Entering the Fray

Musings on Christmas morning, waiting for our daughter to come down and open her stocking.

Autograff's experience developing websites for microbusinesses in Maine has given us a perspective on the character of microbusiness-people and how they see their businesses. Their approaches to strategy varying wildly, but have some common threads.

Maine, our home state, is in some ways (this is going to get me in big trouble) the India of the United States. Technically savvy Mainers abound, the state government and university system support small businesses in a big way, and agencies providing free business advice and access to low cost loans exist in every area of the state. Yet the economy as a whole is sluggish, wages are low, and the business climate is sketchy, especially in rural areas (90% of the state). Urban companies can have technology work done in Maine for less than it costs in their local areas. See? Maine is the India of the US.

The Plus Side

Maine has the highest ratio of entrepreneurs to population of any state in the Union (I will provide my source for this as soon as I remember where I saw this statistic). Jobs in Maine are mostly not highly-paid professional jobs (though lobstering is still a very good living for many), and every lobsterman and woodsworker also plows snow in the winter, their family members make wreaths in the late fall, rake blueberries in August, or harvest potatoes if they live up north. What others call "odd jobs" are an industry in Maine. This gives Mainers a sense of independence, an entrepreneurial spirit of great energy, and a distrust of "nine-to-five" jobs, even though they are coveted and cherished.

The Con Side

Mainers are quintessential Yankees, thrifty and conservative. This makes every sale a challenge. You work harder for a sale in Maine than any other place I know. No one's getting rich selling to Mainers, except oil companies, because you have to drive everywhere in Maine.

Our experience developing websites is that 75% of our customers are local. Folks from New Jersey are used to spending $1000. In Maine that's a small fortune. Mainers are looking for bargains to eke out a life for themselves and their families. Competition is fierce in the web business, which is our business, as you might have guessed. Especially with the proliferation of Web 2.0, with tools like this blogger, building custom websites requires active selling. In a climate like this, the natural state of things is that we tend to overproduce and undercharge.

Solutions

As we struggle to make it in Maine as a microbusiness ourselves, we have wanted tools to help us gauge the waters and analyze our business. Many of these simply don't exist, so we're creating them.

We have created a very basic form builder called Form:Gen for building web forms of various kinds. It's free, and we use it ourselves to build forms. Even if you can't do everything you want in the form builder, it's a good start on the code, and it creates a mailer script that is more compact, secure, and functional than the generic form mailing scripts. A major feature is that the recipient's email address is nowhere to be seen on the web, so spammers can't hack the form to get your email address.

One tool that does exist, but which we created for ourselves, is a content management system. There are hundreds or thousands out there, of varying complexity. Ours is designed for microbusiness. It's called SiteNow CMS. More information on it is on our website, autograff.com. Business owners don't want to design their sites with a content management system. They're not web developers. They like point and click, but they want features too. Our CMS uses a simple template, vastly customizable and very flexible, with a few function calls in the html code. We design and look and feel of navigation, the graphics and the styles, and our clients update their sites through a web form, adding pages and page elements, uploading pictures, documents and sound files, and creating email and web links. No code needed, and both the web page and the web editor are XHTML-based, and accessible to non-visual users. Launch of SiteNow(tm) CMS is planned for January 2006.

We have more tools in the pipeline. We're excited to share them as soon as they're available.