CEO of Friendgiftr.com Rob Carpenter believes in dreaming big and being persistent.

Tinseltown is better known for producing movie stars, but there may be another star in the making in Hollywood, California-based startup Friendgiftr.com.

Friendgiftr.com recently debuted e-commerce applications that turns sites such as Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, Ning and Bebo, into social media-based storefronts that sells actual gift cards from retailers and other businesses to social media users. Through a Friendgiftr application, consumers can buy gift cards from more than 130 brands such as Gap, Dominos Pizza, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, and Banana Republic, among others, for friends and connections in their social netoworks. 

“Introducing our network of gift card storefronts across numerous social networking sites is a game-changing step forward in the commercialization of social media,” says Friendgiftr CEO Rob Carpenter. “It’s also a cornerstone of our unique business model. We partner with the companies whose gift cards we sell, which keeps our operating costs minimal, and unlike most web-based start-ups we have multiple viable revenue streams, including commissions from cards we sell through a growing number of storefronts, slotting fees, advertisements and affiliate marketing programs.”

Understanding The Gift Card Economy

Another unique aspect of Friendgiftr is that card recipients can exchange the card given to them for a card they prefer from any of the merchants Friendgiftr offers, at no charge, and without the buyer knowing. Not happy with your Banana Republic gift card? No problem – just exchange it for another. Recipients can even split the gift card amount across multiple merchants, to make sure they get the gifts they really want.

“It became clear that, as we were conducting our market research, we had to do more than just sell gift cards. We had to solve some sort of pressing consumer problem. So we decided on the idea that we were going to allow anyone who received a gift card from one of our storefronts the ability to exchange the gift card for any gift card they want or split it across multiple merchants,” says Carpenter. “After all, everyone has received a gift card at one point or another they just didn’t want and ended up not using it. We thought this was a total waste and needed to be fixed, which is why we allow the end-user or recipient to pick the gift card they really want after it’s been purchased for them.”

“We thought this would be a pretty neat solution for a lot of people.”

Friendgiftr.com makes it easy for social media users to buy and send gift cards to their friends and online connections.

Commercializing The Social Media Explosion

Carpenter, who previously worked at the White House and as a business writer, admits that the inspiration behind Friendgiftr is popular social networking site Facebook. Carpenter was intrigued by Facebook’s virtual economy – virtual goods like smiley faces and cupcakes that users bought on the site – but felt much more could be done. “We thought if users were comfortable buying fake gifts on social networking sites, maybe they’d be comfortable buying real ones, too,” Carpenter says. The idea for Friendgiftr was thus born.

Friendgiftr was originally designed to sell gift cards – America’s most popular gift – on a single platform, Facebook. “Over time,  it became clearer that we had a tremendous opportunity to both expand our gift card offerings… and our gift card platforms, by adding other social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo, mobile phones like Blackberry and Android, and an array of innovative new shopping platforms,” says Carpenter.

Growing The Brand

So far, accolades have been streaming in for Friendgiftr, including awards such as the Henry Kravis Prize in Venture Capital and the Venturebeat.com Technology trends competition. Reaching this point, Carpenter reveals, has been a big challenge. “Getting funding in the worst economy since the Great Depression; persuading big merchants to partner with a tiny, unknown startup; and in building customized apps for each platform that we’re on,” says Carpenter, listing some of the numerous external obstacles they faced. 

“Fortunately we have overcome these challenges and are moving forward pretty aggressively on a lot of new fronts.”

In contrast to the experiences of many startups, Friendgiftr was lucky enough to land venture funding from Tech Coast Angels on its first attempt to raise capital. “We went to an event called Fast Pitch and gave a 90-second speed presentation, which then led to a 30-day negotiation before we got our first infusion of funds.” He declined to reveal the amount, except to say it has given them ‘a comfortable cushion’ so that it can focus on its mission.

Carpenter says growing the Friendgiftr brand and virtual shopping network will be key to its short and long-term success, but he’s not about to give away its ”secret sauce” by saying which platforms they’re moving onto next or its specific marketing approaches. But he does offers this hint. “Needless to say, strategically we rise or fall based on our online reach. It’s crucial for us to multiply in as many creative ways as possible. And it’s especially crucial that we multiply boldly in this economy, as we want to continue to be on the offensive by giving our customers more shopping choices than they ever thought possible,” he adds.

