Neil Crookes, tech director at Kong365, explains why the business should win the Startup of the Year category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition:
Kong empowers anyone to sell their products online, through their own professional online store, for free.
We’ve created Kong to be a free antidote for the many pain points e-commerce store owners have. We’ve stepped back and reconsidered the entire process in order to make e-commerce accessible to everyone.
What’s the catch? There really isn’t one. Out of the box you get everything you need to create, run and grow a professional store, without any restrictions. Have as many products you like, use as much bandwidth and storage as you need, and make use of our flexible, customisable default theme - all for free.
We make this all possible by selling more advanced feature power-ups, apps and themes for when your e-commerce business grows to need them.
We’ve experienced phenomenal growth in sign-ups since we launched our freemium service in August 2015. This accelerated when we were featured on website Product Hunt in December 2015, which started a huge spike in traffic, and resulted in press coverage around the world, generating sign-ups from over 100 countries.
That’s not our only growth strategy though; we’ve partnered with marketing students at a local university to help plan and execute innovative and creative, yet cost-effective, marketing strategies. This gives the students the opportunity to put their learning into practice on a real, high-growth potential, exciting brand.
Kong is also partnering with local, national and international business support organisations to help further spread awareness of our service, so we can help support entrepreneurs and the economy.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the top three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
