It has become a common (misleading & wrong) practice, that when a user purchases a platform or SaaS, they are required to purchase additional online courses, dedicate extra hours or days to making the platform adjust to their business and are many times abandoned by the platform's team or at least the support gets worse after the first purchase, and because of this, they have no clue what to do, where to go, or how to adapt the platform to their needs. The platform does not even offer guidance in many instances like marketing, SEO, pricing, membership, staff management, feature offering, funneling, growing your business and more. It simply serves to be sold and after which, the users are by themselves to see how they can try to bring their business idea to life. There is no follow up, consistent support, nor the idea of it exists in most platforms.

The fact that the company selling the platform does not follow up on the client at multiple levels, abandons them and does not show any interest in making sure the user is successful while using the platform after the first sell, also creates an issue about the support that was advertised and the one that they end up with after joining. Numerous times the user starts working on a version of the platform that could be bare bones and hard to understand, making the user lose precious time. Apart from this, the lack of a friendly and intuitive user design is evident in many cases like this, including the flexibility to change or allowing the user to change options in a way that can easily adapt the platform to their business model in a quick and efficient way.

The concept of asking clients what they would need in a platform is not new, but the fact that currently, it is a rare thing to offer and not apply it as common ground when building a platform is a big deal, since the end results of the platform would force clients to adapt to the platform, not the platform to their business and lower the success rate of many businesses while using the platform.

Even more, when offering ideas to a platform, most users get canned messages that sounds promising but never deliver on it, making the user wait years for it. On other cases, if a customization is done (eg: Wordpress) and a new update is pushed to the base platform, it breaks or hinders the custom code and makes maintaining a site very difficult if you need any custom work for it.

OED tackles multiple business areas so the owner does not have to worry about them, but still has the power to decide:

• Security - Zero day vulnerabilities, Automatic SSL, Live Monitoring & Unit Tests provide Daily & Weekly updates to the site, making sure Security receives the highest priority & care.
• Stability – The system provides a Smart and Unique way of handling Traffic, Rerouting, Resource Usage, Resource Sharing, Testing sites vs Live sites including bottleneck & downtime Detection.
• Speed - To offer a faster development of the base of OED, it is built & optimized using PHP 8.X (Stage 1). This is later migrated without any impact to GoLang & Rust (Stage 2) showcasing the power & speed the platform can offer. Basically do more while lowering your costs.
• Adaptability - Adapt the platform to your business, not your business to the platform. Create stages for your site for production, development and testing. Decide how to adapt the platform to your needs, test out how it integrates and how it simplifies the way you manage and design all of its functionality. Test small or large changes before sending them live. Create multiple versions of your site or even multiple versions of a specific feature for the site.
• Integration - Ability to integrate with many 3rd party solutions, from Amazon, Salesforce, Zoho, InfusionSoft & Hubspot to Payment solutions, streaming services and more. Just like Zapier, but this time, you have the control. You are also able to migrate from multiple other platforms. From Wordpress and Magento, to Brilliant Directories and edirectory. Test your OED site with real data before going live. Compare both platforms before doing the final migration.
• Intuitive - Built from the ground up thinking as a client, the user experience is based on a non-techy intuitive approach for the platform. Thinking as the actual user helps us deliver a more friendly, user thought design that also caters around amazing designs and enhanced user experiences.
• Flexibility - Based on a Modular approach, all parts of the system can be moved around, attached, enabled, merged and more. You set the rules of what is needed for your business and what you want to offer to your clients. Have a product section and want to merge it with the coupons sections. One click away and now you have products that support coupons and coupons that apply to products in multiple ways. So yes, you could go from a simple blog, to an e-commerce, and end up as an e-directory or e-learning platform, all on the same day. Remember, you are in control.
• Ownership - Control your own files, security and platform integration within your own Cloud Linux Based Servers, using your own resources. Never again depend on 3rd party "hostage hosting providers" that lack privacy, security, flexibility, scalability & stability, but worse yet, control your payments, files and information. Select where in the world you would like to have your dedicated server, improving your SEO and the latency speed for your visitors.
• Scalability – In the case your business starts growing, an advanced AI will notify you whenever more resources are needed, be it more RAM, CPU, Storage Space or even an automatic detection based on traffic. No more sending emails and tickets, or having to do this manually with your hosting provider or platform provider, you are in control. The system will let you know how to handle each situation based on simple rules and save you the trouble and related issues when scalability is in question.
• Support - Includes multiple levels of support. From it's own CRM Ticketing system, to an ERP one, and from an internal support for your business to an external one for your members and clients. Additionally, you get an integrated helpdesk that lowers the responsive time of your IT Management team, apart from also teaching with its online course about how each part of the system works and some ideas that can kickstart your curiosity with the platform. Each module of the system has its own fully documented (and constantly updated) course, to teach you about it, provide ideas on things you could do with it and create case scenarios for you to get familiar with in the business world.
• Maintenance - Decide when and how to apply updates. Customize the experience of selecting which modules to update, which ones to freeze and even test out new features or do rollbacks using your own Development & Staging versions of your site. All of this without paying any additional fees. You decide and test updates, see changelogs and more.
• Future-Proof - The platform adapts new technologies that come out, new techniques and new functionality and design that becomes relevant or useful for the user. With that said, the user will always be able to pick new features and new ideas and apply them on their business site. The platform also takes into account and on a more serious note, the feedback and ideas provided by their users, so it can enhance and grow the platform with the ideas and needs in mind of the users.

