Eric Schurenburg, editor of Inc.com, posted this interesting piece yesterday – “What’s an Entrepreneur? The Best Answer Ever”.

Some interesting quotes from HBS prof. Howard Stevenson:

• “Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”
• “They see an opportunity and don’t feel constrained from pursuing it because they lack resources. They’re used to making do without resources.”

And an interesting quote from Jon Burgstone’s book, Breakthrough Entrepreneurship:

“Every time you want to make any important decision, there are two possible courses of action. You can look at the array of choices that present themselves, pick the best available option and try to make it fit. Or, you can do what the true entrepreneur does: Figure out the best conceivable option and then make it available.”

A thought I’ll add to this:

Entrepreneurs learn by trying and failing.  They not only don’t fear failure, they embrace it as a learning opportunity.

What do you think makes a great entrepreneur?

When should I retain a lawyer?

Early.  Before you form the business, and before you start doing business transactions with multiple individuals or entities.  And certainly before you take in money from investors.

How do I find the right attorney?

There’s no replacement for networking.  Ask for referrals from other startup executives, entrepreneurs, as well as from complementary business service providers (e.g., business accelerators, economic development agencies, accountants, marketing firms).  When you’re referred to attorneys, ask them what other startups they’ve worked with in your field.  Ask for references you can talk to.  Find a firm, and an attorney, for whom your startup will be an important client.  (The big-name firms may schmooze you over dinner, but ultimately they’ll assign an inexperienced associate to your account who’ll be pressured to bill lots of hours – at the same billing rate at a partner from a small firm.)  Seek a small-firm attorney who is not only focused on business law, but has extensive experience with startups. (For more thoughts on this and the previous question, see my earlier post here.)

What are the top “to do” items I should address with my attorney?

First of all, take the time to tell your whole story to your lawyer.  I find that a good lawyer can only do his or her job if they know what questions to ask, and they can only do that if they have the deep background.  Then, your lawyers can help you with the following startup items:

• Legal formation
• State and federal tax filings
• State DBA (“doing business as”) filings
• Development of standard “form” legal agreements for your business
• Advice regarding the structure of shareholder agreements and capitalization

What kind of legal entity do I form, and why?

Even if you’re the sole owner of the business, you might want to consider operating the business as a limited liability company (LLC) rather than a sole proprietorship, since the former offers you the liability protections of a corporation.  (Awhile ago, I took a more in-depth look at this topic here.)

How do I protect my ideas and brands?

Basic business concepts are rarely if ever legally protectable by patent.  That said, there are some straightforward – and inexpensive – things you can do to protect your business’s ideas.  First, you can use nondisclosure agreements (NDAs): have your employees and contractors sign them, and be sure to sign them with people you meet with outside the company.  Second, you should copyright all written, graphical video and/or multimedia content that you put out in front of the public (e.g., “Copyright © Goofball, LLC 2012”).  You should also put trademark (^TM) or service mark (^SM) symbol, as appropriate, adjacent to your brands – company name, product names, logo, and tag lines.  You may wish to inexpensively file with the U.S. PTO to register a name or mark for the right to use the registered trademark symbol (®).

What should I expect to spend on attorney’s fees?

That said, if you’re the only owner, total legal fees and state filing fees associated with getting a new LLC organized and set up may be as low as $500-1,500, depending on the attorney and the specifics.  If the business has 2-4 partners but the structure is pretty straightforward, you might expect total legal startup and filing fees to be more in the range of $1,500-2,500.

It’s important to note that a reasonable startup-oriented attorney ought to be willing to: (a) give you a budget estimate and a not-to-exceed quote before starting on any project; and (b) put you on a payment plan, understanding that your business is cash-poor.

Can I save money by using standard legal forms on the Internet?

