Technology
Business in Cyberspace
New company offers a Web portal that brings together buyers and sellers in an online marketplace for goods and services
By Katrina Tan
Name: Mayette Cidro-Cubil, chief operating officer; Jimmy Dy, founder and partner; and Willy Ngo, partner
Description: Online web portal for those who wish to put up an online business as a sideline
Contact details: inquiry@SYOBnow.com, or (0921) 7850000
Startup: Approximately P3 million, in May 2005
2007 projected sales: P5 million
SYOBnow, Inc., which stands for Start Your Online Business Now, is a company whose business is to help other people start their own businesses. It recently launched the Philippines' first online marketplace for goods and services, bringing together buyers and sellers through an online Web portal that serves as a complete virtual office.
The idea for SYOBnow first came to Jimmy Dy, who is in the plastics wholesaling business, when he was in Shanghai about two years ago. That was even before the Internet giant Yahoo! acquired Alibaba.com, China's largest e-commerce company, in August 2005. Dy already saw how big the Internet's potential impact on a nation's business could be and thought of similarly harnessing the technology in the Philippines. At that time, though, there were only about 7 to 8 million Internet users in the Philippines, so he thought that it would take the country at least another five years to be ready for his idea.
"Amazingly, however, the number of Filipino net surfers grew much faster than I projected," says Dy. "I therefore decided to actualize my business idea much earlier. I partnered with Willy Ngo, my Bicol kababayan [fellow countryman] who owns a bus fleet, and with Mayette Cidro-Cubil, who agreed to be our chief operations officer. The three of us officially started the company in May 2006."
After almost seven months of development, SYOBnow.com is now up and running. The partners put up about P3 million in capital for it, 65 percent of which went to development costs. The remaining 35 percent is earmarked for marketing.
To create the business-to-business portal platform, SYOBnow.com had outsourced the back-end development to a project manager and a team of seven developers in Minsk, Belarus, a country in north central Europe. The SYOBnow.com system uses the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) web development infrastructure, a bundle of open-source software programs that together runs web sites or servers. The system's framework is ISO-compliant with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the world's developer of technical standards.
Says Dy: "Since the Philippines has one of the highest SMS [short message service available on most digital phones] traffic rates in the world, we decided to add SMS capabilities to the portal features. Thus, using our site, buyers can send SMS inquiries directly from their computer to the sellers. This makes SYOBnow.com not so much a trading company but an online marketplace for buyers and sellers, one where you can post and promote your business or search for and find other opportunities."
The daily operations of SYOBnow.com are handled by an information technology (IT) administrator and three sales executives based in the Philippines. Through telecommunication, the Philippines-based administrator coordinates daily with the IT department in Minsk and goes over all of the content uploaded on the site, making particularly sure that none of it is obscene. The sales executives do fieldwork and assist prospective members in the offline registration process.
The SYOBnow.com website offers two kinds of membership: free and premium. Free buyers are allowed to make postings for products or services they want to buy, use the portal's search tools, and send inquiries to the seller; free sellers, on the other hand, can post products or services to sell, search for buyers, contact them, and send quotations. By paying an annual fee of P3,650, premium sellers can enjoy the following privileges: posting more products and leads, sending and receiving SMS alerts whenever they receive online inquiries, top placement of their postings on the portal's search results, their own mini website on SYOBnow.com, and free e-mail of up to 10 megabytes.
The entire portal is convenient, easy-to-use, and affordable. Says Dy: "For only P10 a day, you can have your own no-maintenance, fully-hosted website on SYOBnow.com. This would cost something like P20,000 if you were to develop it yourself."
The portal should be particularly useful to small entities and to people looking for a sideline business. Indeed, its principal target markets are currently employed individuals, overseas foreign workers, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and exporter organizations.
Cidro-Cubil explains how SYOBnow.com works: "Our goal is to develop a new kind of entrepreneur through the Web. For example, a friend of ours wanted to have her own business but didn't want to give up her regular job. We introduced her to the owner of a flower shop, with whom she made a business tieup to make flower deliveries in her name, each delivery bearing her personal business card. Then we helped her set up an online flower-shop website that sends out newsletters offering her flower-delivery service. Every time she gets an order for flowers, our friend forwards it to the flower shop for arrangement and delivery. Our friend's online flower-delivery business has been doing very well since then, and her flower supplier has also been enjoying sales increases."