The reason Carpenter believes why they’ll be successful, is because he feels he’s built an incredible team around Friendgiftr. “The team here at Friendgiftr is extremely passionate, hard working, creative and experimental, and willing to try bold new ideas,” he says. ”We generally and genuinely love people, culture, and food – especially here in Hollywood – and definitely enjoy having fun in the very fast-paced startup world.” In particular, he gives a shoutout to teammates search engine optimization (SEO) expert Jonny Chan and creative marketing director Jennifer Reece (who Carpenter reveals is working on a stealth marketing concept that will be revealed soon).

Views on Entrepreneurship

Having been both an entrepreneur and social entrepreneur, Carpenter believes he understands the differences and similarities between the two. He encourages as many people as possible – especially the youth – to try both paths out as they can be rewarding. “It’s not just the fact that you are your own boss, but it’s the notion that you have a profound opportunity to create new jobs, new industries, and re-make society,” says Carpenter. ”There’s nothing better than to introduce innovations that allow people to live better, more convenient lives – whether you’re offering them a product or service or trying to save the world.”

The biggest lesson he’s learnt as an entrepreneur is to be patient and persistent. “If you want to be an entrepreneur, run a company or nonprofit, make bold changes, and do all of the other incredibly difficult and challenging things that entrepreneurs do on a daily basis, you have to have the tenacity to hold on to your hope until one day your time arrives,” he shares. ”If you believe strongly enough in yourself, other people will start to believe in you, too.”

“It’s that simple. Dream big, work hard, learn everyday, be true to yourself, and never give in. If you follow some variation of these themes, you will one day get to where you want to be and achieve your wildest dreams.”

Don't think. Just do. (Image by Joanna Alberti)

Running your own business can be immensely exciting and rewarding. It could well be the best way to earn an income, especially if you have saleable skills, an innovative idea or an interest that could be turned into a profitable business.

However, it is important to ask yourself why you want to do it. It isn’t for everyone. Remember that it can be lonely being the boss and that you are likely to have to jump through a lot of hoops to get going; you most likely will have to work long hours, tackle paperwork and regulations and be Jack-of-all-trades to get your new venture off the ground.

Nevertheless, if you believe you have a strong business plan, the necessary resources and the determination to succeed, why not give it a go?

I have put together the below top ten tips for budding entrepreneurs as a list of things to consider before diving in:

1. Research the market. Find out whether customers will buy what you are offering, and use feedback to refine your product or service.

2. Write a business plan. Describe your business, how it will operate and its finances for the first two years. Ask your chartered accountant if you need help writing your business plan. He or she will also be able to advise you about the appropriate structure for your business. The regulations and costs of setting up a business can be complex and off putting. Get an expert to help you.

3. Raise finance if needed and build in contingencies. Being under-financed often leads to poor performance at the start. As setting up always takes longer than you think, you also have to ensure your financing has built in flexibility.

4. Choose the right staff. Unless you are planning to be a one-man-band, pick the best people you can afford. They may work for less than the market rate initially if they are convinced of the potential for growth of the business. Consider share option schemes to attract the best staff and to motivate them to work to achieve your business goals.

5. Find a mentor. It is helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off. Learn from customers and suppliers and ask the views of your chartered accountant and other advisers.

6. Ensure you have the right financial information. This is vital, not least to understand your trading performance. Set up records from the start, using software if you are comfortable with it. Employ a good book-keeper or talk to your chartered accountant about outsourcing accounting services.

7. Monitor key performance indicators. Ensure that you have right data, such as turnover, gross margins, overheads, finance costs, net profit, cashflow and working capital, on a daily, monthly and annual basis.

8. Be alive to possibilities and dangers. Don’t exclude taking the business in a different direction if you see potential elsewhere or there are problems ahead. Watch out for competitors in difficulty and listen to your customers, suppliers and staff.

9. Learn. Absorb all that you can from the experience of being an entrepreneur and from those around you, and – not least – learn from your mistakes.

