fmylife.com: and you thought your life was bad?

I’ve taken a bunch of entrepreneurship classes, read a bunch of articles, and heard a lot of people talk about entrepreneurship and they all say that the best ideas are the simplest ones.  They are the ideas that people get as soon as you explain it to them.  Fmylife.com is the perfect example.

Fmylife.com is a blog to post humorous recollections “of everyday anecdotes likely to happen to anyone.”  People post short stories about unfortunate events that happened to them that day.  Here’s an example, “Today, I was walking my husky when she saw a cat and bolted toward it.  I coudn’t let go of the leash because my hand was tangled up.  Forced to run along, I ran into a parked van at full sprint.  I lost my dog, broke two ribs and have to pay for the dent in the van.  FML”

I can’t tell you how many people have told me about fmylife.com in the past week, it’s unbelievable.  It is especially incredible considering the site was launched in English in January and by March 6, the Wall Street Journal reported that it had one million visitors daily.  As of today, fmylife.com’s site rank is 3,275.

Fmylife.com is a spin off of the French site VieDeMerde.fr.  This site was developed by two French entrepreneurs and launched in January 08.  They have now published a book in France with their VDM stories, have one of the top ten most visited sites in France, and are publishing a book in English with FML stories that is coming out this summer.

Fmylife.com is an incredibly simple site; it is just a blog.  Not only that, but it isn’t even that asthetically pleasing (this site far surpasses it).  Fmylife.com makes money through advertising, through publishing books, and all of their matterial comes from the user.  All fmylife has to do is maintain the site and weed through the stories users submit to find good ones to publish. 

Not only is the cost of running the business low, but contributors are able to laugh at the bad stuff going on in their lives, and readers are able to laugh at their own troubles seeing that they often do not compare to others issues.  What a great business!… or is it?

While much of the content on the website is truely funny, if you haven’t guessed so far from the name of the website, which stands for f*** my life, much of the content is also very crass and vulgar, and this is a question the entrepreneur needs to look at.  Just because there is a great way to legally make a lot of money, does that mean an entrepreneur should do it?   …more on that in weeks to come.