Dragons Den and has Deborah Meaden gone mad?...

Just watched last weeks Dragon Den and am absolutely amazed that Deborah invested £100k in a website that has no USP, could be replicated within days, and is burning £22k a month.

The website, according to the program contained 6000 recipes which people can upload, share with each other etc etc - and has the burn rate mentioned above.

Peter Jones and James Caan who obviously know about websites and that they could replicate it within a month steered well clear, as did Duncan... for some bizarre reason though Deborah decided to invest. Either this was because of a lack of understanding of the online market or through the heart ruling the head. Either way of she gave a decent web developer £100k and a few months, with half the budget being spent on content, a site with that functionality and many more recipes and a decent adwords campaign bringing in traffic could surpass it and she could take 100% of the profits. Very odd indeed! Unbelievable in fact. So anyone who has a website that they've spent a fortune on and is easily replicated get in touch with the Dragons next year and see what investment you can get!

Tim

Re : Dragons Den and has Deborah Meaden gone mad?

Haha - glad to see someone else thought pretty much the same as me.

It was on last, so I knew - being as formulaic as Dragons Den is - that someone must have decided to invest, but as it went on and I realised it was burning more and more money and seemed to have no unique element to it I was getting more and more incredulous.

Just goes to show that if you take someone out of the business areas they are comfortable with and have expertise in, even as experienced and shrewd business people, they can make strange investment decisions.

Re : Dragons Den and has Deborah Meaden gone mad?

Hi Chris

Glad you had the same thoughts! I've not had a chance to watch last week's episode yet, but hope there is nothing similar to make me tear my hair out!

Cheers

Tim