For the millions of entrepreneurs interested is online business, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from Paperlesspost.com. The one year old New York based company provides the consumers to send elegant designed invitation cards via email and at the same time keep a track of the responses. The hurdles to entry in this particular market are almost non existent and the competition here is considerable. Apart from Evite, there are several other online companies like MyPunchBowl.com, Smilebox.com, Socializr. Com.
Paperlesspost has a media exposure. The New York Times have mentioned about them in a period of less than six months. They have also been shown on Fox News and several trendy sites like W, Lucky, Tatler and many others. You can make a huge difference but at this moment you need to think more than your product. James does not consider his company among the online invitations and card business. James says “we had the chance to make a platform for the formal, meaningful, textured communication on the internet. That brand platform could move into many different expressions that go far beyond invitation cards that are sent through email.
Although James would not discuss about future plans, one can use join things like email letterheads that help several companies brand themselves in email in a better way that they can be done today. “Since a year ago, Paperlesspost scored $880,000 when the company had $4,000 in the bank” said James. This investment gave a chance to the company to recruit a team of developers, a branding expert, a financial officer. This particular company had a rudimentary prototype for showing the investors, so that it looks like if the investors were purchasing a vision and management team more than a readymade product.
The last but not the least way for having success in online business is the use of Gen Y characters. Like the several Gen Y entrepreneurs, James says that he very well knows the limitation of own expertise. James graduated from Harvard and his work experience consisted of stints at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, working summers for a hedge fund and New Cinema. The entrepreneur Alexa worked for Katie Couric for the first time at CBS News. Both Alex and James were had some employers but both of them were new entrepreneurs. Both of them acted as co-CEO but at the same time showed a lot of attitude to the people who were engaged in development, marketing and finance.
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