You might save money in the short-run, but in my experience, entrepreneurs who use such off-the-shelf form agreements regret it and pay far more later on to repair the damage done.  You can download forms – e.g., for an LLC operating agreement – off the Internet, but you get what you pay for.  The problem is that the standard forms are, by definition, designed for the lowest-common-denominator situation, and can’t possibly anticipate any specific current or future circumstances in your business.  In addition, they typically won’t be tailored to your state’s laws (although some are).

My brother-in-law (or parent, or neighbor, or old school friend, etc.) is a lawyer, and he/she is willing to do the legal work for cheap or free.  Is that a good way for my startup to save money?

No!  As with using standard forms, you get what you pay for.  Attorneys specialize – and accumulate specialized career expertise – just as physicians do.  Would you rather have your child’s pediatrician, or your dermatologist, perform complex brain surgery on your loved one, or a neurosurgeon who performs that specific brain-surgery procedure dozens of times per year?  The answer’s obvious with doctors, and it ought to be just as clear with attorneys.  Paying a modest amount of legal fees early on as you’re setting up your business entity will save you many headaches, and major expenses, in the long-run.

The value proposition of a good startup attorney:  mistake avoidance

Even though I’ve started and run a number of businesses myself and know more than I care to admit about business law, I would never dream of launching a new business without the active assistance of an experienced, startup-oriented attorney.  And yet I find it challenging at times to explain to first-time entrepreneurs the cost-benefit of lawyers – because the value proposition is one of indirect savings and avoided hazards.  In other words, a modest amount of money invested in attorney’s fees now is very likely to pay great dividends later on when bad things don’t happen to your business.

But “mistake avoidance” is a difficult value proposition to self-assured entrepreneurs, because they tend to think they can figure things out for themselves.  Unfortunately, I’ve seen quite a number of otherwise high-potential entrepreneurs commit what ended up being company-killing mistakes because they didn’t have the benefit of wise guidance in the early stages – and in the end, they had nobody to blame but themselves.

The comments and suggestions in this post do not represent legal advice.  The author is not an attorney, and recommends that entrepreneurs and other readers seek an attorney’s advice to address any legal matters. 

The Advantages of Outsourcing and Contractors

As your startup business expands beyond just yourself (or you and your cofounder/partner), you need to decide, as you add more people, whether those functions, in the near term at least, can be outsourced.  For instance, do you really need to hire a full-time bookkeeper, or can you outsource that to a freelance bookkeeper/accountant for 4-6 hours a month at first?  Do you really need to bring on that full-time marketing person, or can you retain a small marketing firm, or hire a freelancer or contractor for a few hours a month instead at first?  Is that web development task going to be an ongoing need, or will it be a one-time task you might better address with a short-term contractor rather than a full-time employee?  Can you have your product orders packed and shipped by an outside company on an as-needed basis – perhaps more cost-effectively and with better quality control than by hiring full-time people who would be sitting idle when there’s no packing and shipping to be done?

Outsourcing and hiring contractors in this way offers you several important benefits as an entrepreneur:

1. It enables you, even as a tiny business, to surround yourself with deep domain expertise at a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time experts in each function.
2. At least in the short run, you can avoid the hassles of setting up all the human resources (HR) infrastructure such as benefits, payroll, tax withholding, etc. that you’ll need to do when you hire fulltime people.
3. While a given contractor’s services may cost you more per-hour than an internal employee – they, after all, have to charge enough to cover the costs of their own benefits and marketing their services to people like you – you can scale up a contractor’s involvement by a few hours a month as your company grows, rather than needing to consider hiring an entire additional person.
4. The cost to your business of an outsourced function is a variable cost – as opposed to the fixed cost of a salaried employee – making it a much more painless proposition to scale back expenses if that becomes necessary.

Things to Consider When You Bring on  Full-Time Employees

As your business continues to grow, it will probably make sense at some point to bring on certain people as full-time employees.  At that point, you need to understand that you are taking on a number of human-resources (HR) related legal responsibilities.

