A new name for a new start

Things have changed a lot in the E-resistible world. We are now open in France. We have grown the team a little. Now we are more of a company and less of a student start-up, we are hoping to move things at a faster pace. Although the everyday work is definitely still start-upy…

One thing which always bothered us with the move in France was the name of the site. We’ve always been huge fans of the name E-resistible, but most of our outside counsel was telling us it was crap. About 2 months after we started at Warwick, we were facing the decision: do we change now, or keep it forever? We decided to stick with it, and I never regretted that decision. In fact, we had nothing better and it is pretty cool.

But with the move to France, there we two things to take into consideration

  1. Should we take this chance of having a different name which could make our lives easier
  2. As we’re launching in a competitive market, should we use the name to have an advantage in SEO?

Question 1 was totally arbitrary. Question 2 was a major concern for me. So we decided that the name chosen would need to be something with “delivery” or “livraison”. We liked the UK/Anglo-saxon heritage of the site, so we chose to use FoodLivraison.

It worked out well for us. Our rankings are solid relative to the age of our site and it is different to competitors.

However, we have very high ambitions for our company. I think that with a focus on the quality of our restaurants and the user experience of our site, we will be able to make the difference in an industry that is growing but not innovating.

But with strong ambition, you need to have a strong name. We need to build a brand. This brand needs to be international, so all sites need the same name. We need to mark the end of an era and the start of something truly new, we need a new name.

So that’s what we’ve done, after a month of searching, we found it. It’s hidden underneath our logo, click on the image to go check it out!

 

New name

We’re back!

I haven’t been posting in a while as E-resistible’s implementation in France took a bad turn a couple of months ago. I decided not to post until things were completely clear and the company was up and running.

And it finally is! We launched the company in France about a month ago, you can read E-resistible’s press release here.

Here’s a screenshot of FoodLivraison, compared with E-resistible!

 

E-resistible

 

FoodLivraison

A lot of things have changed, for the best.

We’ve got some really exciting news scheduled to be released in the first half of January. One of my NY’s resolutions will definitely be to start tracking progress here again, so stay tuned!

Comment créer la structure juridique d’une entreprise (SAS) en France

EDIT: 29th Dec – added information on “apports en nature” and updated strategy to bring on investors despite complications of entrepreneurs needing to bring pro-rata cash.

J’ai perdu beaucoup de temps à essayer de comprendre comment monter une entreprise en France. Malgré les efforts du gouvernement pour la simplification de ce processus, il n’existe aucune ressource parfaite et le sites sont très mal conçus. Maintenant que FoodLivraison existe, j’ai toutes les démarches en tête et souhaite maintenant les partager.

Ce sont les démarches pour la création d’une SAS, Société à Actions Simplifiées, le type de structure que la plupart des jeunes entreprises devrait adopter. C’est la plus simple, flexible et moins chère. Les démarches administratives sont beaucoup moins lourdes. Avec une SAS, vous pouvez faire à peu près ce que vous voulez par la suite (augmentation de capital, vente/cession de parts) sans devoir tout déclarer systématiquement.

Un autre point, il s’agit ici d’une SAS à capital variable. Cela signifie que vous êtes libres de faire des augmentations/réductions de capital, entre deux seuils que vous définissez dans les statuts. C’est très utile car ça permet de commencer petit, puis d’injecter plus de capital. Mais le processus pour une SAS normale est identique.

Voici les étapes:

1. Ecrire les statuts:

Bien sûr, l’idéal est de faire appel à un avocat pour la rédaction des statuts, mais ce n’est pas toujours possible. La meilleure technique est de prendre les statuts d’une autre entreprise similaire et d’adapter le contenu. Il existe aussi des modèles en ligne. Mais les statuts de toutes les entreprises existantes sont publiques, il suffit d’aller au greffe (pour Paris, c’est au tribunal de commerce, quai de corse) et de demander une copie.

Il faut en faire 6 copies. Faire attention de mettre la date la plus près du dépôt de tout ce dossier au greffe (voir fin des étapes), car il faut que les statuts soient signés dans le mois de la création de l’entreprise. Il faut parapher chaque page et faire signer tous les actionnaires.

