Update (25. feb. 2010): After I have hired a project manager from the Philippines I spend more like 1-3 hours per week.

I have a service called Get A Shop where I create webshops based on the open source e-commerce system Magento.

I want to show you how I now after a couple of months, currently generate an extra income of approximately 2000$. In the post I won’t share all the numbers, I still have competitors :)

Getting the idea – find your customers first

The business idea was to create an internet business that was somewhat automated. I know that this cannot be automated as much as some of my other ideas like selling ebooks, but I found potential customers and a real demand for this kind of product on the danish entrepreneur forum Amino.dk where there were a lot of questions from people wanting to start a webshop.

I had previously researched the Magento platform because I wanted to start my own webshop, and I know a thing or two about IT projects and processes (I am also partner in 41concepts an IT consultancy company). Since I didn’t want to work anymore than I already do, I of course thought about outsourcing.

I made a couple of quick calculations on the price of the product, and I found that I could sell the product at a really good price and the idea was born!

Creating the product

1) Process

Since I wanted to sell the webshops at a fixed price (instead of simply selling hours), I had to define exactly what my customers would get. The process was also really important so I spent a couple of days getting the full delivery process defined. A quick example of a couple of my thoughts was that the client get a fixed number of design drafts, and a fixed number of design iterations. For my Danish visitors, you can get a good description of the process here: http://getashop.dk/produkter/info/processen

2) Partners

Now I needed to find someone to actually produce the webshops. I contacted a lot of companies that advertised with Magento knowledge and was located in traditional outsourcing contries. I talked with a lot of Indian outsourcing companies but since my product was mainly a design task (designing the shop), I quickly abandoned them. I did not find a single Indian company that could create a design that did not look like a standard design template. Boring!

I ended up choosing a company from Russia and we have had a really good collaboration. They are proactive and really want to create the best solutions for my customers. The deal is that I pay them per project.

3) Website

The last thing I had to do was to create a website. And let us be frank… While this is of course important, I did not want to spend a lot of time tweaking minor things. I knew that I should be able to sell my product and have people order through the site. So I ended up using the Joomla CMS because it was a one click install on an existing hosting account with Dreamhost. This way I had a new blank website in 10 minutes. I then found a template (costing me 10$) that I liked and successfully modified the Joomla theme (I don’t know how to programme PHP that Joomla is programmed in, but looking at the other templates made it fairly easy to incorporate the design I had bought). After this I posted a project on elance because I wanted a logo. I ended up paying 50$ for the logo. So this was pretty easy, the hard part was to generate all the content for the website that I did over a couple of days.

I ended up spending less than 40 hours over a couple of weeks and a total of 60$ getting my new business running.

Marketing – telling your potential customers about your product

Currently I get leads from three different sources:

  • Amino (the forum where the idea started)
  • Organic traffic from Google
  • Word of mouth (even though I am fairly new in this game, I already get some word of mouth thing going on).

I have done a little search engine optimization (SEO), but could probably do much more.

Room for improvement

  • I currently send invoices to my clients after the product is done, but I have to pay my development team 50% up front. I also have to pay for hosting (which is included in my product the first year), so I had to give my company a loan (using my personal finances).
  • I would also like to do less project management and I expect that the development team will do this more and more over the next couple of months. Currently I work 5 hours a week, answering emails, doing project management and looking for leads on Amino.
  • While this is a nice little business, there is still room for more clients. I just have to scale down my own involvement as the number of clients rises so I don’t work more :)
  • I could still do more SEO

Hope you got inspired to start your own internet business

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Related posts:

  1. My experiences with outsourcing to the Philippines
  2. Personal outsourcing questions – Part 1
  3. My Magento webshop business
  4. What to do once you only work 4 hours a week
  5. Outsourcing – 10 Learning Points From The Last 2 Year