Saving Time and Money

Saving Time and Money

COMPANIES by Dave Szymanski | Tampa Bay Editor

St. Petersburg's RapidVector takes a different approach to Web site development locally: It sells its product to resellers and uses a workforce primarily in India.

Hundreds of Web services companies dot the United States, including many along the Gulf Coast.

So how does RapidVector Web Technologies LLC, a startup St. Petersburg company created this year, hope to carve a niche?

Among other things: Cost and speed. It has cut costs, using a 30-person workforce in India for development and technical support. The five-person staff in downtown St. Petersburg only does marketing and administrative work.

And it is selling its Web development tools to resellers, professionals who can use the RapidVector designs to create Web sites in less than a day, in some cases. The niche for this could be growing as more companies are frustrated with the time and the cost for building or revamping their Web sites.

The RapidVector program also allows resellers and clients to work on Web site designs, such as databases, without intimate knowledge of design programs. It's easier. It's less expensive. And that's good news to small businesses, who often don't have time or budgets for sophisticated Web sites, company executives say.

The business owner has the option of building his own Web site using any of the 1,500 stock RapidVector designs. Among the many available drag-and-drop features are a shopping cart, event registration manager, blog and custom forms manager. There is no page limit and customers can lay out pages and preview them before going live.

RapidVector also has a site for real estate agents as well as applications for mortgage brokers, chambers of commerce, associations and franchise operations. RapidVector is both a content management system and intranet management system.

The precursor to RapidVector is a sister company in St. Petersburg, JCTWeb, which designs Web sites. JCT has been the lone reseller for RapidVector until now. The company has signed up five more.

"We did over 200 sites last year," says Jim Shumate, chief operating officer of RapidVector. "No one does that kind of volume."

RapidVector's niche is small businesses, but its content management program, allowing clients to do updates to their Web sites, is not entirely unique in the industry, says Kevin Hourigan, CEO of Tampa-based Web site developer, Bayshore Solutions.

RapidVector targeted the small business audience when it recently offered free Web sites to members of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce. It has done about 50 of those sites and is hoping those members will buy other services from the company, such as search engine optimization.

"It's audience is really, really, really small businesses who may have hired a guy in a garage that didn't have tools," Hourigan says. "To a company with revenues of $1 million or higher, it (content management) is an expectation. We built a content management system in 1997. I have over 2,500 companies I work with and every one has content management systems."

Even so, RapidVector's product allows for faster turnaround designs, Shumate says, in some cases, as quick as 30 minutes. The 10.5-hour time difference between Ahmadabad, India and St. Petersburg allows for work orders to be turned around often within one working day.

Hourigan says 200 Web sites in a year was "not unrespectable," but the RapidVector system is not custom design, from scratch, like Bayshore's work. So that saves time. The trade off is that the sites are not as unique.

"It's great for a very small company, like a dry cleaner and a pizza place," he says. "They get one of those templates. In the business I'm in, we do it all from scratch, the requirements are unique. If you wanted to design a brochure, could you do it in 30 minutes?"

Jeff Wilson, CEO of 352 Media Group outside of Gainesville, which does the Outback Steakhouse and American Express Web sites and did 300 sites last year, agreed.

"They are a Web site template shop," Wilson says. "They have a bunch of sites in a library, a bunch of template redesigns. People can select from the designs and edit the content. It's an easy-to-use system. This targets the smallest of small businesses."

But they're not all small. Among RapidVector's clients is Dagwood's, a restaurant chain that will generate more than 4,600 Web sites in the next five years.

Hourigan did say that RapidVector's India presence was unique.

"It's unique for a local company," Hourigan says. "We've chosen to adopt a local presence, using Tampa skill sets. Magnetic, eSolutions and other companies have chosen the same. It's patriotism. I'd much rather grow a business in the community than have resources be offshore. Putting my head on the pillow each night, I sleep better."

But like other Amerian companies, RapidVector is able to use India to lower costs, cut development times and pass the savings to customers. India also has a large pool of IT professionals.

The resellers it works with charge less per hour than companies such as Bayshore, making Web sites more affordable for clients. In some cases, the total savings are thousands of dollars, notes CEO John Tuncer.

In addition, the reseller working on a client's Web design determines which pages the client can have access to, so the clients cannot dismantle the site by mistake, Shumate says.

"We give them the keys to the car, but they need a seat belt and navigation, too," he says.

RapidVector supplies all the services for clients. It packages them so the client has all he needs to run a Web business. It provides training, support and lead generation.

Tuncer, who worked as a hotel manager and in the retail jewelry and jewelry manufacturing businesses, came from Turkey to the United States in 1990. In 1995 he began offering online consulting and founded JCT, which is named after his initials. He raised $300,000 in about a month recently to create RapidVector to market the Web design product. He is looking to raise $1 million more to market the product.

"We don't have an idea," Tuncer says. "We have a product. We have a proven model behind us."

In the future, Tuncer would like to offer more Web services, branching out from Web design. Although, he also wants to sign up 1,000 resellers in the next two years to deploy RapidVector designs.

"In the future, Web development will be a small portion of what we do," Tuncer says. "Our goal is to implement these services into RapidVector. We want these not only to be Web sites, but businesses' main tool from start to finish."

BY THE NUMBERS

RapidVector

revenue estimates

2007 $2 million

2008 $12 million

2009 $50 million

AT A GLANCE

Company: RapidVector Web Technologies LLC

Industry: Web services company

Key: Continue to hone Web development model and market it nationally through resellers, keeping costs and time down.