2. Faire la liste des souscripteurs:

Un point un peu compliqué dans la création et qu’il n’est pas possible en France pour les fondateurs de faire des apports en industrie pour leurs actions. C’est à dire que le deal avec un investisseur où vous pouvez lui accorder 20% pour 100k€ et vous 80% en tant qu’entrepreneur n’est pas possible, il faut que chaque actionnaire apporte le cash au prorata. Donc pour avoir les 100k dans les comptes, il faut 20k de lui et 80k de vous. Il existe deux solutions:

  • L’investisseur vous prête l’argent directement: un transfert préalable dans votre compte personnel est donc nécessaire. Le problème est que la dynamique d’investissement change complètement: votre investisseur devient un prêteur. Autre conséquence, la valorisation change complètement, elle est maintenant de 100k€ plutôt que 500k€. De plus, vous prenez une part du risque que l’investisseur prenait à l’origine, car en cas de faillite, vous êtes redevables à l’investisseur pour les 80k€.
  • Créer une petite structure tout seul, puis faire une augmentation de capital: Vous montez une SAS avec un petit capital, par exemple 1000 € avec 100% des actions. Puis de faire une augmentation de capital quelques mois plus tard, en faisant une Assemblée Générale Extraordinaire avec une augmentation de la valeur des actions pour arriver aux 80/20.
L’on peut aussi faire des apports en nature (Propriété Intellectuelle, ordinateurs, meubles etc…). Cependant, c’est compliqué et ça prend plus de temps (ajouter 30 jours). Pour faire cela, il faut faire appel à un commissaire aux apports. Il faut aller au Tribunal du Commerce avec un formulaire pour demander accès à un commissaire. Puis, il faut présenter le dossier et recevoir un certificat. Un peu complèxe et ne faire que s’il y a de la réelle valeur à apporter.

Il faut donc faire une liste, c’est simplement un doc word, en 4 copies, avec:

LISTE DES SOUSCRIPTEURS D’ACTIONS

Monsieur …, né le …, à …, demeurant …, de nationalité …, représentant de la Société … SAS actuellement en voie de formation dont le siège social se situe au …, déclare que la somme de …€ représente le montant des apports en numéraire de la Société par Actions Simplifiées, ainsi qu’il a été versé par l’ensemble des actionnaires.

Liste des Actionnaires Nombre d’Actions Somme Versée
Nom 8000
Nom 2000

Total :

..

En conséquence, conformément aux dispositions légales en vigueur, la somme ci-dessous demeurera bloquée en compte social :

… Euros

La présente liste et le présent état sont certifiés par …, Président de la Société

A …, le … :

3. Déposer le capital à la Banque

Il faut contacter une banque et avoir un rendez-vous avec un conseiller. Expliquer le projet, s’arranger sur les termes (négocier pour avoir plusieurs mois gratuits etc…). Puis, vous irez signer la convention avec eux et déposer les chèques (un de chaque actionnaire représentant le montant de sa somme qu’il doit verser). Ils prendront une copie des statuts. Ils doivent vous remettre, une fois que les chèques sont passés, 2 originaux de l’attestation de dépôt des fonds. Demandez en plusieurs copies, ça sert toujours.

4. Parution légale

Une énorme arnaque mais obligatoire. J’ai longtemps cherché, la moins chère est chez Le Parisien

Réduisez au maximum les caractères. Payer en ligne et l’attestation est envoyée par email.

5. Local commercial

Il vous faut un justificatif pour votre siège, souvent un bail, un acte de location ou mieux, un contrat de domiciliation.

6. Copies des cartes d’identité

Demandez 3 copies pour chaque actionnaire, signées, et gardez les, c’est toujours utile.

7. Déclaration de non-condamnation

A remplir par le Président:

DECLARATION DE NON CONDAMNATION

Je soussigné…, deumeurant…, né le…, à…, fils de … et de …, déclare sur l’honneur, conformément à l’article 17 de l’arrêté du 9 février 1988 relatif au Registre du Commerce et des Sociétés, n’avoir fait l’objet d’aucune condamnation pénale, ni de sanction civile ou administrative de nature à m’interdire de gérer, d’administrer ou de diriger une personne morale, ou d’exercer une activité commerciale.

Fait à:… le…

Signature

Article 2 de l’ordonnance n° 58-1352 du 27décembre 1958, réprimant certaines infractions en matière de Registre du Commerce (Journal Officiel du 29 décembre 1958)

Article L.123-5 du code de commerce

Le fait de donner, de mauvaise foi, des indications inexactes ou incomplètes en vue d’une immatriculation, d’une radiation ou d’une mention complémentaire ou rectificative au registre du commerce et des sociétés est puni d’une amende de 4 500 € [30 000 F] et d’un emprisonnement de six mois. Les dispositions des deuxième et troisième alinéas de l’article L. 123-4 sont applicables dans les cas prévus au présent article.