Even without doing any formal marketing effort yet-except for e-mail invitations and SMS (text messaging to mobile phones) alerts-SYOBnow.com at the end of 2006 already had a database of 100,000 buyers and sellers and now expects to double it by the time the online portal is formally launched this month. The company projects sales to reach P5 million for the whole of 2007 and expects to recover its initial investment in 18 months.
The third partner in SYOBnow.com, Willy Ngo, has been so impressed with the online market's rapid growth and ease of management that he now plans to set up an online ticketing system for his bus company. "SYOBnow.com enables people to set up new businesses and connect them to buyers and suppliers, while still saving time and money," he says. "I'm sure that my bus company's business can similarly benefit from such an online system. After all, a profitable business is all about increasing sales and decreasing costs."
Dy says about the prospects of SYOBnow.com: "Although there aren't many risks involved, the greatest challenge for us is to educate the public about the benefits of being online. A lot of them still prefer the conventional way of selling wherein the buyer and seller meet first, and they aren't ready for online credit-card purchases yet. That's why we are looking for an office space that can serve as an 'eyeball place'-we call it EB-which is some sort of warehouse that members can use. In that warehouse, sellers can leave the products they've posted on SYOBnow.com so buyers can come and see them. This way, they need not take a leave from their office just to show their products to prospective buyers. It will be a big added convenience to our sellers, whom we expect to come mostly from the employee sector."
To educate the public about its service, SYOBnow.com intends to put up e-newsletters and physical billboards, run radio and TV commercials as well as conduct raffles for free and premium members, and participate in trade fairs. And for the future, Dy looks forward to expanding SYOBnow.com to other English-speaking countries all throughout Southeast Asia.
"At any rate, in SYOBnow.com, the Philippines now has a dynamic facility for everyone to do business-to-business transactions online," he says. "Anyone who has dreamt of having their own business can do so now without having to sacrifice their current work."
Description: Online web portal for those who wish to put up an online business as a sideline
Contact details: inquiry@SYOBnow.com, or (0921) 7850000
Startup: Approximately P3 million, in May 2005
2007 projected sales: P5 million
SYOBnow, Inc., which stands for Start Your Online Business Now, is a company whose business is to help other people start their own businesses. It recently launched the Philippines' first online marketplace for goods and services, bringing together buyers and sellers through an online Web portal that serves as a complete virtual office.
The idea for SYOBnow first came to Jimmy Dy, who is in the plastics wholesaling business, when he was in Shanghai about two years ago. That was even before the Internet giant Yahoo! acquired Alibaba.com, China's largest e-commerce company, in August 2005. Dy already saw how big the Internet's potential impact on a nation's business could be and thought of similarly harnessing the technology in the Philippines. At that time, though, there were only about 7 to 8 million Internet users in the Philippines, so he thought that it would take the country at least another five years to be ready for his idea.
"Amazingly, however, the number of Filipino net surfers grew much faster than I projected," says Dy. "I therefore decided to actualize my business idea much earlier. I partnered with Willy Ngo, my Bicol kababayan [fellow countryman] who owns a bus fleet, and with Mayette Cidro-Cubil, who agreed to be our chief operations officer. The three of us officially started the company in May 2006."
After almost seven months of development, SYOBnow.com is now up and running. The partners put up about P3 million in capital for it, 65 percent of which went to development costs. The remaining 35 percent is earmarked for marketing.
To create the business-to-business portal platform, SYOBnow.com had outsourced the back-end development to a project manager and a team of seven developers in Minsk, Belarus, a country in north central Europe. The SYOBnow.com system uses the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) web development infrastructure, a bundle of open-source software programs that together runs web sites or servers. The system's framework is ISO-compliant with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the world's developer of technical standards.
