Built to Enjoy in Utah: Jana Francis, Founder, Steals.com (Part 4)

Sramana: You spent five months working a full-time job and working your starup business in parallel. What were you able to accomplish in those five months?

Jana: Since our deals start at 9 a.m., I would be at my desk job at work. I would take a break at work and make sure every deal that was supposed to go off went off as planned. After that quick 5-minute break, I would work my day job until lunch, at which time I would run packages to the post office. I would also make phone calls to manufacturers and source products.

I would work until 5 p.m., and then I would go home and follow up on all of my emails. I would place one or two additional purchase orders for future deals. I would also go through my incoming shipments and verify that everything was in order. I would then have to pack orders that were sold that day and answer any customer questions that came in that day.

On the side I handled the businesses accounting and selected future manufacturers who I would target for calls in the upcoming weeks. I also had to prepare everything for the website publishing. I would write all the copy and take photos and send them off to the webmaster.

Sramana: Did you do all of this alone? You have not mentioned anything about customer acquisition. How did you promote the website?

Jana: I promoted the website in many ways. The month before we launched I took two weeks of vacation and went to a baby expo in Salt Lake City. I did not have a website yet, but I had a logo that I had made a banner out of and a PowerPoint presentation. I took my flat screen TV and set it up on a table under my banner and ran a PowerPoint presentation. I also made bookmarks which asked people to bookmark us in their web browser.

I sat at that table for two days, and I told every woman who walked by my booth all about the business. I got a lot of feedback, and I could tell how excited people were. I got 160 people to sign up for my email list exactly one month before we launched. I encouraged them to tell their friends.

The night before I launched the site, I emailed my family and friends as well as everyone on that list. I encouraged them to share the website and spread the word. That is, with no exaggeration, the only thing that I have done to get the word out. Even to this day we have very little customer acquisition spending.

Sramana: How did you find your webmaster?

Jana: She was the webmaster for the company that I worked for and she left on maternity leave a few years earlier and decided not to return to work. She started freelancing from home.

Sramana: Did anyone else do this venture with you?

Jana: It was me and my business partner, Rett Clevenger. He is our CEO and the other owner of the company. Shortly after the baby expo, I got an email from Rett. We had never worked together, but my company in media had worked with his company, BackCountry.com, which was a large e-commerce site located in Utah. A few days after the baby expo I was trying to pick the back-end e-commerce solution for the shopping cart, and he emailed me out of the blue. I had narrowed it down to two options, and he sent me a recommendation for one of them. The next day we went to lunch and we walked out of that as full business partners. We launched the website on April 28th of that month.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Built to Enjoy in Utah: Jana Francis, Founder, Steals.com
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