8. Remplir le M0

Il en faut 3 copies, toutes signées. Le formulaire se trouve ici

9. Aller au RCS

Avec tous les documents ci-dessus et aller déposer le dossier. Le RCS à Paris est près de Châtelet, à la CCIP. C’est même le bureau 9 si vous voulez tout savoir! Il faut déposer le dossier, puis ils l’envoient au greffe. Si tout se passe bien, vous recevrez vos K-Bis à l’adresse du siège. S’il y a quelque-chose, vous recevrez une demande d’informations complémentaires et devrez aller au greffe.

10. Aller à la banque

Avec l’extrait de KBis pour débloquer les fonds.

11. Acheter les registres

Il y a quelques registres qui sont obligatoires, c’est un peu les registres de l’activité et des décisions de l’entreprise. Ceux qu’il faut avoir sont le registre des mouvements de titres et le registre des assemblées générales. Celui pour les AG doit être paraphé par le greffe. Il faut donc les commander, ARC Registres propose les meilleurs prix et c’est plus simple, ici. Quand vous les recevez, allez au greffe pour donner les feuilles, qu’ils parapherons et vous enverrons par la poste.

J’ai créé ma structure il y a quelques mois donc je me souviens peut-être pas de tout. Mais je vais essayer de garder ceci à jour. Si vous avez des commentaires, n’hésitez pas à me contacter.

Mike Sellers – Startup Advice

I just read this post on Quora by Mike Sellers.

The question was: As first time entrepreneurs, what part of the process are people often completely blind to?

His answer is great:

An idea is not a design
A design is not a prototype
A prototype is not a program
A program is not a product
A product is not a business
A business is not profits
Profits are not an exit
And an exit is not happiness.

It’s a very interesting illustration of the steps of building and exiting a startup, and reminds us that it isn’t all about the exit. Looking back at what I’ve done, I realise that I’ve somehow managed to do an error at each of the steps. Having a great idea that’s impossible to design, a fantastic product which couldn’t be a business etc… So from now on, I’m going to keep this framework in mind.

Exploring the world of pitching

Having started to explore in depth the world of pitching and sales, I’ve come to realise there are so many fields I know little about when it comes to presentations. I’ve always spent a great deal of time on the preparation, understanding what the audience expects, anticipating questions. But room dynamics and listener categorisation were unknown to me.

For anyone interested in this topic, and because I want to find a place to store these links, check out this post by Mark Suster, an entrepreneur turned VC who’s ability to present complex information simply and clearly is quite outstanding. Somewhere on that site, there’s a video of him talking through a Partner Meeting and his ability to outline the key features is very impressive.

Pitching

Some of you may know that I enjoy pitching. I think it takes huge amounts of work to get the presentation just right and I put a lot of effort into any pitch I do.

I also spend a lot of time looking at other people pitch to see what new things they can come up with. Innovation in the way you share your information and being able to surprise and wake up the audience is all down to creativity and work. I stumbled upon this site which has a bunch of videos of some great pitches. Some I think should not be up there, but it is definitely worth checking out.

But I think this guy has it just right, the part with Trump:

A new way to interact with information

Qwiki - click to experience

Over the past week, I’ve been obsessed with Qwiki.

I only heard about it through it’s insane amounts of iPad App downloads and checked it out. Now everything I look up, I start there. It is quite addictive, you easily try out another related topic and end up knowing quite a lot about the field you started off in.  I would say it’s the future of learning.

They’ve got a great API which lets you control the theme of the search to match your site when you integrate with it. We’re going to have a go at inserting it on the food order confirmation page on e-resistible. That way, when users place an order and are waiting for the confirmation from the restaurant, they can learn a little something !

Unfortunately, wordpress doesn’t accept APIs or JS, so click here, for the new experience!

Finally, we’re stepping up – acceleration

If you’ve been following this blog recently, you’ll realise that things were moving relatively fast for a while. We got things up and running, the whole team set up, the offices rolling. But we hit a big obstacle on the tech side of things. I guess that’s always the issue with being an online business. Maybe one day i’ll diversify into selling shoes or something. Although there are probably even more problems there…

Following some translation halts, we faced the problem with getting E-resistible and Foodlivraison running simultaneously using the same systems in the back-end. It seems that we could get one working, but the other would break. It happened for 3 days, but we finally managed to fix it yesterday. Three times, we’d get Foodlivraison online, and then realise that something was broken on E-resistible. Naturally, we’d take Foodlivraison offline, and try again the next day. You see, we can online push updates when the site is ‘not active’, that is when E-resistible is not receiving any orders. That’s after 1am UK time, when E-resistible closes for business. Essentially, when our support customer service shift ends, and we close all restaurants for orders on the site. So there is only a relatively small window for us to get updates live and to test. One other issue, is that we have to stay up late. I’ve had a few late nights recently, but it is all for a good cause!