There are Federal employment and tax regulations to adhere to, and employment law and tax law also varies somewhat state-by-state.  But in general, as a business with full-time employees, you will need to pay attention to a new list of concerns, including (but not limited to) the following:

1. Employee manual – required by state employment law, detailing all terms of employment, standard work hours, pay policies, policies and procedures, holidays, paid time off, discrimination policies, healthcare benefits, etc., etc.
2. Employment agreements
3. Confidentiality and non-compete agreements
4. Payroll, including automatic deposit
5. Tax withholding (Federal and state taxes)
6. Payment of payroll withholding taxes
7. Healthcare benefits
8. COBRA mechanisms
9. Retirement benefits
10. Other benefits
11. …and the list goes on…

Let’s say your small business is the type that, in order to expand marketing and sales, needs to hire representatives in different remote locations around the country.   (These days, that can be done pretty cost-efficiently by having your remote-office reps work out of home offices.)   In this scenario, you need to be aware that both employment law and tax policies vary on a state-by-state basis, so your business will need to accommodate that administrative complexity.

In general, whether your business has employees in one or multiple locations, I find that a good solution for almost any growing business is to consider third-party administrators, or TPAs, to assist you with specifying, setting up, and administering your human resources administration systems.  TPAs are often independent insurance brokerages – a great example is Kapnick Insurance in Southeast Michigan.

This type of firm, I’ve found, is great to work with for a small-to-mid-sized business because they are able to completely spec, outsource-handle and manage many of your HR functions, as follows:

• Complete benefit plan analysis, design and ongoing administration;
• Medical, dental, vision, life, insurance plans, etc., etc.;
• 401k and other savings and retirement;
• COBRA;
• HR e-solutions online admin;
• Ongoing employee communications;

Some TPAs will also advise you regarding setting up an employee manual.  (As insurance brokers, most will also quote handle your business insurance needs — which has nothing to do with this post — such as general liability, directors’ and officers’ insurance, etc.)  Because TPAs tend  to be  independent agencies, we as entrepreneurs tend to get competitive rates quoted on the various insurance carriers and plans, and working with a “TPA” (third-party administrator) obviates the need for us to go out and try to hire an HR director with expertise in seventeen areas (which no one person could reasonably possess).

Meanwhile, you can go through the cloud to set up and manage your payroll easily and inexpensively.  Consider going through Quickbooks/Intuit – or alternatively a vendor such as Paychex or ADP – with biweekly or monthly, automatic deposits into your employees’ bank accounts,  complete with the appropriate tax withholdings, along with your vendor making automatic payroll withholding tax payments to the appropriate agencies (the IRS or state tax authorities).  You can integrate the payroll transactions transparently with your company’s online bank account, and via the Internet with your accounting and bookkeeping system.

Because remember the whole point of the Flight Checklist: With the tech- and cloud-based tools and services available today, designing and launching a robust new business can be quick, easy and inexpensive.

Now, while as with any mature application space, accounting software has numerous full-featured competitive offerings, Quickbooks from Intuit is the dominant player and the class of the field.

A few very robust, stand-alone accounting app alternatives to Quickbooks include Sage Peachtree, Bookkeeper from Avanquest, Sage Simply Accounting Pro, and AccountEdge from Acclivity.  Quickbooks and most of these stand-alone accounting packages are available on a one-time purchase basis as well as (in most cases) in cloud-based forms

The following are the integrated functions you will look to accomplish with your small-business accounting software:

• Setting up and maintaining your general ledger
• Doing your daily bookkeeping
• Accounts payable (A/P)
• Accounts receivable (A/R)
• Reconciliation between your books and your bank account
• Financial statements
• Budget management – plan vs. actual

In addition, with Quickbooks, you can electronically coordinate through Intuit to automatically manage payroll transactions with your bank, including automatic deposits for your employees and automatic handling of tax withholdings and payments to the appropriate government agencies, etc.

