I love how the Malaysian standardise the word “e” in everything electronic. Eeeeeee!
What I’m going to show you all is how to be an Internet entrepreneur within a day. Yup. Within a day, you’ll be honoured with the title “entrepreneur” for your best effort in building your own Internet business. Having spasms already?
h3. What are you going to need?
First and foremost, I highly suggest you maintain a real job. Whatever the job it may be, just have a job. It’s healthy when you’re just starting up. Also, it allows you to have your own credit facilities (personal loans, credit cards, etc) which is fairly important in a business, no matter which “side” it is.
Ok, second is a credit line. Third on your list is to have associates, partners & friends with similar interests in helping your business. Use them for your own good. Be Darth Vader. Or Yoda.
No. 4, have an idea on what you’re actually going to do, or trying to do. Sell custom designed jackets, designer tshirts, there are so many ideas out there waiting to adopted for all of you. Try to niche your idea in your own ways. Sometimes being small is good. And! You must have passion at all times.
h3. The Idea
For this purpose, I’m going to illustrate how I assisted two of my friends to start-up their idea. “Nonanoni Mixed Merchandise”:http://nonanoni.buyot.org/ is the result of the collaboration. What better way to research for a story other than soliciting with the story itself?
Let me introduce the actresses for this show. First up, say hello to Amira & Sharaliza. Amira is a long time friend of mine where we met thru IRC (lame. I know). Hippy. That’s who she is. Crazy too. Sharaliza is a wonderfully & rocking talented illustrator emo-punk chick that I get to know thru Amira. They are best friends. Their idea: Designer clothing. Using Shara’s superb talents & Amira’s aggressive marketing, they want their brand to be out there. Out there with kids wearing their clothes. Cool rock kids. Punk.
The hidden actor will be me, the tech geek.
h3. Scene 1
Be friends with Google. Open a Gmail account. A very important “first thing to do”. They have a suite of integrated tools for collaboration & communication. Nonanoni is now at Gmail dot com. Use GTalk to talk with customers. Use Google Docs to write reports. Use them wisely.
h3. Scene 2
They wanted to start with tshirts. I researched around for available ecommerce services on the Web. Santa loves me. I found “Cafepress”:http://www.cafepress.com. With them, you can start with variety of products using your brand. Here’s a way: “dedicate” each design to one cafepress *FREE* shop. Nonanoni registered with Cafepress and they opened a shop for their first line, the “Nonanoni”:http://cafepress.com/nonanoni brand.
h3. Scene 3
So, in order to “dedicate” one design to one cafepress shop, we decided that Nonanoni should have it’s own website. I offered them a space on my host & designed their 1st website. The website features their current clothing line & links back to the “dedicated” Cafepress page when a visitor wants to buy their tshirt. The downside here is that the user experience is not consistent. You had to make the users jump to another website. But it’s a manageable risk. Shara & Amira had confidence in their designs. So, ok. The design took 6 hours to make & templated into “Textpattern”:http://www.textpattern.com. That’s done.
h3. Scene 4
Things are getting exciting. “Nonanoni”:http://nonanoni.buyot.org launched. For today, they have become Internet entrepreneurs. Next step, marketing & more products. A Myspace “page”:http://www.myspace.com/nonanoni was put up. Shara starts to brush up her skills. Amira goes haywire on marketing.
h3. Did this happened all in one day?
Well actually, no. I was researching for a story, so I decided to make up with one. Amira & Shara had their idea for a while and I just jumped into their boat. It took quite a push. It took time. But for the purpose of my story, I wanted to illustrate how it can actually be done within 24 hours. And I had time to kill.
So, do you want to give it a shot?