Create Your Online Store In Minutes With One Line Of Code

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Bulavard helps you convert your existing website into an online store with just one line of code. It’s a simple solution for those who want to turn website into a store in just a few minutes. Below is our recent interview with George Cheng, CEO and Founder Bulavard:

Q: George, what is Bulavard’s startup story?

A: Having lived in many different cities across the U.S. and in Asia, I sought to develop a business that was not location dependent — one that could be managed from anywhere in the world. My initial thought was to set up a web-based online store, so I spent time researching, evaluating, and setting up online stores on various platforms. Some were self-hosted open source solutions, while others were SaaS-based solutions. But I was never really satisfied with any of them. Most seemed too complicated, heavyweight, or difficult to customize. So I started looking at building something myself from scratch and decided to turn it into a platform that other people could use as well.

While working on that platform, I discovered that many users were linking their online stores to an existing website that they already owned. I thought that seemed like a terrible experience for their visitors. Why should a website owner redirect their visitors to a completely different website in order to sell their own products? Worse still was that some website owners didn’t even link their website to their online store and instead were trying to drive traffic directly to their online store. Why should website owners have to abandon their existing websites? What if they could just use their existing website, which already had traffic, and turn it into an online store? What if they could do this quickly and without much effort? That’s how I decided that this was what I had to do.

Q: What are main benefits of using Bulavard?

A: Bulavard.com is a platform that turns your existing website into an online store with one line of code. Many people with existing websites that decide they now want an online store will often use solutions that require the abandonment of their existing websites, or require the installation and customization of complicated plugins. The current solutions cause website owners to abandon their existing investments and lose time and money building something new.

Bulavard dramatically reduces the pain of setting up and maintaining an online store for existing websites by offering a platform that:
• Makes getting started easy and fast: Copy/paste a line of code into an existing website and it’s ecommerce-enabled
• Keeps maintenance simple: Websites can be updated without impacting ecommerce functionality since ecommerce functionality is separate from the website
• Allows users to keep their existing website: Saves time and money since existing investments are not abandoned

We are separating ecommerce functionality from websites, so that websites can be implemented on virtually any platform. Even a static website with no database can become an online store by using our platform.

Q: What were the main challenges you faced in developing the service?

A: The main challenges in the development of our service have been dealing with the limitations and legacy of web technologies. We created a platform where we are able to inject our application into another website without much code on that website and without access to its web servers. This is challenging because, by default, web browsers prevent certain types of cross-domain requests needed for this type of application. Additionally, different web browsers provide slightly different implementations of the web technology standards, which make cross-browser compatibility a challenge. There is also the challenge of backwards compatibility for older browsers.

Q: What are the most challenging aspects of being a startup founder?

A: The most challenging aspects of being a startup founder are mostly psychological. It can often times be a lonely process. You have to constantly deal with your fears and self-doubt, while simultaneously exuding confidence and self-assuredness to other people, whether they are investors, employees, customers, or your friends and family. You’re constantly thinking about your customers and worrying about whether they are getting the value they thought they were going to get. And you often consider it to be a personal failure when things don’t go the way you had hoped.

The key is to overcome your psychological hurdles and just keep pushing forward no matter what. There’s a saying that startups are like a marathon, but I think that’s actually the wrong analogy. I think startups are more like a triathlon that you thought was a marathon. You get to the race in your running gear only to discover that you have to swim, and after you come out of the water you realize everyone else is jumping on a bike that you didn’t know you needed, and by the time you get to the running portion of the race, your shoes are still wet and your sides are starting to cramp. But you keep going because you still want to win.

Q: When do you plan to launch it? What are your plans for the next six months?

A: We plan to start on-boarding private beta users very soon and will be listening closely to their feedback. We want to make sure that the experience is smooth and that we are providing the value that they were expecting. For the next six months, we will be focused on the needs of our beta users and further improving the quality and performance of our platform.

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