If you have a successful business that doesn’t sell to a nationwide audience, I have a lot of respect for you. I find myself scared of business ideas that don’t have an immediate national reach. Our largest company, GetMyHomesValue.com, was successful from the first days of it’s founding largely in part to the fact that it was nation wide. There’s simply no way that we would be profitable on a local level.

I was thinking of this today as I read about StubHub.com. If you ever find yourself wanting to go to a show, concert or sporting event and the tickets are sold out, just go to StubHub.com. People who have tickets to these events sell them for a profit on StubHub and StubHub charges a fee. I have personally used the service on numerous occassions and have been happy each and every time, always getting the tickets that I had paid for.

Imagine how the “scalping” industry has changed now that one “scalper” (StubHub) can advertise to a worldwide audience with limited expense. Imagine the money that it would have taken to do that just 20 years ago - without the internet.

To put it all into perspective, Ebay decided that StubHub was so valuable that they gave the Co-Founders $310 million this month for the company. Not bad for scalping tickets.

If you are thinking of starting a new company, the first thing I would ask is, “Can you sell nationwide?”.