10. Reduce the chances of failure. Do something you already know, or employ people with experience in the sector. Manage your overheads and working capital. Appoint a chartered accountant with experience of start-ups before you launch your new enterprise.

This post was contributed by Mark Billington, Regional Director, Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) South East Asia.

Alibaba.com Success Guide shows you how to navigate the labyrinthine B2B trade portal for the best results.

If Amazon.com is the paragon of a successful model for an online B2C (business-to-consumer) business, then surely China’s Alibaba.com must be its B2B (business-to-business) equivalent. Alibaba.com is essentially a global trading platform where businesses (especially small-to-medium enterprises) source for the right goods or materials, and for producers to find the right distributors and retailers to carry their products. Set up by founder Jack Ma – the first entrepreneur from China to grace the cover of Forbes magazine in 50 years – along with 17 other founders, with a vision of building a platform to help others realize their entrepreneurial dreams, it is today the world’s largest online B2B trading platform, with 45 million registered users from over 240 countries, and constantly ranks amongst the top ten as a global Internet brand.

It’s still set to grow globally as well – last year the site launched a marketing campaign in the United States to grow its business there.

The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide

But navigating the cluttered and labyrinthine trading portal can be confusing and tricky, especially for a first-time user.

That’s where The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide: Insider Tips and Strategies for Sourcing Products from the Worlds Largest B2B Marketplace comes in useful. Written by Brad and Debra Schepp and published by Wiley & Sons, the book advises how you should consider the needs of your business – from developing your idea to research to prototyping, for example – before it guides you, step-by-step, through the various functions and features on the site. Each chapter is broken down to easy-to-follow sections dedicated to key aspects of Alibaba.com, so it’s a simple matter of turning to the right page for the right advice – like posting a buying lead, for example.

The book doesn’t make easy reading, however, especially for those of us who aren’t familiar with trading terms or trade in general. But for those of you who intend to use Alibaba.com for your business but haven’t done so, this book will be heaven-sent.

So what do I like about the book? Part III, where the authors highlight various success stories of entrepreneurs who’ve successfully used Alibaba.com for their businesses. Even though I know these examples are intended to encourage you to join and use the site, the real-life stories do make one feel good about being an entrepreneur. Probably kind of like why you read this blog, really.

Thanks to Jeff Nordstedt of Planned Television Arts for providing an advance copy of The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide for review.

Trevor Ginn of Hello Baby was inspired by the birth of his first daughter to start his online business retailing baby wares.

Selling baby items online can be very lucrative, as Trevor Ginn found out. The managing director and founder of London-based Hello Baby, an online retail business peddling baby wares, has seen sales for his company go up 20% over the past few months.

Hello Baby retails baby products on their own website, as well as eBay and Amazon Marketplace, in an Internet-only sales strategy that has helped keep costs low. “A multi-channel online strategy enables us to reach the maximum number of online customers” said Ginn. “We all have a preferred place where we like to buy online. Many business just sell on a website, or just on eBay, but we think that this is a terrible mistake. Companies need to be flexible and go where the customers are.”

Starting Out

Ginn worked as an e-commerce consultant before he started Hello Baby. With e-commerce growing at a steady pace, his clients were doing well – which disturbed him. “I felt that I knew much more about online marketing they did. So I decided to put my money where my mouth was and launch my own online business.”

Ginn researched into may different retail sectors before settling on the nursery industry. ”I had a number of different criteria for choosing a sector, for example, it had to be something I knew about, be non-seasonal and have the opportunity for good margins,” he explains. “I had also recently had my first daughter and the amount of money which all new parents seem to spend on stuff was also an inspiration!”

Hello Baby focuses on building an attractive, user-friendly website and carrying a great range of products at attractive prices. As people cannot touch the products they are browsing, the site believes this is essential for customers to have as much information as possible before making a purchase. “We put a lot of effort into having compelling product descriptions and photos,” says Ginn. But building and managing a robust product catalogue, Ginn admits, is the company’s main challenge. ”A retailing website involves the creation of a huge amount of content, and prices constantly change. Keeping on top of this is very time consuming.”  His team also faced a steep learning curve trying to get up to speed with the products and the competitive landscape. “No one in the company had a background in the nursery industry!” Ginn reveals, unabashedly.

