A true Start-up story: day 4 - what to do next
Posted on June 1, 2007
If you have followed my small business start-up story, then, you already know that the first year ended with no profit, the second one brought the first signs of success, and now on the third we are going full speed ahead.
Starting day 4 of my story, I’m going to document how we (the 3 partners, Tina, Simona and Cristian) are running our business with it’s two lines: Web design Energybyte and in progress a media shop and pr agency.
By looking back at our history, I can clearly see some strategic mistakes we did - they didn’t kill us, but slowed us down. If you are used to stories that only show how great a company is, well, you will see here some of the mistakes we did, because entrepreneurship is about mistakes and improvements, and other mistakes and other improvements.
First, I can say that we expanded way too slow. Survival Isn’t Good Enough For Entrepreneurs says Ben Yoskovitz, and I don’t think it was enough for us as well:
- going in survival mode in the first 2 years, make it look like just work and no real benefits
- we missed a lot of opportunities
- market has changed and competition used the time to develop
What we did:
Once we figured out that we can do more, a lot of interesting things have happened like opening the in progress business, Tina and Simona switched to full time jobs, we’ve got an office outside home (now looking for a better one), hired our first employee and now we just got a new designer on board.
We (Energybyte) didn’t have a focused target.
This is the capital sin of any entrepreneur. They want the whole World. If you have a look on the site www.energybyte.com you will see that is somehow generic as Web Design and Software and Corporate ID, and doesn’t have a particular target. This is bad because we can’t compete on such a large domain.
What we did: We actually managed to develop the entire Corporate ID thing into a separate business line called in progress and as the software part went under (see the entire story) now we can focus the entire site on offering Web design solutions for small businesses and have a link for the Corporate ID to in progress. This should include some content re-writing, to target the small business owners.
We didn’t update the site. We didn’t display our achievements. Actually the site content remained kind of unchanged from day one, this is really not so good if you are trying to attract your customers. We didn’t update our portfolio, no testimonials, no case studies, because we relied so much on word of mouth.
What to do: Rewrite the entire content. Update the portfolio, insert testimonials, make case studies, make news and press releases. This applies for both sites.
Sites not optimized for maximum visibility. Actually the sites engine are not very googlish and kind of hard to use to obtain a customized result
What to do:. Improve the engines to ease up things. This includes a complete rewrite for the Energybyte site.
Blog not paying benefits in bringing customers. So far, the blog wasn’t really connected to the stuff we did - it contained nice entrepreneurship experiences without giving visibility to the real thing.
What to do: Use the blog to showcase our major achievements, events and developments in general.
This is just a sample of what happens in a Small Business. You identify a problem and find solutions for it, accordingly to the resources you have. You will never be perfect, you will always find something to improve, to change or to implement.
Ok, so far I’ve established some things to do:
- Change the site engine, structure, content to make the most of it
- Write news, update the portfolio
- Focus everything to target small businesses needs
Oh, and just forgot, we should make in progress in English as well - our foreign customers can’t understand it…
If you want to know how we do that and what’s happening next, come back to the blog 
- A true Start-up story: day three - a little history, this year.
- A Start-up Story
- Adobe acquires InterAKT: a dream comes true
- A true Start-up story: day two - a little history, the second year.
- A true Start-up story: day one - a little history, the first year.
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Hi - this is great information for anyone just starting you on the internet. And it’s good that you are able to work out where you went wrong and put it right. Too many people would just give up. Good luck.