Currently there is a paradigm of steps used to create an online business that lacks one key fundamental point: Feedback from the actual users of it. Not only that but it is very apparent that typical software is very rigid, is not future proofed in many scenarios, nor does it include new features based on the same user feedback. In most cases, the software never receives an update or listens to its customers (for decades even).

Online business platforms for example have no way to determine the site owners success rate, improvements they need based on their audience, issues they have in UX or what they need to have a higher chance at succeeding. They have trouble merging or connecting with other existing platforms or to even integrate via an API. Worse of all, some platforms create intentionally unidirectional APIs in which the user is constrained and forced to only use said platform, so they can never grow their business through other alternatives.

There is this learning roadblock, imposed by the platform itself that creates a long huge learning curve for the user. The tendency of using old, obsolete technology does not help either in some platforms, since, by the time the business takes off, it needs to be brought down for updates, and most likely it can’t be updated to a new technology because of compatibility issues.

This thinking trickles down to many more small, medium and large social, financial, and technical issues for the business site, that could be carried down for decades and have a direct impact on the livelihood of the user and their business.

OED tacklets this by listening to their users and offering multiple ways to improve their experience with the platform at the same time having an impact on their clients and other aspects of their business model.

The development of OED is divided into 3 stages:

1. STAGE 1 (Base Platform which is the MVP):

   It focuses on creating the ground work on which the rest of the platform will be based. Offering flexibility, adaptability and scalability from the beginning, not just for the user, but for the developer as well. It will offer the following:

   • Login System that includes Standard Login, Social, Group, Invitation & Referral Login & Sign Up.
   • Dynamic Modules which behave as features, addons or extensions in other products. The great thing about this is, that they act as LEGOS, you can take pieces of them off and adapt them to other modules. The default modules would be Coupon, Product, Article, Photo, Agenda, Event, Video, Job, Classified, Audio since this are found in many other platforms, but at the same time, this modules are generated by a Dynamic Module (The parent module) where you are able to dynamically add features to said module, fields, look and design and more, by simply clicking, dragging and nothing more. No previous knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP or Javascript. You can even merge ideas from multiple modules to create a new one or add components like a streaming video service, storage option, banners and more to them.
   • Ability to quickly adapt one module to another one. Meaning, create a complete module (eg: Automobile, Health, Restaurant, Religion) in less than 15 minutes or use an existing one as base.
   • SEO Page Generation (Create dynamic pretty urls that follow Google guidelines and/or adapt to the way you wish the URLs to show). Not just that but we take SEO as an internal part of the platform, so more than 50 different SEO related Google rules are applied to your content and pages by default.
   • Backup System that handles full, incremental or snapshot backups so you can pick what can get stored without affecting other parts of the data.
   • Integration with Google Servers. From Geolocating members, to geocoding, to addresses, maps and more but also offering the ability to use alternatives like openStreetMap.
   • Import & Export System with smart data detection.
   • Chat System (For the site, the membership level, member, groups, etc)
   • Log & History of every event.
   • Language Manager to be able to control the language of the whole site depending on where the users come from or what language they select on the homepage.
   • Friendly Lead System (Smart matching based on Location, Membership Level, Features and more)
   • Intuitive Website Builder (Drag elements on the site around, position them where you want, change background color or images, set font types and more. Create your own look.
   • Dynamic Email System which offers an event based triggering system
   • Banner Manager
   • Free Trial System
   • Image Optimizer
   • Cropping Tool
   • Category System for all Modules
   • Calendar Manager
   • Review Manager
   • Member Cover System OED
   • Member Management System
   • Flexible Payment System
   • Flexible Search System for all Modules
   • Template & Design Manager for Pages
   • Enhanced Email Manager
   • Join & Pricing Manager
   • Subscription System
   • Web Designer
   • Kanban style Project Management System & Staff Handling

   And any other common feature missing from the list that a user needs...

2. STAGE 2 (Enhances CRM & ERP Capabilities):

   This stage focuses on enhancing the functionality of the owner and its clients. It will offer:

   • Basic CRM System which includes an integrated ticketing system, customer helpdesk, tracking & history and an enhanced billing.
   • Call Center system (Integrates with multiple chat systems)
   • Basic ERP for Accounting, Staff and Projects.
   • Ranking System
   • Achievement System
   • Store (For Products, Classified and others)
   • Forum System
   • Enhancements on Stage 1 based on Feedback from owners
   • API System to integrate with 3rd party sites in an easy way.
   • Feeder System (To send or receive information in JSON, XML or Rest calls)

3. STAGE 3 (Adds more control to the owner over site management):

   This last stage finishes the whole Alpha stage of the platform and provides the base to launch the platform in a Beta version. This includes:

   • Versioning System (Similar to Git)
   • Enhanced Privacy Settings
   • Ability to Clone or create snapshots of the site
   • Ability to rollback parts of the site.
   • Ability to send updates to social sites whenever a member publishes an item of any module.
   • Ability to automate social media interaction (For Marketing)
   • Streaming Service (For Live events)
   • Zapier like integration where OED integrates automatically with more than 100 different other platforms.

• Alpha Stage Launch – Around 12 Months after initial funding
• Beta Stage Launch – Around 12 months after Alpha stage
• Final First Stage Launch – Around 6 months after Beta stage

During all stages, participants are encouraged to provide feedback, ideas and more, so the first version starts out oriented towards your business model.

If you'd like to donate for this project, click here