Jason Ross is founder of Jackthreads.com, an invitation-only "flash-sale" clothing website for men that was acquired by young-men-oriented content site Thrillist.com earlier this year. He offers About.com's Entrepreneur readers some solid advice for startup entrepreneurs who are working on e-commerce and other online business concepts.
Hiring Mistakes: Some interesting and simple advice I received was "hire slow". Oftentimes in the past we were growing so quickly that I wanted to fill a position as quickly as I could, without truly making sure the individual was a fit for our organization. At times we got lucky, but other times we weren't so lucky. Having the right people on the team is critical to success, and hiring slowly to make sure there is a fit will save time and money long term.
Negotiating our Lease: We made a mistake early on of subleasing a space from a company who leased out an entire building. It seemed like a situation where very little could go wrong, however everything went wrong. The company that we sublet from stopped paying their rent on the space, so because we were a subtenant of theirs we were guilty by association and were evicted from the building even though we were paying our rent monthly. We found out 30 days before we had to vacate the premises The key takeaway from this situation was that a trusted advisor of mine told me from the start that this was not the right lease to get into, my gut told me not to do it, but I did it anyway and it backfired.
Fail Fast: Another key lesson early on in our evolution was learning that not everything we did had to be perfect from the start. For the first few months of our start up I was trying to make everything perfect, and the fact of the matter was that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Making it perfect wasn't going to happen, we just needed to start trying new things. I have since come across some advice that I think relates to this situation. Don't be afraid to go out and fail, and fail fast. The quicker you fail, the more quickly you are closer to figuring out the correct way of doing something. We just needed to go out and try new things, not be afraid to fail, and figure it out. Once we adopted this lesson, we stuck with it and still use it to this day.
E-Commerce Planning: I always joke with people that "I just wanted to sell clothing online". Sounds simple right? I definitely didn't realize all of the planning that needs to go into running an e-commerce business in the early days, however every obstacle we faced we found a way to overcome it. One of the biggest mistakes made early on was the fact that we didn't have the proper systems set up to manage e-commerce growth. We were operating with basic Quickbooks, a custom built website that wasn't connected to Quickbooks in any way, fulfillment was operating out of my house, customer service was Gmail, etc. As the company grew it became extremely painful, but we quickly realized how important planning was and we began doing the proper research to identify solutions to all of our e-commerce problems. We hired a logistics partner to professionally manage fulfillment, we built a custom inventory management and order tracking system that matched our business model, we recruited and hired a great team of people, we improved our user interface and customer experience.