Its effective customer service and delivery – only one percent of their orders experience any kind of problem – means good repeat business. Perhaps because of that, Hello Baby has grown their business steadily – at around 10 percent per month – since their launch, and currently sells £40,000 worth of goods every month. Its iPhone app alone has garnered some 20,000 downloads.

Hello Baby is self-funded, and keep their startup costs low by choosing very cheap office space and dropshipping a large proportion of their stock. However, they are looking to expand their operations, and “aim to be a major player in the nursery market” with ”a compelling offering to customer in the UK and worldwide”.

Growing An Online Business

Ginn shares that Hello Baby’s main strategies for growth are to increase the size of its product catalogue and build more traffic through natural search. More products available, he says, means more opportunities for people to make purchases and allows more content for Google to index and drives natural search traffic. “We believe the natural search is the most cost effective way to market a website and we engage in an active program of content creation and link building.”

Hello Baby has a blog where its team write about their experiences of raising children, as “a resource for new parents”. It also uses the social networks Facebook and MySpace to keep in touch with their customers. “Social networks like Facebook are great fun and a fantastic way of getting to know our customers,” Ginn explains. “They also give us instant feedback about what our customers are thinking.”

However, Ginn admits their forays into the social media front have some way to go. “Social media has only driven very limited traffic to the site although we have built up over 700 followers on Twitter. However, we are putting a lot of effort in this area and expect it to pay dividends in the future.”

Starting Online, and Starting Small

If you’re considering  starting an online retail business, Ginn says that budding entrepreneurs need to consider those that have proven business models, and starting small if they have to. “Online retail is great in this regard, as online marketing places like eBay and Amazon give quick access to customers and transactional websites can be set up quickly and cheaply,” he says.

“We started off with about £1000 worth of stock and an eBay store and took it from there.”

Views on Entrepreneurship

Ginn is very candid when discussing why he became an entrepreneur. “I was a pretty poor employee which made the decision to become an entrepreneur easy. I always found it hard to work for other people and consequently did not do a very good job!”

“Having worked for myself now for 2 years I can confirm that being an entrepreneur is very hard work and quite lonely at times,” he says. “However, on the plus side, knowing that you are a master of your own destiny is a great feeling. I think that the secret is to have a clear end goal and maintain focus.”

The two most important lesson Ginn has learnt, he says, is becoming an expert in your field and being self-reliant. “Most things in business or technology are not that complicated and it is usually possible to do them yourself if you read up on the subject,” says Ginn. ”I have saved thousands and achieved better results by becoming knowledgeable in areas such as online marketing, usability and application development.”

“Depending on contractors to do everything is very expensive,” he adds.

There will be two conference calls to answer any questions founders based in Singapore who may be interested in the program:

Friday, March 5th at 0800hrs in Singapore
Saturday, March 6th at 1200hrs in Singapore
+1 (605) 715-4900 / PIN: 998-602#

The Singapore program has also added four new mentors from the United States, including founder & CEO of Urgent Career, Jeff Stewart, Ron Weiner of Venture Mechanics, Will Bunker of One-and-Only (which became Match.com) and CEO of Skip Hop Michael Diamant.

James Kappen proposes an easier way for salespeople to manage their sales process with Proposable.com.

Salespeople know the pain of managing and keeping track of each step of the sales process with potential sales leads. Proposable.com believes it has an answer.

Proposable, is a startup based in Bloomington, Indiana that offers a refreshing alternative to the traditional method of sending sales material to potential customers – you know, as file attachments of various formats via email, which can get lost or, worse, zapped by spam filters. It’s developed a web application that lets users create, deliver and analyze sales material online. With Proposable, users can create, edit and store all proposal templates, sections and attachments in an online library. It even has a team account, allowing sales teams to collaborate on proposals, as well as assign a Sales Manager role who can monitor and manage sales material created by a team.

But what’s so great about this?

