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For people interested in e-commerce, this article explains the basic concepts for starting an e-preneur venture (also known as an e commerce website). It also lists various open source tools that help build such a business from scratch.
An e-preneur is someone who uses an opportunity in the digital world to start a venture, which contributes solely to the digital economy. So how’s an e-preneur different from an entrepreneur? Entrepreneurs contribute to the economy—physical, digital, or both—through their ventures, but an e-preneur contributes only to the digital economy.Let’s look at the case of Mark Zuckerberg. He saw that students at Harvard needed a common platform from where they could communicate with each other, or get updates of their friends without actually having to interact with them. He grabbed the opportunity and developed Facebook.
But do you know what went into the making of Facebook? It was developed using PHP as the scripting language, MySQL as the back-end database, Linux as the OS platform and a few hundred dollars. So did you notice hat all these are open source platforms (apart from the money, of course)? This article will show you the possibility of starting an e-preneur venture using open source tools—but before taking the plunge, let’s warm up a bit and look at the key ingredients that go into making an e–preneur.
What does it take to be an e-preneur?
- The essential requirement for an e-preneur is an idea, and the essentials of a successful idea are its uniqueness, originality, and the extent to which it satisfies the current as well as future needs of people.
- To be a successful e-preneur, it is good to have an active interest in current and upcoming technologies, because it would enable you to understand the nitty-gritty of the e-commerce platform.
- If you have an idea, and are technically competent enough to either develop a e-commerce portal, or to modify one according to your needs, there’s very little left to be funded.
- strong and vast network of people. Such a network not only serves as a medium of advertising, but also provides you with valuable feedback on how to improve the offerings, serviceability, user experience, etc.
- Skills like innovative thinking, having a long-term vision, etc, come in very handy to brighten the long-term prospects of any e-preneur venture.
Open-sourcing an e-preneur venture
An e-preneur venture goes through various stages of planning and development. This includes the idea stage, developing the concept and then the platform, marketing, planning for expansion and growth, innovation and even possibly a redesign stage. All of these stages can be implemented or enhanced using open source tools.
- The idea stage : Think of starting a venture, and millions of ideas bloom. However, only some of these ideas are actually feasible or practical. Even among the feasible ones, finding that one unique and original idea is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Idea management tools can prove to be a blessing at this stage. Write down all your ideas (even the stupid ones).Sharing these with your partners and grouping them are some of the features that these tools provide. Ideatorrent (http://drupal. org/project/ideatorrent) and BBYIDX (http://bbyidx.com/) are two great open source idea management tools.
- The concept stage: Once an idea has evolved from the idea stage, it enters the concept stage. At this stage, it is further refined and improvised using various tools such as brainstorming, focus groups, etc,and is converted into a concept. Using brain mapping and collaboration tools can help speed up this stage. The best open source tool for brain mapping is FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page). Add to this the power of collaboration with Collabtive (http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/) and create a concept out of your idea in no time.
- The platform development stage: A concept, once approved, enters the next stage of platform development.Selecting the technology to build the online platform and developing
it is an important element of this phase. HTML5,CSS3, jQuery, PHP and MySQL, are some of the best open source technologies available to develop your platform. Open source PHP frameworks like Codeigniter (http://ellislab.com/ codeigniter) and CakePHP (http://cakephp.org/) can be used to build robust e-commerce portals. User interfaces, or the look and feel of the platform, can be designed using the GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/) and the Bluefish editor (http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html). If you wish to go completely open source, use any of the open source Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, etc) flavours as the base operating system.