I think of myself as a pretty good guy and most people seem to tolerate me fairly well, but sometimes, no matter what I do, I seem to ruffle other people’s feathers. While, I don’t think this is one of those cases, I do find it interesting that Paul Scrivens, a man that I highly respect and dare I say, envy online, has listed Grand Effect, the network that I co-founded as one of his business related enemies.

I always secretly hope that a competitor to 9rules would stand up. With the new 9rules coming shortly there will be more defined targets for us to keep an eye on. Chawlk goes head-to-head with plenty of other sites and if we don’t do better than the competition we die. Grand Effect is very similar to 9rules and I like to monitor what is going on over there to see what we can steal or do better. That is why you want enemies and although I have no problem with David Peralty or Sarah Perez I am going to put their network on my enemy list. “Enemy” may be too strong of the word, but I hope you can understand where I am going with this.

I haven’t yet figured out if I should be excited, or worried, as Scrivs has always done well when he gets competitive. And the support team he has in 9rules with Mike Rundle (a talent set that Grand Effect could sorely use), and Tyme White (we could use a person like her as well) make Grand Effect look rather small. The flip side though is that Sarah, myself and the rest of the Grand Effect members are getting very excited over the attention we have been receiving from all the wonderful blogs that are taking interest in what we are trying to build.

Much like I thought 9rules original intentions were, we have decided to keep things small, leveraging the power of the group and helping members with things they don’t have time to become experts on, namely advertising and promotion.

I never saw Grand Effect as competition to any other network out there, as none of our membership belongs to a network and they are all self-established brands, but if Scrivs needs to have a business enemy to remain competitive, then I look forward to helping increase that competitive spirit to really see how far he can go, while still attending to the needs of the people around me.

Do we really need business enemies to remain competitive?

Originally posted on April 8, 2008 @ 12:35 am