Push Button: Start Business

On Friday of last week, my wife and I officially launched a small side project that we have been working on, in some capacity, for the past several months. The idea has been swirling around in my head for much, much longer than that, but after putting in some actual work, we finally pushed the button that sent our website live and really, in earnest, started a business.

Why did we do this? I work with entrepreneurs all day and I come from a family of entrepreneurs - I have an itch to start things and make money. My wife has a similar itch and she has all of the tools to be a great entrepreneur. Call it professional development, personal fulfillment, or marriage counseling. Whatever you call it, ultimately it was just something we had to do.

Not to bore you with too many details, but we started a digitally native golf brand called Bent Grass Golf. This is a passion project, both for the game of golf, which I have written about to exhaustion in this space, but also to entrepreneurship itself. Like I said, I have a lot of second hand experiences seeing someone try and start something - I wanted some first hand experience myself. I wanted to answer questions for myself about what actually goes into marketing a product? How do you set up an LLC? A bank account? A corporate strategy? And everything in between? This is not even close to my primary focus (nothing beats working in VC) and it’s not at the same scale as starting an actual full-time endeavor, but it is an exercise in entrepreneurship.

So my wife and I embarked on this exercise. We are not on the other side of it yet - things are really just getting started. But there are already a few things that I have learned from the experience. First of all, starting a business is really hard. No matter how simple the product, how low the ambitions, how small the target, starting something can be terrifying, even if you are just doing it on the side. The second lesson is how many tools have sprouted up in the last couple of years that are specifically designed to make things easier for entrepreneurs, side projects, and hustlers of all kinds.

As an investor, I was very broadly familiar with the space of enterprise software for small businesses and startups, but it wasn’t until I actually started using services like Shopify and Printful that I realized how valuable they really are. Many of you probably have a pretty good grasp on Shopify - it is the end-to-end solution for starting an online store. No need to have build a payment infrastructure, or an inventory system, or really anything. It’s super simple, which is especially impressive considering how hard setting up an online store used to be (allegedly, it’s not like I ever really tried it, but I am sure I would have struggled with it). Shopify is as close to an all-in-one solution as you can get.

But you might be not be as familiar with a product like Printful. Printful is a drop shipping solution that can help back up your online store. My wife and I are using it to fulfill order for our initial line of products. All that we had to do was create the designs (we’ve had some awesome help there along the way too), match them with the product suite that Printful provides, and integrate with your online store (they have a bunch of integrations with products like Shopify, Squarespace commerce, and the like). It’s incredibly easy and seamless. And in an age of social media and microinfluencers, being able to monetize your brand easily through a service like Printful can be super helpful. And it’s not just influencers and esports stars - if you are a local grocer who wants to make product easily and sell it in store, Printful has capabilities for that too. As far as business startup tools are concerned, Printful is an example of what the future looks like.

There are several categories that these business startup tools (or automated entrepreneurship software) can be segmented into. Those categories, completely made up by me, are as follows: Customer Interfacing, Logistics, Communication, Back-Office Automation, and Financial Management. Of course, most of these can just be slotted into the enterprise software space. However, it’s important to note that these are specifically focused on getting businesses off the ground. And while that may sound like semantics, there’s a big difference between the logistics software you use if you are Kroger, and that which you use if you are the brand-new concept restaurant around the corner.

If you are starting a business and in the market for technology and services such as these, there are a couple of good resources that can be found here and here (GitLab open sourced its business tech stack, as one does when you are GitLab, and it’s a pretty exhaustive resource). While there’s a whole blog post out there dying to be written about what the best business stacks are for any business, now is not the time for that. There are plenty of resources out there already. Plus, I need to do a little more field testing myself to figure out what the best startup business stack actually is.

The thing I keep asking myself is, after reviewing a lot of the tools that I could use when starting my own side-project, was “why can’t they all be more like Shopify?” The all-in-one solution provided by $SHOP is incredible and well worth the price of admission. It seems obvious that someone would sell an all-in-one solution for ecommerce - why do folks selling something online also have to be good programmers just to get their product into the hands of their customers? The best tools are the ones that allow its users to focus on the things they are good at and alleviate the things they don’t have time to focus on.

But it’s not just ecommerce. What else should be sold as business in a box? I need to do some further investigating and will get back to you. There are plenty of tools that help small businesses thrive, like if you are an electrician, a handyman, a dog walker, or freelancer. But the more these tools become more streamlined and reduce the friction preventing folks from starting their own companies, the better. Entrepreneurship is due for a revival, and anything that can help make that happen will flourish in the coming years.