With a shared online central library, a sales manager will never run into problems such as having an urgent proposal stuck in the laptop of a colleague who’s away on vacation. The system allows a sales lead to view, comment and pose questions alongside the proposal, and notifies the salesperson via text message and email when the a proposal is viewed or commented on. Also, an in-depth analytics page displays a sales lead’s viewing patterns and viewing history – allowing salespeople to effectively gauge interest and focus on the “low-hanging fruit”.

CEO of Proposable, James Kappen, puts it this way. “You’ll never have to again ask yourself questions like, “Did they open my proposal?”, “What sections did they look at?” or “Which of my leads is most interested?”.”

Check out how Proposable works with this video:

Proposable is a joint venture between business accelerator program Sproutbox and Kappen. Proposable, Kappen’s second venture since graduating from college in 2006, won a business plan competition organized by Sproutbox by beating a thousand other entries from all over the United States. Proposable also landed US$250,000 in seed money from Sproutbox.

“The inspiration for Proposable came out of my frustration with the sales proposal process,” says Kappen. “I ran a regional print magazine and I would be sending out sales material every day via email to potential advertisers. The trouble was that I never knew what was happening with any of it. I would spend much of my time following up with my leads attempting to figure out who saw what and which of them was genuinely interested. I knew that salespeople everywhere had this pain that comes from the lack of information around their outgoing sales material, so I set out to create a solution.”

Proposable launched in early February to a huge response, garnering some 300 sign-ups on its first day. The challenge now, James says, is to make the site as user-friendly and robust as possible for all kinds of users in a variety of selling environments. In order to fuel growth, James believes it is necessary for Proposable to get thousands of salespeople to try their product. The way to accomplish this, he says, is to partner with sales organizations and publications.

Views on Entrepreneurship

Kappen says entrepreneurship is for those who have the insatiable need to create something new, to innovate. But he cautions that while creating an excellent product is necessary, the real work only begins after the product is created.

“Execution is 90 percent of what makes any venture successful. That is the challenge,” he says.

Martell VSOP's Ultimate Start-up Space challenge - which of these ideas will emerge the winner?

I previously wrote about Martell VSOP’s The “Ultimate Start-up Space”. With a chance to win free six-month rental of a premium space in Clarke Quay, S$20,000 in funding and training in an INSEAD Executive Education programme, what kind of ideas have the initiative attracted?

Ideas from Singaporeans from the creative, such as a pub with dynamic drinks pricing, to the utterly bizarre in the form of insect cuisine. Here is a look at some of the top ten entries:

1. RADIOactive

RADIOactive empowers brands to operate their own Radio channel, communicating with targeted audiences via mobile devices. With a 24/7 International Party Radio Channel, the space will house the studio and function as an outlet for prize redemptions, sampling and venue for making on-site paid  dedications that go to charity.

2. Amnesia

Visitors are encouraged to temporarily forget where they are when in Amnesia, with its full 360-degree multimedia projectors that take visitors around the world as they enjoy on signature drinks and cocktails.

3. Bon Soir – Dark Dining

Imagine taking a meal in absolute darkness. Embark on an extraordinary culinary adventure where the visually impaired  are hired and trained to serve as professional waiters/guides. This idea is not new, though.

4. Hemeryx – The Bar That Connects

A bar that uses interactive wall to change ambiance, interactive tables play games with each other and strangers at other tables. As Hemeryx expands worldwide, people can connect with strangers chilling elsewhere on Earth.

5. OliveScreens

OliveScreens combines two best things in life – food and movies. The food menu and ambience of the restaurant, depends on the movie shown in the restaurant. For instance, if a French movie is shown, authentic French cuisine is served.

You can view the rest of the top ten entries here.

The judging panel consisted of representatives from INSEAD, Standard Chartered Bank, Pernod Ricard Singapore, Origo Ventures and other partners. However, it does looks like the shortlisted entries are heavily skewed towards dining or F&B – perhaps this has something to do with the fact the competition’s driven by Martell VSOP?

(I’ll pass on the bugs, thanks.)

Adrian Tan, founder of Antenna Consulting, wants to challenge youth to find their passion in life.

