If you have a unique creation or invention, and you are not selling it around the world on the Internet, now is the time to start. The cost of entry has never been lower. Anyone can be an entrepreneur today, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or angels.
In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to create. Now the price is closer to $100, if you are willing to do the work yourself. Here are the key steps for a personal home-based business website selling a few products (as an alternative to Ebay):
The next step in complexity is building a software product that you can offer as a service to your customers. A simple example might be mortgage calculator to add to your real estate sales site. Any credible software developer should be willing to tackle this kind of tool for a couple of thousand dollars.
Then there are full-featured software sites like Facebook. The logic behind all these features is millions of lines of code, and cost millions of dollars to develop and maintain. Don’t expect that you can create a new social networking site in your garage, and steal all the users away from Facebook. Facebook is barely making money today, after $150 million investment so far.
But even Facebook started simple, and then developed more and more robust iterations as user interest caught on. I give this advice all the time “launch fast and iterate.” You can’t get it all right the first time, and the market will be gone if you try to include every feature in the first version.
The net is that if I see a website business plan today with a projected development cost greater than $200K, I suspect the founder must be including some fancy perks, or they don’t understand the market dynamics of e-commerce today.
Budding entrepreneurs and home-based businesses should be writing business plans before they start, so they understand and can manage the tasks ahead, but no outside investor need ever see the plan. Fund it yourself (bootstrapping) and do it yourself entrepreneurs are the best kind, because they can focus on the business, rather than fund raising, and have full control of their destiny. Life is more fun that way. Start today.
Marty Zwilling
In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to create. Now the price is closer to $100, if you are willing to do the work yourself. Here are the key steps for a personal home-based business website selling a few products (as an alternative to Ebay):
- Go online to reserve a website domain name to match your business, and get a hosting agreement from one of the popular providers like GoDaddy. The cost for the domain name is maybe $10/year, and the hosting starts around $50/year. Start simple.
- Many of these services offer free tools to build a simple website. Other popular tools are available at low cost, with built-in e-commerce capabilities (pay via PayPal or credit card), including FrontPage in the Microsoft Office Suite, and DreamWeaver by Adobe.
- Open an account with PayPal. This costs nothing, and allows you to safely collect money from customers all around the world. If you want to also accept all the popular credit cards, that will require a merchant services account for a low monthly fee.
- Build a simple website using one of the tools above, selecting one of the standard templates for design and layout. You probably want at least a home page, product page, order page, and contact page. The menu should include a link to your blog, separately set up on Blogger, Wordpress, or TypePad, again free.
- Publish the site and now you are in business. But don’t be fooled into expecting people to flock to your site after you tell a few friends. Now the real work begins – promotion, marketing, blogging, and all types of search engine marketing.
The next step in complexity is building a software product that you can offer as a service to your customers. A simple example might be mortgage calculator to add to your real estate sales site. Any credible software developer should be willing to tackle this kind of tool for a couple of thousand dollars.
Then there are full-featured software sites like Facebook. The logic behind all these features is millions of lines of code, and cost millions of dollars to develop and maintain. Don’t expect that you can create a new social networking site in your garage, and steal all the users away from Facebook. Facebook is barely making money today, after $150 million investment so far.
But even Facebook started simple, and then developed more and more robust iterations as user interest caught on. I give this advice all the time “launch fast and iterate.” You can’t get it all right the first time, and the market will be gone if you try to include every feature in the first version.
The net is that if I see a website business plan today with a projected development cost greater than $200K, I suspect the founder must be including some fancy perks, or they don’t understand the market dynamics of e-commerce today.
Budding entrepreneurs and home-based businesses should be writing business plans before they start, so they understand and can manage the tasks ahead, but no outside investor need ever see the plan. Fund it yourself (bootstrapping) and do it yourself entrepreneurs are the best kind, because they can focus on the business, rather than fund raising, and have full control of their destiny. Life is more fun that way. Start today.
Marty Zwilling
Posts
5 comments:
Would use a CMS with some modules for e-commerce or other software like magento or xt:commerce, it's easy to use and the underlying programming language, php, is fairly wide spread on hosting servers
It's like getting your space, downloading that package, upping it through your ftp-connection to your webspace and then just tiping the url of the installer, give some informations like where you want to save something and your ready! The only thing you now have to do is to create some content and look fpr the current software sometimes, the money will come anyway ;)
I agree with the post above. For a someone starting off that is not a programmer, I would suggest a service such as wordpress or squarespace. Hire a designer for low cost (99designs.com)to get your website up. Some services host everything, such as zazzle or cafepress.
Like Martin says in step 5, now is the hard part and nobody is going to flock to your site no matter how good your product is... it will take time. This is where social media comes in... look to http://garyvaynerchuk.com/ for inspiration
Shopify is a great site for adding turnkey e-commerce capabilities to your website. Worth checking out http://shopify.com
I love this article for people who feel that operating their own business is not possible for them though they wish it could be. There's never been a better time in history to get started. Have a look at http://www.LikeSoup.com and examine if being an entrepreneur is something you could commit to.
you got it right, after the website, then the work begins. Once your business is off the ground and running, you many want to get a real merchant account. That way you have more flexibility, faster access to your money, no holds or reserves.
Check http://paymenttransactionsystems.com for the best service and rates on merchant accounts. Also check http://merchantpos.net for the best prices on credit card terminals and supplies
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