Peter Crawshaw and Hugh Salmon are tech-savvy entrepreneurs who had an idea for a book-promotion business while working in advertising. Not wanting to spend the money to open an office and recruit a staff, they built a basic website and researched the market for $16,000. Their NZ Business Coach helped them to learn to love technology.
Their site, www.lovereading.co.uk, is designed around the idea of improving publisher relationships with readers. This site allows readers to get extracts and publishers to promote their books. More than 100,000 people are registered to use the site and an angel investor has invested $400,000 in their venture.
Crawshaw sees huge benefits in having an online business.
• You can test what you did at a lower risk.
• You don’t have to invest in property and long leases
• You can see what your customers are doing on the site
• You can change and develop your services more easily
• You can measure the effectiveness of your web-based advertising with systems like pay-per-click
• You can discover the most effective way to get noticed by potential customers
Technology supports start-ups and levels the playing field for small businesses with quicker, cheaper, and less bureaucratic methods of getting products to market. Wendy Shand, another budding entrepreneur, got an idea for a website after a vacation in France where her toddler almost drowned in an unattended swimming pool. She took a free online business course and spent $2000 to develop an online company that offers safe, child-friendly homes for vacationing families with babies and toddlers. She recognized a need in the market and technology came to her aid at the cost of $2000 instead of tens of thousands.
