What to focus on with Magento during your startup. Presented at MeetMagento 2014 Romania

1. Magento
Startup & Growth

2. About me
• CEO and founder of MindMagnet
• Developer background
• In business from 2005
• Launched first Magento in 2009
• Currently running a 30 developers agency in Cluj-Napoca

3. Contents
• The Plan
• Choose your platform
• Choose your developers
• Design: Template or Custom?
• Decide your functionality
• Your catalog
• Hosting
• Marketing
• Maintenance: Monitor, Improve
• Customer Service
• Grow

4. The Plan
The questions you’ll need to ask yourself:
• What are you selling?
• Profit margin?
• What are your projections?
• Who is your competitor?
• What can you do better? (write this down, you’ll need to execute
on this)
• How much can you invest?
• How much of this can go into your store?

5. Choose your platform
Magento
Other
open-source
Hosted Solution Custom Built
Features High Medium Medium Low
Custom Design Yes Yes No Yes
Quality
(stability, speed)
High Low – Medium Medium Medium - High
Build Cost Medium Medium - High Very Low - Free High
Hosting Cost Medium - High Medium Low – Medium Medium
Dependency
Low Medium Very High High
(host, dev)

6. Choose your platform
What are your priorities?
• Budget
– go for hosted, but choose something you can easily migrate away from
• Quality
– go for Magento
• Low Dependency
– go for Magento

7. Choose your developer
Depending on the platform you picked, choose
the most experienced team you can afford, trust
and enjoy working with.

8. Design
Custom or Template?
Custom design is best, but it will cost you.
If you go with template, pick one you like as it is and
stop making changes to it.
What to focus on
• Make it easy to use
– A user interface is like a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not that good
• Be clear on everything
– specs, pricing, delivery, warranty, etc.
• Make it so your clients can contact you
• Responsive!

9. Decide your functionality
MVP: Minimum Viable Product
Look at the plan and see what you need/can/want to
beat your competitors on
Nice functions: add a few (a nicer checkout, a nicer
cart, stop there)
You really want to have (it’s free): transactional emails
(Mandrill), newsletter (Mailchimp), credit card payments
You think you need, but you don’t:
• ERP
• CRM
• fancy functionality

10. Your catalog
Maybe the most important thing to focus on
Products
• Good pictures
• Great descriptions
• Complete specifications
Categories
• Good structure
• Good ordering and filtering
– specs, stock, price… think of
what you’re looking for
• Good search

11. Hosting
Magento is greedy, don’t fight it, accept it.
• VPS? … Slow
• Dedicated? … Expensive
• Cloud? … Scalable (Fast & Inexpensive)

13. Hosting
Hire a good team to set you up
CDN

14. Marketing
Traditional marketing
• SEO? Yes!
• Social Media? Be present, engage and don’t overinvest
• Ads? Maybe
• Price comparison? Depends…
• Newsletter? Collect emails, but don’t send out any until you have a good base
• Blog? Only if you really need it…
• Conversion optimisations? Yes!
But there’s more to it
• focus and be consistent
• trust: warranty and return policy

15. Maintenance
Uptime
• Monitor
• Have sysadmin and/or developer on
call
Marketing
• Google Analytics
• Mandrill
• Google Alerts
• Price directories
Dev/Server
• keep the server software up to
date
• keep Magento and the extensions
up to date

16. Customer service
• Email / Ticket support
• Chat support
• Phone support

17. Grow
• Improve your logistics
• Focus on sales Increase your marketing
• Add those nice functions you dreamed
about
• Do a Black Friday … and stay online

18. Thank you!
vlad.stanescu@mindmagnetsoftware.com
ro.linkedin.com/in/vladstanescu
Twitter: @vladstanescu
www.mindmagnetsoftware.com