A common question that I get pretty often is: Can you raise capital to launch an e-commerce store?
And the answer is usually, NO. And the reason for that is because in these days and age
launching an e-commerce store
doesn't take a whole lot of money or a whole lot of time for that matter.
So I figure that we could just do that, pretty quick.
I'm, going to get the team to launch an e-commerce store in under 8 hours.
Okay, like I said building an e-commerce shop it is really not much work.
That is not our core business but we are going to build a quick one and put some
t-shirts and stickers and whatever Slidebean strap.
Which will be actually for sale if you want to try it out.
But the main point is we can actually build this in under a business day.
I've listed the help of George who usually designs presentations
he's not a developer, he's a graphic designer
but the point is we even need to code for this,
he's going to take part in the visuals and I'm going to be plug-in wires in the background
just to prove to you that the tools to do it are out there. That there
not that expensive and not hard to use and you can get it done within a day.
Before anything, we decided to spend some time on the logo,
because if you're starting from scratch you need a logo.
Logo and brand design is a whole world, a whole industry.
That's beyond our scope.
The first Slidebean logo we designed ourselves, and our current logo was designed by an agency-
but we only paid that after we were operating, with 5-digit monthly revenue.
The point of this story is- your first logo doesn’t need to be perfect,
it needs to be quick, and get the job done by showing something about your brand.
You can usually build that with internet tools or paid a small fee for a designer to come up with
something that is interesting
Here we were obviously biased to pick something that resembled our
existing brand, but a good tip to follow is to ensure that you have
a visual line that you can continue to use across other visuals on your website.
Let's talk for a second about Domain.
Off course dot.com domain are still from and center, they still the coolest domain
even though dot.io, dot.ai domains started to be useful
dot.com domains they are always kinda coolest.
But snatching at dot.com domain in these dns is pretty hard
Plugging in domain into your website is really not that hard,
plenty of guides online, you have to program some dns servers
and regionize somethings but its not a big deal.
I'm not going to get into it.
One thing that I wanna get into it is the value of these dot.com domains
So I meet the CEO of a company called The.com
and we are actually doing a sat chat in a couple of weeks
just to talk, to hear his story, how he snatch such a domain.
Those stories are usually quite funny and how they manage to get this domain
So tunning for that's part of our sat chat series, the link is in the description.
I'm getting a free domain here, so I'm just going to grab it if I can.
Let's see if slidebeanswag is available... Yeah! Great!
I'm just going to do a one-year domain.
One of the advantages of getting a domain through a year is that automatically connects
to Google Workspace mailbox which I find very useful
If you have never used Google Workspace it's essentially works like a Gmail account
that is literally for your job,
so no ads and the same user interface that we all are familiar with in Gmail
We already have one so I'm not going to add a new one,
we are just going to connect our existing email address but know that this can do it.
With the domain purchase then connected we set out to build the site
I see a trend of people wanting to build entire websites from scratch,
so it's customer and different and special
but truly for a lean startup experiment, for your first site,
you should be efficient- validate your concept with the least amount of effort possible.
This is lean startup theory 101
You’ll notice we’ve been using Tailorbrands here, which let us go from logo to domain, to website.
Jorge quickly customized this template to match the color of our logo,
and we had some cool imagery that we repurposed as this header image.
What we are doing here is adjusting the height of
the site of that hero section, so that the Call to Action doesn’t go beyond the fold.
If that sounded like gibberish- let me explain. A good practice is to make sure
when a user loads the page, they can see the main components without having to scroll.
In that case, we have the main message on your page, plus your image(s) as well as the main
button or main call to action you want the users to perform- all of that is the hero section.
And all of that should be visible without any interaction from the user and any scroll.
So another really cool thing that you can do from TailorBrands is just generating a bunch of swag
and using the logo of the brand you created
it will automatically integrate a bunch of different swag options for you
T-shirts, caps, whatever. One thing you can do is print a bunch of these
keep them in storage and shipped them to customers as they order them,
but that of course is expensive
and requires a lot of investment so one alternative that I think
is fantastic is this platform called Printful.
With Printful you can essentially do is connect
this Printful platform with your website through the background
either with your spreadsheet or with direct integrations.
When someone orders a piece of swag from your website
what they would do is go ahead and produced it.
So they will print for you
and ship to the customer and they will only bill you for that one item
So obviously margins aren't great, because you print item by item so this is not the
maximum margin that you can get on e-commerce but
as lean start approach launching a store in a day and being able to fulfill your orders
literally, your customers can start ordering tomorrow just works
And then in about 6 and a half hours, we were done!.
Website live, website connected and functional.
TailorBrands is a platform I’ve used in the past for
quick logo or website experiments like this. It doesn’t necessarily need to be tied to a store,
but it is fast and efficient to get a website out there.
They do a bunch of other things as well, from allowing you to register your business,
to business cards, social media posts, and trademark services- and they agreed to offer
you guys a limited 20% of discount if you try it out using the link in the description.
Thanks a lot to Tailorbrans for sponsoring today's video, we'll see you guys next week