April 18, 2021 by Alyson Smith

There is an ongoing debate in the business world: When is the best time to start a business?

Entrepreneur Magazine said there’s no time like the present, with technological advancements leading to new opportunities for inspiration and innovation. Forbes Business, on the other hand, thinks the best time to build a business. 59 percent of startup owners believe that it is becoming more difficult to own and operate a small business, according to Forbes.

There is no clear answer to the question of when to start a business, but there is no doubt that the startup landscape is changing.

Director of Product at Mindbody Michelle Neuringer has witnessed this change firsthand. 

Neuringer was on the founding team of SpaBooker, an online appointment booking service founded in 2001 and acquired by Mindbody in 2018. She watched SpaBooker go through significant changes in the years leading up to its acquisition. Most of these changes were rooted in the rapid growth of technology between the 2000s and 2020s.

“You needed a lot of technological know-how to actually get a product going, whereas now, it’s much easier to set something up,” Neuringer said. “Before, it was a much heavier lift to get an idea off the ground.”

SpaBooker and other early tech startups worked with technologies which were new at the time, but are now common. 

“In 2006, SpaBooker was creating an appointment calendar — and this was prior to Gmail,” Neuringer said. “We had to hand-code the Javascript interaction to drag and drop the calendar [because] that [technology] just did not exist.”

These once limited technologies have become easily accessible for those who may lack extensive computer knowledge, an advantage for modern startups.

The growth of the Internet led to a growth in available resources. Young entrepreneurs have a wealth of business knowledge at their disposal, whereas startups founded prior to the 2010s had to dedicate more time and effort to finding the answers to their questions.

“You weren’t relying on too many services to help move you along,” Neuringer said. “You really had to start from scratch.”

Technology available to entrepreneurs today can help to expedite the startup process. Technological expansion was vital to the launch of Celebrate, an online gift-registry that allows users to create personalized interest boards. The Celebrate team utilized online resources like Shopify, a software for e-commerce businesses, and Wix, a website builder, to build their product quickly and efficiently. 

“Having access to sources where you can make a super low fidelity prototype and get it out into the real world in a matter of weeks or months is really, really cool,” Celebrate co-founder and sophomore business student Julie Arnette said. “You don’t need to have specific web development ability in order to make your startup happen right away.”

Social media can also be an asset for small businesses. Jojo Stassel, co-founder of online graphic design studio One Stone Design, said she and co-founder Morgan McKean “learned a ton [about starting a business] from TikTok, Reddit and all those tutorial videos on YouTube.”

McKean echoed similar sentiments, stating the Internet is becoming integral to the startup experience.

“The Internet is ingrained in our generation — understanding how to leverage the Internet and get what you need out of it [and] looking at all the resources that are out there,” she said. “Everyone right now is running on all cylinders of the Internet and reaping the benefits from it.””

The Internet, however, can also hinder small business’ successes by creating overcrowded markets and making it difficult for new startups to make their voices heard. 

“There was a much more narrow lane of how to go about running a business 10 or 15 years ago,” Stassel said. “You open a store and you do X to get Y. Now, there are a million ways we could sell our products, and finding the best one — there are so many possibilities. It can be overwhelming.”

Arnette also recognizes the disadvantages of the Internet.

“Access to knowledge, like having resources available to everybody, is a benefit, but also makes starting a business more competitive”

— julie arnette

Some small businesses succeed without the use of the Internet. Scout Coffee co-founder Sara Peterson said the Internet never held much influence over the success of her startup.

Scout Coffee was founded in San Luis Obispo, California in 2014 around the knowledge that Peterson gained through first-hand experience working for other small businesses.

“I worked at an independent coffee shop in New Jersey after I graduated from college [and] really fell in love with small businesses during that experience,” Peterson explained. “I got to see a small business in action and though, ‘You know, someday I’m going to do this.’”

Scout Coffee used social media to market her business and connect with customers. Peterson was cautious, however, of placing too much value in their social media presence and not enough in more important facets of her business.

“I think that some people can focus a little bit too much on [social media] and create this mirage of a business with all of these beautiful, curated photos, but what happens when I walk in the door?” Peterson said. “To me, [social media] is extra. It’s a little more peripheral. If the core of our business is doing well, then that’s when we can branch out and focus on social media.”

New startups are facing various obstacles besides the Internet, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Many entrepreneurs, however, turned this obstacle into an opportunity for online innovation.

“As a challenge, new startups have to think of ways to consider creating a business that could still thrive in a shut down world,” said Peterson. “There are lots of opportunities for online marketplaces.”

Neuringer said the pandemic resulted in significant technological expansion.

“In a COVID landscape, we’re seeing so many businesses have more success being online, and brick and mortar businesses moving online,” Neuringer said. “COVID provided an opportunity to really accelerate innovation [and] we’re really starting to see some exciting startups that are capitalizing on this change.”

One Stone Design was one of these “exciting startups.”

Stassel and McKean graduated from Cal Poly early in the pandemic with degrees in graphic communications and minors in entrepreneurship. They saw how the pandemic caused the world to become increasingly digitized and seized the opportunity to create their own online business.

“When we graduated, it was a pretty rocky world out there,” McKean said. “We decided we might as well come together and stick out this next however-long-we-can and form something that we always dreamed of doing.”

The startup landscape will continue to change over time, but building a business and bringing an idea to fruition will always be an enriching process.

“When you’re talking about starting a business, I think it’s timeless,” Peterson said. “People that started a business a hundred years ago had the same challenges. It comes down to being able to work through problems and being able to persevere.”