Birth of an E-Commerce Startup
While I have been, and been around, entrepreneurs and startups most of my professional career, I’ve had an unique opportunity recently to advise on a startup that hits me where I live, so to speak — my wife’s recent launch of her K-8 math curriculum offering, www.mangomathgroup.com.
Mango Math is the first of two initial beta clients for a small business offering Free Vector has developed. What we did with respect to the launch of Mango Math — a true LILO (little in, lots out) start-up opportunity — included:
- business formation and planning, including choice of entity all the necessary federal, state and local filings to set them up as a business.
- development of a strategic plan, business plan and financial model, including a dashboard of periodic financial and operational objectives aligned to the plan.
- initial branding and marketing.
- a business and technology infrastructure based almost entirely on hosted, software as a service technologies: domain, web and email hosting through Go Daddy; collaboration workspaces and tools through Google Apps; hosted accounting using Quickbooks Online; an e-commerce website built on WordPress; list and campaign management using MailChimp, among others.
- SEO, SEM and social media integration.
We wanted to prove that the cost, ease of use and advantages of creating a new venture with a solid business plan and using hosted technologies to support day-to-day operations is viable, scalable, and easy-to-use.
The up-front costs in terms of actual dollars to launch the business was very modest. We wanted to prove that the cost, ease of use and advantages of creating a new venture with a solid business plan and using hosted technologies to support day-to-day operations is viable, scalable, and easy-to-use.
We’re currently finalizing a fixed price service offering around this concept of using our business expertise and leveraging lower cost hosted technologies to enable clients to quickly move an idea to execution. For existing companies, we are developing a migration offering to allow businesses to take advantage of the flexibility and cost savings that these hosted technologies offer.
Ideally, we see delivering the whole business to clients on a netbook: business-in-a-box.