Ex-schoolteacher and founder of training consultancy Antenna Consulting, Adrian Tan, has always been passionate about working with young people. He likes to see a young person thrilled at what they’ve learnt, and finding that drive to want to succeed in life. It’s the reason he’s a leader in his church’s youth group, and why he became a teacher for four years at Nan Hua High School. “You are investing in something that has infinite returns,” says 29-year old Adrian. ”You never know what could happen in 10 years time when that introverted student becomes a public speaker!”

While at Nan Hua, he had the autonomy of planning interesting lessons using technology. He remembers fondly the time he had the opportunity to share technological applications for education with then Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam (who is now Singapore’s Finance Minister) and King of Cambodia Norodom Sihamoni. “We showcased the use of Tablet PCs and later, introducing the use of podcasting for lessons.”

Making Learning Purposeful

But somewhere into the second year of teaching, Adrian became very disturbed that most of his students – many of whom were academically above-average – were apathetic about their lives, as well as on social issues. “Most of them didn’t even know what they want to do, or what their passion was,” he says. “And almost all of them didn’t relate what they were studying to its real world applications.” At the same time, his wife Alison, who also happens to be a schoolteacher, was telling him about how there was a real need to find a way to get the students in her school engaged in learning a trade skill rather than mere academic subjects.

Being involved in a rock band – Adrian was the lead singer of local punk rock band Pensionstate for more than 11 years – had taught him more about collaboration, personal effectiveness, leadership and event organization – far more than his education ever did. “It is in these years of not ever making money from music that I have been intrigued by the creative process through intrinsic motivation.”

“Why do people do what they love and push boundaries in their passion, which is intrinsic, but hate their school and work when their reward is extrinsic?” he asks. “If we are able to bring to class the real world application to curriculum, learning will be purposeful and the motivation to learn is intrinsic,” Adrian reasons.

That was the birth of Antenna Consulting – the idea to bring to the classroom real world applications to curriculum, to make learning purposeful, and the motivation to learn, instrinsic.

Challenging the Status Quo

Adrian says that it was a big decision when he quit as a teacher in December of 2008 – it was the lowest point of the global recession and Alison was eight months pregnant. It was a tremendously difficult period, he reveals, but managing to successfully convince his parents, his wife, her parents, and his school principal of his idea was an amazing breakthrough. “(It) proved that the concept is doable,” he remembers.

Adrian then pumped in S$30K of his own savings to start Antenna, with another S$30K from silent partners.

Antenna programs are customized to help schools go beyond their curriculum goals. Its target market, naturally, are education institutions that needs help crafting meaning education solutions with a real-world perspective. Adrian believes that as a former educator who understands the educational system and its needs, helps sets him apart from his competitors.

But he insists that his biggest competition comes not from similar service providers such as High Achievers or Mastereign, but the schools’ indifference and adherence to the status quo when it comes to education. “The key challenge was to convince schools that change was needed in the way training programs are run, and convince the key decision makers out there to try you out.”

But there are forward-looking schools, and school educators. In the eight months that Antenna has been in operation, they’ve signed on five schools as clients, including a 5-day workshop for Crescent Girls’ School on ’21st century skills’. “Seeing (the girls) get so inspired was a proof of concept that greatly encouraged us.” Antenna also regularly works with industry partners to develop CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiatives for schools.

Focusing On “Doing Great Work”

Antenna’s strategy for 2010, Adrian says, is to ‘do great work and be seen doing so’. “We aim to focus on our current school clients and provide exceptional service. This will secure us more training jobs from the current schools we service as they become more confident of our service quality.” Quality, he insists, is critical in his industry. He says that the problem with most training vendors is that they try to do too many things, and have their hands in everything. “They outsource their trainers and, in the end, training standards drop.”

“We try to evolve organically and ensure that all our trainers are properly trained to facilitate.” In the meantime, Antenna expects to spend this year on research and development, continually crafting and iterating its programs before scaling out to more schools next year. They also aim freely share training initiatives at education forums and on social media.

Views on Entrepreneurship

“I have always admired entrepreneurs since I was young, and found it amazing that every product and service you use daily were (once) merely ideas in someone’s head,” Adrian muses. “Even though I became a civil servant after graduation, it was constantly bubbling inside of me, that one day I would step out and do something on my own.” (Incidentally, his sister Adrianna – a popular travel blogger at Popagandhi.com- also started her own business Pen To Pixel.)