Only up from here

Only up from here

But otherwise, you will be glad to know www.foodlivraison.fr is now live. We are not yet advertising any of it. That is because all the translations are not finished, the search function for French restaurants is pretty much inexistant, and I am pretty sure the site is riddled with bugs.

However, it is only uphill from here! We’re live and now must move fast to get everything perfect. Search engines will start picking up our content, which is always a nice little start.

The restaurants we have signed up, quite a few now thanks to the sales team picking up momentum, will be put online in a continuous stream, you can test out the menu pages for a few, by scrolling to the bottom of the homepage and clicking on the links at the bottom right. I hope to get the first orders through to them by the start of next week. Even if it is only me bugging my friends to order on the site. After all, that is what they are here for!

 

Lost in translation

Yet again, nothing is live on foodlivraison.fr

We’re facing the issue of having to translate all the text. This process was naturally expected, I translated all the text that could be found on E-resistible into French about two months ago. It was a lot more than I thought it would be. But the problem isn’t the translation, it’s inputting all this new data, replacing the old english content. We’re actually setting up the system so that next time we translate into another language, we don’t need to go through this whole process again. There will just be a section on the back-end where we can input the phrases in english, french, spanish, german etc… and they are inserted automatically. This however means we need to go through all the existing text, and add the little (fr) to say “grab the french version of that text”.

Another issue is the once again ridiculous amount of different browser which interpret code in different ways. Relating to the translation this means that a sentence which is 2 words longer in French no longer fits in the design. And it may fit in Chrome, it doesnt in IE or Firefox etc…

Trying to keep calm...

Anyway, it is driving me pretty insane now. The two sales guys are wondering what the hell is going on, restaurants are calling me asking why the site isn’t live etc… Having to reassure everyone, when I actually have no real control on expect delivery dates, is a bit of a nightmare.

I’m managing to compensate by running a little during the day. I’m training for the Paris half marathon in two weeks. That releases a little steam. I also scream at my computer every now and again.

I showed one of the sales guys around the offices yesterday and we spent a little time catching up. It seems that sales are not as easy as they initially figured. But both still have fantastic energy, so I’m not to worried about it. And to be honest, they are doing very well already. It is just a question of momentum. When you start off well, you can have an insane evening of sales, where every restaurant you visit is interested. But if the first 3 restaurants say no and won’t even listen to you, it is hard to bounce back.

Anyway, this post isn’t filled with great news, but that’s the way things go around. Hopefully i’ll have some fantastic update to give in a couple of days, and we will forget all about this week!

 

Setting up for scaling, waiting for the IT

The countdown is on and playing with my head!

There isn’t much holding us back anymore from really getting to the market. As indicated from the title, the only thing holding us back now if waiting for the site to be finalised. Apparently, some progress was made by Saturday, which is great news. Sunday was a bit of a halt, and I have my fingers crossed that the rest will come soon.

We have however identified a bug with E-resistible, nothing too serious and to do with design and adapting to browsers. IE (internet explorer) kills us due to their serious inability to cope with new frameworks, recent sites etc… We bring something new into E-resistible and 90% of the time it does not work with IE. Another problem is that we are all with Macs, which makes testing with IE a bit of an issue. I am still hoping for the launch on Monday, and think we may be able to make it.

 

 

This have been going great on most of the other fronts.

Sales to restaurants are fantastic. Two things:

  1. The two new guys, which I am sure will stay a long time with Foodlivraison, are very entrepreneurial and hands on. It will probably be, as it was for E-resistible at some point, a case of us asking them to take a break on sales so we can cope with the new restaurants! Although that is always a pleasant problem!
  2. Over the past 2 days I formalised a lot of the sales process, including the pitch, supporting documents, follow-up and tracking systems. I figured that if I aim for a large scale, and manage these guys alone, I’ll need to be very organised. So planning in advance is necessary.

The office is also looking great. I have thought of a few people that will be able to help out during the first couple of weeks of Foodlivraison, people I trust a lot and will be able to catch on instantly. I need to get in touch with most of them to discuss this, but providing I don’t have their schedules too wrong, some stuff should work out.

However, it is a whole lot of work to do alone. The work has kept me up very late, combined with having too many things in mind which stops me from sleeping… Things will sort themselves out in my head as soon as we’re live!

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