At the height of the dot-com boom, a literal multitude of ambitious start-ups came and went. The medium of the internet had created a plethora of opportunities for forward-thinking entrepreneurs. Michael Nardy, then a Boston College undergraduate, decided to take a leap into the pool and started Electronic Payments, one of the foremost online payment processors/e-commerce sites. Starting out by designing and programming auction software to big software firms, Nardy realized that he had stumbled onto a gold mine of opportunity. The handling of money transactions through the internet was a service that was actively in demand by almost everyone doing business in the every growing internet market. Nardy correctly forecasted massive growth in this new market niche, and in 2000, he started operations for Electronic Payments in his dorm room.
If one asked Nardy what his business boiled down to in a word or two, he would probably respond “selling transactions.” Like any form of currency, online transactions are a commodity sold by a market that has been growing ever since the internet started booming. Nardy stated in a 2003 interview that “Transactions are a commodity. So if you can buy a transaction like you buy flour and wheat, you’re going to find success.” Successfully identifying ecommerce as the market of the future, Nardy capitalized on the demand for transactions through the internet. Electronic Payments now processes $1.5billion in transactions worldwide, and racked up over $17million in profits in 2008.
One of the lessons that has stuck with Nardy the most through the years of running his own firm has been dealing with rejection and working harder to overcome that rejection. When he first started, he approached a number of major credit card and financial institutions, looking to establish partnerships with them. He was flatly rejected. Instead of giving up on the project, he took the experience and transformed it into an even stronger resolve to succeed.
It’s great to see someone like Michael Nardy and his business idea. You see a lot of electronic payment sites emerging, and obviously Nardy recognized that as they began to grow. Good example of an entrepreneur seeing an emerging resource and taking advantage of the opportunity.