Helping Microbusiness Take On Megabusiness

A new Israeli startup hopes to upend the dominance of mega-companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart over local businesses. The idea has been to give small organizations free, consumer-grade tools to manage themselves and connect with each other. Starting Wednesday, SohoOS’ new App Store will bring third-party paid apps to the mix as well.

At first glance, SohoOS may seem like yet-another Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup offering business management and collaboration web applications to small businesses. Yawn.

But this is more than just a few editing and CRM apps packaged together on a pretty website: SohoOS is a highly automated system aimed at the microbusiness segment, a channel that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. And with the new App Store, it’s also a marketplace for additional small business services.

Targeting Microbusinesses

SohoOS’s mission is aimed right at that small business sector, delivering business management tools to try to automate as much as possible for busy small business owners and entrepreneurs. And SohoOS means small: businesses with maybe one or two computers, rather than the typical SMB (small and medium business) model of 10-50 machines.

Why target the really little guys?

SohoOS founder and CEO Ron Daniel argues that micro-businesses often don’t have the luxury to relegate business management tasks to one specific employee.

“It can be someone like a single mom, running a designer business out of her home,” Daniel explains. “She needs to be a designer, not taking up her time managing the business.”

To address this problem, SohoOS provides the prerequisite business management tools: document management, contact management, collaborative tools and the like. But then it goes a step further, automating the basic steps that happen during certain events.

Create an invoice for a new customer, for example, and the customer’s information is added to the contact system and any items on the invoice are automatically removed from the business inventory. “We are trying to consumerize the management platform,” Daniel said.

SohoOS’ model has had some traction: the Tel Aviv-based vendor has almost 850,000 customers signed up since it started in December 2011. Daniel expects that number to top a million soon.