Raising Equity and Venture Capital on Main Street

To the tens of thousands of potential entrepreneurs interested in starting an online business, there are lessons aplenty to be learned from Paperlesspost.com.
The roughly one-year-old New York-based company allows consumers to send elegantly designed virtual invitations and greeting cards through email and keep track of responses. In itself, that doesn't sound so gee-whiz. And it's not. The barriers to entry in this market are almost non-existent and the competition is considerable. Aside from Evite, the granddaddy of online invitations (and acting its age), there are online companies like Smilebox.com, MyPunchBowl.com and Socializr.com that are in the online invitations business, not counting the greeting card companies that have online tools for virtual card-sending.
Paperlesspost.com, whose customers sent about 1 million email cards in the company's first year from November 2008 to November 2009, sent another million in the single month after that, according to James Hirschfeld, 23, who co-founded the company with […]