From a build your own skincare product to a delivery service for students run by students, aspiring entrepreneurs from the University of Cape Town's Genesis Project were tasked with establishing their own business, as part of their Honours-level Programme in Management in Entrepreneurship (PDE) course.
Local Web hosting company, 1-grid.com, partnered with the students to provide them with the tools they needed to get online. This included a unique domain name, an SSL certificate to secure their Web site and access to a state-of-the-art, responsive Web site builder where they were able to customise and update their Web sites according to their business needs.
“Customer trust is hardest to earn when you’re starting out because you don’t have any customers yet, but you need to earn customer trust before they'll buy from you,” says BYO Skin representative Mufaro Chiwara. “Having a Web site gave us credibility and legitimised our business. It also helped us achieve national reach.”
With a large percentage of consumers using the Internet to find local businesses, a strong online presence is crucial for start-ups.
“We wanted to provide the students with the necessary support to grow their businesses,” says 1-grid.com’s Craig Fester, who helped the students build their own Web sites.
“Young people make great entrepreneurs because they can approach old problems in new and innovative ways. However, they often lack the experience and resources needed to get online – this is where we could step in, to give the students a step up.”
Given the limited budgets of most small and start-up businesses, the ability to build and maintain a Web site is a substantial advantage.
“At first, we were worried that building our own Web site would be too time-consuming and too complicated. Using 1-grid.com’s Web site builder tool, we set up a basic Web site in a few hours. As our business grew, we were able to update the site ourselves; this helped us stay relevant and attract new clients and we also saved a lot of money,” says Pigeon Couriers representative, Robert Tsiliyiannis.
Other businesses created as part of the course include Outpost, a sales directory platform that connects consumers with a service company tailored to their budget, and Trove Clothing, a platform that allows customers to upload and sell pre-loved clothing.
On top of meeting their substantial academic requirements, the students faced the usual challenges of starting a business. They had to develop an innovative solution to a real-world problem, raise their own start-up capital, produce their product or platform locally and drive it into the market by building trust with actual customers in order to hit their sales targets.
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