By Alex Gove
Redherring.com
September 18, 1999

In Tuesday's column, I asked readers to suggest an exit strategy for Marc Fest, a German entrepreneur living in Miami who has developed a Web site called Quickbrowse that allows users to compile multiple Web pages into one page.

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Mr. Fest is trying to figure out if he should continue slugging away with his part-time Web effort or pull the plug. Quickbrowse has a loyal following, but it isn't generating any revenues. In fact, it's costing Mr. Fest $250 a month just to keep it going, not including his labor. Moreover, Mr. Fest says he wants to focus more on his other part-time career, journalism.

As a reward for the winning entry, I promised a free autographed copy of financial adviser Andrew Tobias's "The Only Investment Guide You Will Ever Need."

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Some respondents took this challenge less seriously than others. Herchel Wilder advised Mr. Fest, "Go to Bill Gates, show him what you got. Who knows what will happen?" Someone called SAT1 suggested that Mr. Fest "get a strategic partner that can offer you the infrastructure and money to make it happen. Just don't ask me how to find one." And Hector G. Calzada Jr. went so far as to give me some advice. In a postscript to his email, he wrote, "If you want to get a rise out of Mr. Tobias, tell him that you invest in front-end load mutual funds."

If I were giving a copy of Mr. Tobias's book to the person with the most inane reply, it would have to be Larry Dockall. He thinks Mr. Fest should "keep [Quickbrowse] running until Jan. 1, pull the plug, [and] then blame it on Y2K."

THE BIG IDEAS
Fortunately, Mr. Fest did receive a number of innovative ideas. One of my favorites was proposed by two people -- Darwin Sanoy and Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen writes, "I think that Mr. Fest has something of real value. The only problem is that it is not of value to him; however, this program could have synergies with companies that have other assets, or it could be of value to an entrepreneur with ideas for a business model that hasn't occurred to Mr. Fest. Therefore, the obvious exit for Mr. Fest is to sell his creation to the highest bidder. Mark Fest should auction off Quickbrowse on eBay [Nasdaq: EBAY]!"

Sound crazy? Maybe not. Terry Kelliher has already thought of a new application for Quickbrowse. "Could you make this display emails as well? If so it would be very useful to a larger audience," Mr. Kelliher writes.

Get-rich-quick schemes aside, the majority of respondents seemed to think Quickbrowse is valuable in its original incarnation. In fact, Jack Sullivan estimates that Mr. Fest could sell Quickbrowse "inside of 12 months, probably in the $10 million to $30 million range, depending on the number of users. This isn't Amazon.com [Nasdaq: AMZN], but it's doable," Mr. Sullivan concludes -- very sensibly, I might add.

Many readers said that Mr. Fest should be able to sell his site to a portal like Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) that might want to differentiate itself from its competition. Others, like Chris Hobson, thought Quickbrowse would make good acquisition bait for portals that cater to certain groups of users, such as "news-hungry consumers" or customers of online brokerages.

AND THE WINNER IS ...
On the whole, our group of armchair entrepreneurs argued that Quickbrowse has a future as a free-standing business. Although Thomas Leavitt, who came up with the winning solution for Speed Racer Enterprises, once again made a strong play for even more free merchandise, Andrew Osmak's email was a little more clear and succinct in outlining Quickbrowse's future line of attack.

Mr. Osmak's concluding lines are straight out of the Internet entrepreneur playbook. "The biggest mistake that Marc could make is worrying about profit. It's way to early for that. First achieve critical mass, then worry about profit."

Mr. Osmak, congratulations. Your free autographed copy of Andrew Tobias's "The Only Investment Guide You Will Ever Need" awaits.

Quickbrowse

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