What you’ll typically find is that if you’re using Quickbooks, which has become very much of a small-business standard, it’s easy to exchange Quickbooks-formatted files with your part-time bookkeeper, account, tax preparation accountant, and so on.

An interesting alternative to Quickbooks or other stand-alone accounting packages is NetSuite, which is a cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) application suite that includes ecommerce and CRM (customer relationship management) apps in addition to the accounting and financial apps, all integrated together.  This is far more to bite off for a brand-new startup than Quickbooks, and significantly more expensive than virtually any of the stand-alone apps.  However, if you think your startup is going to grow big fast, it’s worth a serious look to establish this kind of integrated infrastructure – still quite cost-effectively – from the outset.

Fortunately, there are a number of excellent, integrated, cloud-based software platforms that you can use to cost-effectively manage your direct marketing campaigns.  Some of the better ones include MailChimp, iContact, GetResponse, Campaign Monitor, LetterPop and Vertical Response.  In the opinion of many experts and veteran users, probably the class of the field is Constant Contact.

Each of these vendors provides you with easy-to-use, customizable newsletter templates, e-mail address management tools, and a number of high-level administrative functions  to automatically manage editing, auto-send, opt-in, opt-out, bounce-back, and a myriad of other administrivia that you won’t think of until you immerse yourself into producing a newsletter – at which point you’ll be awfully glad you’re using a pre-baked software platform created by direct marketing experts.

Each e-mail marketing software vendor offers its own tutorial, how-to video, set of tips and tricks, white paper, etc., usually tailored to its particular software platform.  There are also a number of excellent bloggers out there focused purely on direct marketing.  From a number of these experts – and from my own experience overseeing marketing functions – I’ve culled the following step-by-step advice for you.

1.       Decide on the Topical Focus of Your Newsletter

Figure out what you want to say.  Choose your topical focus based on your company’s brand and your team’s expertise, and stick to that focus.

2.      Brand Your Newsletter

What are you going to call your e-mail newsletter, and what will it look like?  E-mail should reflect your corporate brand and corporate design schema (look-and-feel).

3.      Create an Editorial Calendar

Decide how frequently you’re going to send out the newsletter.  It ought to be on a very regular, predictable schedule.  Before you launch it, you should have a good idea of what you’re going to write in the first six to twelve issues.  (In my mind, you might want to consider having a lot of the copy already written ahead of time.  After all, the topical content of business newsletters tends to be information we know in advance – we’re usually not talking about news reporting here.)

4.      Create and Maintain an e-Mail Address List

First, emphasize quality over quantity; there’s no prize for spamming folks who don’t open your newsletters.   Second, use a double-opt-in subscription system; in other words, have people opt-in, and send them a confirmation e-mail containing a link where they can confirm their opt-in status.  Third, avoid, mistyped e-mail addresses (for example, having people enter @gogle.com or @yahoo.cmo) by requiring retyping.  Fourth, delete all addresses that are bounced, as well as any readers that are consistently unopened.  Fifth, encourage subscribers to add you to their white list (preferred contact list). Sixth, offer links to “Unsubscribe” and your privacy policy.  Seventh, create viral marketing by offering “refer to a friend” button and a “Like” us on Facebook widget.  And eighth, to avoid triggering spam filters with ISPs, avoid use of words or phrases such as “sale,” “today only,” “free,” “act now,” “discount,”  “promotion,” and  so on.

5.      Create Compelling Content

First of all, you need to be sure that each issue addresses a topic that’s truly germane to your audience.  Assuming that, though, you need to get your busy subscribers to open and read each new issue of your e-newsletter.  So think carefully about what you say in your e-mail subject line – does it grab their attention?  Then be sure to lead with your very best material in a preview pane.

6.      Continue to Engage Your Audience

Be personable; being stiff just puts people off. Create a clear call-to-action in each e-mail.  Consider surveying your audience from time-to-time.  As I mentioned before, send your issues on a consistent, predictable timetable.  And avoid sending newsletters during holidays.

