his friend – launched their website Referáty.sk (essays on various topics), which made life much easier to thousands of students and over time, it was also visited by their teachers. Their visits were not only to check whether their students stole anything, but also to add their own contributions. Referáty.sk was based on a very simple principle: download and if you want, add your own. A combination of laziness and altruism proved successful.

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The visitor rates were so high that advertisers appeared very quickly. The young partners preferred to communicate with them over e-mail so that they could not in turn find out that they were selling the ads to teenagers. Today, they have approximately 30,000 papers on their website and for four years, the site has been owned by a large Internet company that bought it out. At the time of its sale, it ranked 11th in Slovakia in the number of visitors.

It was during the Referáty.sk times that Michal Meško came up with the idea of connecting, for example, a paper on Little Prince with the option to purchase the book over the Internet. The solutions were a bit rough and so they decided to offer the service to the owners of the largest bookshop in town. They probably did not expect to become a large Internet bookshop that became famous throughout the country.

In addition to sales, they also created a community of readers who communicate through discussion forums and the software recommends books that interest other readers with a similar profile.

Last year, Michal Meško completed his studies of management in Bratislava. “The university is one of the best places to start a business. The exam questions are easier to answer when you had to answer them several months earlier when you were starting a business,” he says. “To confront practice with theory presented by a lecturer can be risky, however if you are lucky enough to have a good tutor, you can save a lot on consulting fees. The best management schools in the world base their programmes on case studies. And you can conduct many of those throughout the course of the study.”

Author: Ján Gregor
Photo: M. Meško

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