LemonStand on startups

4 | published by Danny Halarewich on Friday, April 22, 2011

As a self-funded startup, we feel that we're constantly being educated by the market, and have a story to tell that may be valuable to other entrepreneurs.

We are still very much learning and growing, but even at this stage we feel that we have some valuable insight to offer.

Why we created an eCommerce platform

In short: to scratch our own itch. As web developers engaged in client eCommerce work, other solutions were not acceptable. Even the platforms considered the best were woefully lacking in flexibility and ease of use.

We set out to make eCommerce better. We felt eCommerce development was broken, and are working hard to fix it.

Because we have a personal stake in the state of eCommerce development, we're able to sympathize with our customers easily. It makes product development more organic and based on reality. We continue to build custom eCommerce sites, and this keeps us in touch.

Why we self-funded

We wanted to get started right away. We wanted control over our destiny, and to scratch our own itch. Going through the funding process would complicate that.

Another reason is: Why not? We were able to fund our own business through consulting work initially, and now from actual revenue. Having a bootstrapped business, that turns financially self-sufficient is a beautiful thing, even if it's not as luxurious as being VC backed.

It also has led to good habits, in our opinion. We try to be smart with our expenses and creative with our customer acquisition. We can stretch a dollar a long way because of that, and we're not sure we could say the same if we had a huge budget to start.

We're lean and mean, and on a mission to make eCommerce better.

How we're going to grow

At this stage, our generated revenue through sales is funding our growth. We're gradually expanding our team and continuing to improve our product and challenge the status quo.

We seem to have caught onto a cycle where our customer base is growing, and therefore so does our speed and team. We hope to continue this way.

At the moment we're working hard to improve our existing product, customer support and develop more revenue streams, specifically reocurring ones. We're closely watching the market and trying to capitalize on what we feel are mistakes and shortcomings by our competitors.

On sharing experiences

Moving forward, we plan to share specific information, points of view and our experiences that we feel would be valuable to our customers and entrepreneurs in general.

At the very least, we'll share our story and hopefully you'll find it interesting.

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