How can you accomplish website promotion efficiently and inexpensively?   Through a mix of five complementary online marketing elements:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social networking
• Banner ads and other online advertising
• Affiliate program promotion

If approached in a thoughtful, balanced way, an Internet marketing campaign for a startup venture can be remarkably effective at a very affordable price.  Let’s take a look at each of these five elements in turn.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of systematically adjusting your website in such a way that it ranks higher in “organic search” results in Google and other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.  What are organic search results?  When you type a keyword – which can be a word or a phrase – into Google, three sets of results appear:

1. The pink-shaded-box stuff at the top – those are paid ads, purchased using Google AdWords (see below)
2. The stuff in the right-hand column – those are also paid ads
3. All the search results below the pink box, that go for page after page – these are organic search results based on Google’s proprietary search engine algorithm

So SEO is a matter of researching and inserting the right keywords in your site to make you the most search-engine-friendly, building back links, creating fresh and appealing content, and overall ensuring high visibility with the search engines.  Site hosting services will provide a modicum of SEO service for a very modest monthly fee, independent services will provide more premium versions of the same, and marketing agencies know how to SEO-tune your site as well.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM) really comes down to purchasing Google AdWords.  It’s a beautifully designed system for advertisers that’s really easy to use.  You write your ad, choose the keyword or keywords that are most related to your business – these are words or phrases that, when people search, you’d like your ad to pop up.  AdWords will tell you how much each keyword is on a per-click basis – they vary widely, so you can pick and choose, and narrow in on keywords that are very specific to your business.  For example, “jewelry” might be very expensive on a per-click basis, but “hand-made silver earrings” might be significantly less expensive.  Then, once you set up your ad plan, when people search for your keywords on Google, your ads will pop up.  If – and only if – a user clicks through to your site, you are charged the agreed-upon per-click rate for that particular key-word.  It’s all very transparent and low-risk, since you can monitor your Adwords plan in real time, adjust parameters, and cut things off that you feel aren’t working.

One cool thing to note is that AdWords can be tuned to just generate ads for online users in a local geography that you specify.  So if you’ve got an online presence for your sandwich shops in Decatur, Georgia, you probably only want your ads to show up on Google searches for folks who live in ZIP codes 30030, 30031, etc.

Social Networking

Perhaps the most crucial of these five is social networking links.  By providing standard widgets at the bottom of your homepage, you can encourage site visitors to spread the word regarding your products and services asking them, with a single click, to:

• “Like” your site on Facebook
• Follow you on Twitter
• Add you to their circles on Google+
• Follow your blog

The marketing leverage you gain by adding these links to your website can be significant:  users refer friends, who refer friends, etc.

Banner Ads and Other Online Advertising

In Checklist Item #4, we explored online advertising as a means to generate revenue for your business – using networks ranging from Google AdSense to AdBrite, 24/7 Realmedia, Chitika, and BurstMedia.  Flipped the other way – that is, not selling ad space on your site, but rather, advertising your site elsewhere on the web – can be a viable element of your online marketing mix.  Generally speaking, due to the expense, outbound, paid advertising is a marketing element that you may wish to hold off on if you are pinched for cash; the other marketing elements we’re discussing here are more cost-effective as baseline pillars of a startup online promotion program.

Affiliate Program Promotion

In Checklist Item #5, we discussed generating revenue through affiliate marketing.   So you get the gist of how these programs work: you can sign up to list other online merchants’ products for sale on your site, and when your site visitors click through to purchase, you receive a sales commission or finder’s fee from the merchant.

But let’s look at it from the flip side:  you can also consider using affiliate programs to promote, and drive traffic to, your website.  This approach is probably only appropriate if yours is an ecommerce-oriented site that sells consumer-oriented products.   But if you do have products for sale, a viable element of the online marketing mix is to join affiliate marketing programs.  If you’re a relatively small or unknown brand, you may wish to offer particularly attractive sales commissions to start, under the philosophy that any sales that affiliate partners might generate for you are likely to be sales you would not otherwise see.

