Let's start a job board -- what could go wrong?

I love the job board business but could never have imagined the roller coaster ride that it is... sometimes talking to other job board people is just good therapy, because many of these things or some variation on them will happen to everyone sooner or later. This morning, I started this list in frustration after a database server crash.

Competition

• sales reps at a big job board (like careerbuilder) tell employers that they have a cross-posting partnership with you (that does not exist) making it unnecessary for the employer be your client.
• a big job board ( like careerbuilder) scrapes and post your jobs as their own without any attribution or links.
• you look successful which motivates other entrepreneurs to launch near replicas of your board.
• a venture capitalist invites you to New York to make a pitch and a month later launches a replica of your website run by some other entrepreneur (and eventually goes out of business, lol).

• hurricanes shut down South Florida and you repeatedly spend days evacuating, returning and cleaning up.
• flooding from the remnants of a hurricane shuts off power to servers
• illness forces a change in your plans and priorities.

• you hire friends and then have to fire them.
• just when you think you've learned how to hire, you take a shortcut and the person you hired almost sinks your company and makes you wonder if you learned anything at all.
• you are so busy learning how to do everything it takes to run your business that you fail to see or understand critical changes in the marketplace and you fail to make the right course corrections at the right time.

• your marketing is good, but most people don't remember your exact domain and the variations they try are owned by Domainers who make a buck from your oversight.
• your marketing materials look old and tired and it's time to spend a lot of money again to refresh them.
• you are de-indexed by Google.
  
  

• you hire sales reps that can't sell.
• you price your product too low and find you don't have the resources to grow the company.
• you price your product too high and you get few repeat customers and too few jobs.
• spammers use stolen credit cards to purchase your services.
• competitors offer a weaker product at a much lower price which temporarily sucks the wind out of your sails.
• when a recruiter leaves his position, you often can't collect on an invoice because Accounts Payable says 'no signed paperwork? No payment.'
• your sales reps spend a lot of time on a prospect and when it's time to sign a contract, the HR manager says "please send it over to our advertising agency" and you lose 15% right there.
• when a client company goes into bankruptcy you have to give back anything they paid you within 90 days of the declaration.

Technology

• you choose a software that dies on the vine and you're left without support.
• you choose a software that become so successful its price rises until you can no longer afford it.
• hard drives and other components fail possibly corrupting data.
• the power in your data center goes out because of flooding or because nearby construction mangles a cable.
• when the power in your data center goes out, coincidently your backup power system also fails for any number of arcane reasons and because it was never tested properly.
• denial of service attacks slow your site down to a crawl.
• hackers use your site to e-mail spam or to sell Viagra and Cialis.
• a developer leaves the company taking all the knowledge of your system with him.
• you develop features that only work on some browsers and have to scrap them.
• you develop features that are never used.
• new federal regulation called OFCCP causes you to do months of expensive programming.

Of course it is absolutely true that every cloud has its silver lining, and just about every one of these challenges has made us stronger. It's a process. If you liked reading this, you may also appreciate my advice for how to fail in business on the Internet.

What storms have you weathered?