Says Dy: "Since the Philippines has one of the highest SMS [short message service available on most digital phones] traffic rates in the world, we decided to add SMS capabilities to the portal features. Thus, using our site, buyers can send SMS inquiries directly from their computer to the sellers. This makes SYOBnow.com not so much a trading company but an online marketplace for buyers and sellers, one where you can post and promote your business or search for and find other opportunities."
The daily operations of SYOBnow.com are handled by an information technology (IT) administrator and three sales executives based in the Philippines. Through telecommunication, the Philippines-based administrator coordinates daily with the IT department in Minsk and goes over all of the content uploaded on the site, making particularly sure that none of it is obscene. The sales executives do fieldwork and assist prospective members in the offline registration process.
The SYOBnow.com website offers two kinds of membership: free and premium. Free buyers are allowed to make postings for products or services they want to buy, use the portal's search tools, and send inquiries to the seller; free sellers, on the other hand, can post products or services to sell, search for buyers, contact them, and send quotations. By paying an annual fee of P3,650, premium sellers can enjoy the following privileges: posting more products and leads, sending and receiving SMS alerts whenever they receive online inquiries, top placement of their postings on the portal's search results, their own mini website on SYOBnow.com, and free e-mail of up to 10 megabytes.
The entire portal is convenient, easy-to-use, and affordable. Says Dy: "For only P10 a day, you can have your own no-maintenance, fully-hosted website on SYOBnow.com. This would cost something like P20,000 if you were to develop it yourself."
The portal should be particularly useful to small entities and to people looking for a sideline business. Indeed, its principal target markets are currently employed individuals, overseas foreign workers, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and exporter organizations.
Cidro-Cubil explains how SYOBnow.com works: "Our goal is to develop a new kind of entrepreneur through the Web. For example, a friend of ours wanted to have her own business but didn't want to give up her regular job. We introduced her to the owner of a flower shop, with whom she made a business tieup to make flower deliveries in her name, each delivery bearing her personal business card. Then we helped her set up an online flower-shop website that sends out newsletters offering her flower-delivery service. Every time she gets an order for flowers, our friend forwards it to the flower shop for arrangement and delivery. Our friend's online flower-delivery business has been doing very well since then, and her flower supplier has also been enjoying sales increases."
Even without doing any formal marketing effort yet-except for e-mail invitations and SMS (text messaging to mobile phones) alerts-SYOBnow.com at the end of 2006 already had a database of 100,000 buyers and sellers and now expects to double it by the time the online portal is formally launched this month. The company projects sales to reach P5 million for the whole of 2007 and expects to recover its initial investment in 18 months.
The third partner in SYOBnow.com, Willy Ngo, has been so impressed with the online market's rapid growth and ease of management that he now plans to set up an online ticketing system for his bus company. "SYOBnow.com enables people to set up new businesses and connect them to buyers and suppliers, while still saving time and money," he says. "I'm sure that my bus company's business can similarly benefit from such an online system. After all, a profitable business is all about increasing sales and decreasing costs."
Dy says about the prospects of SYOBnow.com: "Although there aren't many risks involved, the greatest challenge for us is to educate the public about the benefits of being online. A lot of them still prefer the conventional way of selling wherein the buyer and seller meet first, and they aren't ready for online credit-card purchases yet. That's why we are looking for an office space that can serve as an 'eyeball place'-we call it EB-which is some sort of warehouse that members can use. In that warehouse, sellers can leave the products they've posted on SYOBnow.com so buyers can come and see them. This way, they need not take a leave from their office just to show their products to prospective buyers. It will be a big added convenience to our sellers, whom we expect to come mostly from the employee sector."
To educate the public about its service, SYOBnow.com intends to put up e-newsletters and physical billboards, run radio and TV commercials as well as conduct raffles for free and premium members, and participate in trade fairs. And for the future, Dy looks forward to expanding SYOBnow.com to other English-speaking countries all throughout Southeast Asia.
"At any rate, in SYOBnow.com, the Philippines now has a dynamic facility for everyone to do business-to-business transactions online," he says. "Anyone who has dreamt of having their own business can do so now without having to sacrifice their current work."