Let’s step back and see how we’re doing.  So far, we’ve zoomed in on six of the elements in the 12-step Startup Flight Checklist™ – and taken a closer look at efficient, cost-effective ways to address the following business functions:

1. Branding
2. Website Design & Hosting
3. Content Management
4. Generating Revenue Through Advertising
5. Generating Revenue Via Affiliate Marketing
6. eCommerce

Now let’s turn our attention to Startup Flight Checklist Item #7:  Operations and Logistics.  Yeah, I know, most of you think this is like watching paint dry.  But face it, keeping track of all of your product and parts inventory, shipping things in and out the door on-time, tracking those shipments, and so on and so on… can make or break the business.

For our discussion of operations and logistics, you ought to be able to can keep track of every unit or SKU you buy or sell, or that you ship in and out, through your accounting package.  Many eCommerce solutions enable you to interface with Intuit’s QuickBooks, the most widely-used accounting package.

And while we’re not going to delve into the topic of Finance and Accounting until my upcoming post on Flight Checklist Item #10, allow me to take a sneak peak ahead and mention that there may not be a better integrated small-business accounting package on the planet than Intuit’s QuickBooks, available in both online and traditional shrinkwrap software form.  You may also wish to take a close look at other packages at comparison sites such as TopTenReviews, SoftwareComparison, and SoftwareMedia.

As you grow, the task of tracking inventory and order workflow is the job of an ERP (enterprise resource planning) software application that would link into your accounting system.  For ERP, a good, cloud-based solution you can grow with is NetSuite, but I encourage you to comparison-shop.  Meanwhile, though, for businesses just starting out, ERP software can really be overkill,
and you can handle the job just fine with your accounting software (and maybe a spreadsheet or two).

As a startup business, once storage of product inventory has outgrown your spare bedroom, basement, or that spare cubicle, you ought to be able to outsource your storage and warehousing.  That is, you can find private warehouse owner/operators who will rent you storage space with the flexibility to grow or shrink based on your needs, saving you the trouble of having to buy or lease an entire building.  Some outsource storage providers will also handle soup-to-nuts, outsourced material-handling, providing packaging, drop-shipping, incoming and outgoing shipments and shipment tracking.  We’re talking a awful lot of in-ground business infrastructure that you don’t have to build from scratch, and a significant amount of capital expense that you can happily avoid as a startup.

Similarly, you can outsource small- to mid-sized shipments to UPS, FedEx, DHL, and/or the U.S. Postal Service.   Any of these services offer real-time, online parcel-tracking capability that has evolved to the point where entrepreneurial businesses can track the exact shipment status of each piece of inventory, finished-goods order or customer shipment in seconds on a single dashboard.

And finally, an important aspect of any business’s back-office operations these days includes the overall information technology (IT) function.  And once again, you’ll find that much of this can be outsourced or relegated to cloud-based services.  Just as you’re wise to do regular backups of your personal laptop or desktop on a cloud-based service such as Dropbox, as you grow your startup enterprise, you’ll realize that you’ll want to leverage the advantages of the cloud in similar ways.  You can look to rock-solid regional players such as Online Tech for offsite data backup, collocation and disaster recovery, or you can look to national players such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Setting up your own Internet storefront is really quite easy – and inexpensive – these days.  So if you have products you’re interested in selling directly to your customers, whether they be consumers or businesses, you should think seriously about setting up an eCommerce site.  It’s quick, it’s inexpensive, and it doesn’t require technical expertise.

