Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

The original blog post is http://mr.buyot.org/2006/12/05/how-to-be-an-epreneur-in-a-da y

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Hello people from SUN community, this will be my first post in the forum, although ive been a SUN community member for quite some time. Moving onto good things ahead...

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. Here we go!

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.

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 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.

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.

Scene 2

They wanted to start with tshirts. I researched around for available ecommerce services on the Web. Santa loves me. I found Cafepress. 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 brand.

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. That’s done.

Scene 4

Things are getting exciting. Nonanoni launched. For today, they have become Internet entrepreneurs. Next step, marketing & more products. A Myspace page was put up. Shara starts to brush up her skills. Amira goes haywire on marketing.

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?

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Redboot Solutions
http://www.redboot.net

Mr. Buyot Orgy Observations
http://www.buyot.org

KJROLLERS Malaysian Rollerblading
http://www.kjrollers.com

nuGrooveTV.com
http://www.nugroovetv.com

Same question as to CaboBill: Does CafePress only provide stores to sell linen good? It`s sounding as though, no, you can sell whatever you want. Is that true? And why a `dedicated` store, per product?

Frankly, not everything you can sell thru cafepress. most of the goods are linen stuff like tshirts & even boxer shorts, but there are some variety of "gift" items that you can customize with your design & sell it thru cafepress stores. the best thing about using cafepress & other similar services is that they handle all the logistics, supply & production of your store items. it`s like your lil gift shop on the internet

about "dedicated" store per design/product, it`s just an experiment to see the real limitations of the "free" service cafepress store offers. It`s more like I`d like to know how much I can do with that limitation, before I decide to upgrade or something like that.

hope this helps :)


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Redboot Solutions
http://www.redboot.net

Mr. Buyot Orgy Observations
http://www.buyot.org

KJROLLERS Malaysian Rollerblading
http://www.kjrollers.com

nuGrooveTV.com
http://www.nugroovetv.com

So we could sell signal flag banners, right? Seems like it, from what you`ve said...

CraigL,

Not sure if you can sell flag banners. Visit the CafePress site and check for yourself the products they have available (if you click on the drop-down menu to the right of the search button, you will see a list of the products they support).

About "dedicated" store. CafePress offers you a free option to sell your products. The only catch is that you can only have one design per store. So, for instance, if you created a very cool design and you want this design to be applied to a variety of products, you can, but all the products (one of each, considering you can only use the one design you created) will fall into one single CafePress store. But you can create as many stores as you want to display the different designs you come up with.

It is a pretty cool way to sell your designs - it is cheap and professional. And more and more people are using CafePress to buy their stuff.

Andre


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Andre Costa DaCosta Chocolates, LLC www.DaCostaChocolates.com

Does anyone have any sort of metrics on the success of CafePress stores? Even anecdotal stuff would be interesting.

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CEO, CrowdVine
www.crowdvine.com

Hmm....I don`t see why we couldn`t sell signal flag banners under "Posters & Prints." Right? I mean, they`re sort of posters.... :-)

I`ve maintained a very small shop of Doberman items for about a year or so on cafepress. I`ve done no promoting of it, because my intent was actually just to create something for myself and then buy it for myself. Anyway, I decided to make it a public shop, since hey - why not, right?

Anyway, I`ve made about $20 worth of commissions from it. That`s probably because I don`t do any promoting.  I really think cafepress has improved by beginning to offer dark colored t-shirts. I don`t even like white t-shirts. Now that they`ve begun offering dark colors on tees, I may make a new design to try on them, and promote it.


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Waitaminnit....on CafePress you don`t sell your OWN items?

Basically, you`re selling your designs. You don`t ever actually own the t-shirts, the mugs, the mousepads, etc. You design something and upload graphics for it. The graphics are able to be printed on any of CafePress`s offerings, and people can buy them.


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