Money Made With Brain Power

The Internet is a good place to start your business if you have entrepreneurial spirit and are skilled in web-design.

Three young men started a business at the beginning of 2002. They were all 22 years old and still students of IT faculties; thus web-designing and writing computer programming came as the natural fields of activity for their company. "The biggest investment we made was our free-time. Now we have none," says Vlad Gladin, one of the three associates.

Six months after they started their Internet business, they put up a free advertisement exchange system, on www.adzone.ro, which allows the owners of Internet sites to advertise their pages free of charge, on reciprocity.
Thus, after three months in business, their banner-exchange system is ranking three worldwide, with 10 million banners advertised every month.

The reciprocal free advertisement system worked for the three Romanians too, as their business got to be known using this system. They are providing a range of various services, from registering Internet domains, to hosting of web-sites or designing tailor-made software for various clients.

The on-line advertisement market is still in its infancy in Romania, but the web-design business is taking off in the past two or three months.
"Potential clients used to think that having a web-page was not mandatory to having good business results, but now they started to understand there is a connection, though," says Gladin.
One reason for the sudden interest businessmen have for owning an Internet site was prompted by the change in the policy of the mobile phone provider Connex, he believes.
Connex limited the access to some of the services it previously provided for free, "thus its clients understood that Internet is not for free, after all," Gladin explains.

The three men’s company has its own web-site, called www.sonerii.ro, which provides a secure income, they say. They plan to launch other products too, as an on-line catalogue for companies that whish to promote their products.