As I see it, there are four basic approaches you can take – all of which work just fine – that offer you everything you need to design, launch and operate a pretty high-quality store:

• DIY (do-it-yourself) site-design software packages
• Website design and hosting services
• Amazon Webstore
• Outsourced eCommerce design and hosting services

All four of these approaches provide you with the essentials you need for building and operating a high-quality online store:  many alternative design templates, shopping carts, secure payment processing including ability to use PayPal and credit cards, and so on.  Let’s take a look at each one in more detail:

If you choose the DIY site-design software package route, you have a number of of great options to choose from – to name a few,   Web Easy Professional, Web Easy Studio, Microsoft Expression Web (which recently replaced FrontPage), Microsoft Office Publisher, Intuit Website Creator, Adobe Dreamweaver Creative Suite 4, Macromedia Studio 8, Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, Adobe GoLive Creative Suite (Mac).

Check out artist/entrepreneur Kelley Heath Faley’s website, Whim Z Designs, a really nice example of the art of the possible (excuse the pun).  She and her husband used one of these inexpensive software packages and built this very elegant, professional website over part of a weekend.

A second basic alternative to consider for ecommerce is website-building and -hosting services services, which we first examined back in my post on Checklist Item #2 on July 12.  To be clear, these services – such as 1 & 1, JustHost, GoDaddy, iPage, FatCow, HostPapa, HostGator, etc. – offer the ability to design and host not just basic websites, but full eCommerce webstores as well.  They all give you the ability to design your e-tail site online, and go live with your ecommerce solution on their hosting service, with straightforward monthly pricing that scales up pretty modestly based on how much you want to do.   Many offer basic plans for under $10-15 per month, but be sure to read the fine print, because not all prices are what they appear:  there may be severe limits to how much you can do at that base price before escalators kick in.  (For example, if you get more than 100 customers in a given month, your hosting bill might surprise you.)

A third option to consider when building out your ecommerce site is to use all-in-one store platforms such as the Amazon Webstore or eBay Stores turnkey
solution.  Both of these are as good as or better than all the other alternatives in most respects – any number of of design template alternatives, secure eCommerce, an array of design widgets to use, rock-solid  hosting,  etc. – plus you have at least the ostensible marketing advantage of being in Amazon’s or eBay’s marketplace.  We’re talking only $14.99/month for Amazon’s service, and it’s highly scalable.  eBay’s got a different pricing model:  While its monthly subscription fee for hosting the store is roughly the same as Amazon’s ($15.95/month in eBay’s case for its lowest option), unlike Amazon or most other hosting services, eBay also charges variable fees as a slice of everything you sell, in the form of “insertion fees,” “fixed price format fees,” and “final value fees.”  These add up, so to choose the eBay Stores platform over other approaches, you obviously need to feel that eBay offers clear marketing advantages in other ways.

A fourth option you might consider that’s more high-end but more costly, is to work with a firm to develop a more custom solution.  One classy example is WebShopManager, which will work with you on a semi-custom basis to design an eCommerce solution that’s considerably more elaborate than what you’ll be able to accomplish with the first three options.  Hosting with a service such as this can range from $50 to $250 or higher per month, depending on the fancy features you choose to include –we’re talking not just custom site design, but features like multi-site live chat, Google Maps-enabled dealer locators, QuickBooks integration, UPS and FedEx shipping integration,  and other cool stuff that a basic starter-store doesn’t need.  But if you’re building a business that’s, for example, got more complexity – say it’s got multi-tier distribution such as selling through multiple distributors, multiple  store chains, etc. – you might consider going to the expense of a solution with this complexity.  But for most entrepreneurs just launching, this may be an unnecessarily elaborate starting point.

You know how eBay and CraigsList created markets for the stuff lying around our homes that, it turns out, others wanted all along and were willing to pay for?  Well, I see Skillshare as doing the same thing for a lot of talented people — enabling them to better monetize their unique talents.

Last week, Skillshare closed an A Round of $3.1 million, which will accelerate their growth (see http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/skillshare-raises-3-1-million-to-turn-everyone-into-teachers/).  I hope this community really makes it big.  It deserves success.

Last week, Skillshare raised a $3.1 million Series A round (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/skillshare-raises-3-1-million-to-turn-everyone-into-teachers/).