The 1950s is as far removed from the early 21st century as tail-finned station wagons are from lightweight electric cars, sock hops from techno raves or full-service gas stations from ATM self-serve islands.
But that isn’t stopping Todd Johnson, the 32-year-old co-founder of OhGolly.com, from harkening back to the bygone era with a free Internet service designed to be less intimidating for small-business owners.
As the company moves into new offices to make room for the 60-or-so people expected to join the operation this year, officials are seeking $10 million to become to small business web services what Amazon.com has become to online retailing. The company plans to use the money for new employees and possible acquisitions.
Oh golly, indeed.
“We tried to come up with a name for a company that spoke of a time that was friendlier,” Johnson says. “A time when people left their doors unlocked, when your car dash only had two knobs on it. ‘OhGolly’ just spoke of a simpler, fun, friendly, sweet, trusting time.”
But can the button-down business word take such a sugar-coated moniker seriously?
“Everybody knows how to spell ‘Yahoo,’ ” says Amy Schofield, the company’s vice president for marketing and self proclaimed “head cheerleader.”
As Schofield explains the company’s frantic push for more subscribers, it’s clear that the comparison is no accident. Officials hope their “first-mover” advantage,the phenomenon that helped give Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and eBay their dominant market shares,proves equally lucrative in the small-business segment.
The Huntington Beach company provides free Internet access and easy-to-build web sites to small businesses that want to create an Internet presence, even if the business owner doesn’t have a computer. Web newbies can describe what they want their site to look like to one of OhGolly’s phone operators and have it up within minutes.
OhGolly’s approach is reflected in the site’s throwback graphics and a kitschy theme, punctuated with pop art style design and giant buttons that look more like old radios than the tightly packed icons on most web-design software and point-and-click web sites online now.
Signing Up
So far, small business owners seem to be flocking. More than 57,000 subscribers have set up shop online using OhGolly since the company re-launched the service in December. And company officials say they’re adding new subscribers at the rate of 1,000 per day. The audience size will be crucial to the company’s ability to attract advertising and will determine how much the company gets for sales referrals from e-commerce partnerships.
Although companies giving away free Internet access or web hosting services are easy to find these days, Johnson hopes to differentiate his company through its hand-holding and cold-calling efforts, taking the initiative to contact small-business owners rather than waiting for them to call.
And while many free Internet services have thrived on so-called “viral marketing” efforts (or word-of-mouth and e-mail from happy customers), OhGolly officials say telephone sales are a more efficient way to reach small-business owners not yet online.
“You can’t catch a virus if you’re not touching anyone,” Schofield says.
OhGolly’s strategy seems to work well for the segment. Wazzu Corp., another Orange County company that builds web sites and provides Internet access for small-business owners, uses a similar marketing technique.
Revenue Sources
With no revenue from its free web sites or access, OhGolly hopes to make money by selling e-commerce and related small-business services to subscribers and by selling advertising space aimed at the small-business segment.
The market for services aimed at small businesses is expected to reach $50 billion by 2004, and Johnson hopes his company’s audience will be attractive to potential advertisers and affiliates. OhGolly has already forged partnerships with EXP.com, Accompany Inc., OfficeMax, Shop121.com Inc., Eletter Inc., E-Stamp, Staples and iSyndicate Inc.
Despite the stereotype of the tech-savvy 20-something launching a company based on his computer know-how, Johnson says his relevant knowledge comes from his experience as a telemarketer hawking long-distance service. He and OhGolly’s other three co-founders had launched several long-distance resellers, and after hearing many of his long-distance customers talking about their desire to get on the Internet, the four scraped up about $4 million, most of that in private outside investment, to launch the Internet company.
“I had about enough computer knowledge as it took to program my VCR,” he says. Still, he has plenty of telemarketing experience, and that plays a big role in OhGolly’s customer acquisition.
New President
Johnson, who calls himself the company’s “lucky rabbit’s foot,” has stepped aside to make way for President and CEO Frank Kavanaugh, who previously founded Irvine’s QuickStart Technologies Inc., a computer training center that has ranked in Fortune’s list of fastest-growing companies.
Johnson’s new business cards read “Corporate Evangelist,” and while his fellow co-founders have kept an ownership stake, they do not participate in the company’s day-to-day operation. The company employs about 40 people now.
Johnson and his fellow executives hope to give away PCs in an effort to get more small businesses online, and will focus on wooing new subscribers over the next year. His biggest challenge, he predicts, will be educating the 39% of small-business owners not yet online about the benefits of adding a little click-and-order to their bricks and mortar.
“Anybody can build a sophisticated technology engine,” Johnson says. “But really getting into the mind of a small-business owner who has no or very minimal Internet literacy and helping them understand how to use it is a very difficult challenge.” n