One of the key lessons he learnt during about entrepreneurship was clarifying his idea. Don’t give up even if your idea doesn’t seem clear at the start, he says. “As I went through the first six months, articulating it to people, bouncing off mentors, crafting my elevator pitch, asking teachers and students about the problems they faced, the direction becomes clearer and clearer.”

“As a friend once shared – it’s easier to steer the car if it’s moving!”

His final parting words? ”Remember the idea you had? You have five seconds to get enthusiastic over it. Now!”

Christian Arno of Lingo24: Loving the idea of a global business.

September 26th, 2001 – Oxford University languages graduate Christian Arno registers his new translation company Lingo24 as an official business. Arno and a handful of home-based employees prepare to make their mark within the translation industry.

September 26th 2009: Lingo24 has 112 full-time employees working across four continents, clients in over sixty countries and an annual turnover of over US$6m.

So what happened in those eight years? And what was the inspiration behind what is now one of the UK’s biggest translation companies?

Let’s backtrack a little to 1999, when Christian Arno was on a year’s study at a university in Italy as part of his degree course. Along with a few friends, they decided to found a small online translation company called tgv24.com. The plan was to make a little beer money and perhaps make enough to help subsidize their studies.

They did not too badly as it happens. But it made Arno realize that there was genuine potential to build a serious online translation company. At the time, the Internet was still emerging and was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is today. No translation companies were using the Internet to its fullest potential.

A Home-Based Business

After graduating in the summer of 2001, Arno decided to go for it and launched Lingo24, opting for the name because he planned to operate round-the-clock. He aimed to market his company entirely on the World Wide Web, something that no other translation company was doing at the time.

One of the key factors in Lingo24’s early success was that they were home-based. No premises meant no expensive overheads, and hence they could offer prices up to 30-percent less than established competitors. Furthermore, because Christian was based in his parents’ house in Aberdeen – one of the world’s most prominent oil and gas hubs – he was introduced to some big companies and won some big contracts early on. This initial growth spurt saw Arno take his business abroad, opening virtual, home-based operations in New Zealand in 2003 and then China in 2004.

Overseas Expansion

With operations established across multiple time-zones, Lingo24 could now effectively manage projects ‘out of hours’, so to speak. When the UK closed for business, the project management reigns would be passed to a manager elsewhere in the world.

A major growth milestone occurred in 2005, when a main operational hub was opened in Timisoara, a small university city in Romania. With an excellent technical university and the city’s high degree of multilingualism, Lingo24 could recruit highly talented individuals and develop the next phase of Arno’s growth plans. It took its international operations further in January 2008 when it opened in Panama, another multicultural, multilingual country that also happened to already be an established service centre for the nearby United States. Lingo24 could now build its business in the lucrative North American market, and also offer an additional option for round-the-clock support for clients in other countries.

Its first physical office space was finally opened in August 2008, in the Scottish capital city of Edinburgh. A vibrant, multicultural city with several excellent universities, Edinburgh was the perfect city to establish its global headquarters.

Over the years, Christian’s drive and vision has also seen the company and himself shortlisted for numerous awards.

Navigating The World Wide Web

It’s also worth mentioning the role that online marketing has played in Lingo24’s rise from a small home-based business into an international multi-million dollar business. Search engine optimization has been a key strategy. A significant proportion of its revenue comes via search engines, through ranking highly on Google and other search engines for key search terms such as ‘translation services’, ‘legal translation services’ and ‘UK translation company’.

This year, Lingo24 expects sales to continue on an upwards trajectory. Predicted turnover is expected grow year-on-year by over 30 percent to well over US$7m.

Content for this post was contributed by Nora Zavalczki of Lingo24, and adapted and edited for publication here.

Up to 20 companies will be chosen to present to a distinguished group of panel members, including James Hong, co-founder of HotorNot.com, Ashwin Navin, partner of i/o ventures, and a co-founder of BitTorrent, and Jupe Tan of Plug and Play Tech Center, amongst others.

Space at all the events is limited, so you may like to register as soon as possible.