S.F. starts up Internet portal for startups

San Francisco’s business portal aims to make starting a new business easier San Francisco’s business portal aims to make starting a new business easier Photo: Office Of The Mayor Photo: Office Of The Mayor Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close S.F. starts up Internet portal for startups 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Starting a small business in San Francisco can be a pain, what with the maze of permits, licenses and other strips of red tape to deal with. Not to mention the fear that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.

City Hall wants to make the experience as painless as possible with a new website it touts as “the most robust, comprehensive and user-friendly ever developed for San Francisco businesses.”

Launched this weekend, the San Francisco Business Portal is designed to align the bureaucratic necessities of starting a business with lessons learned from putting a ton of information online to make it easy to absorb and navigate. A kind of “Starting a Small Business for Dummies,” which, having taken a test drive on a desktop and an iPhone, I mean in the best possible way.

“The San Francisco Business Portal puts our small businesses first by bringing together all the information a small-business owner needs to start, stay and grow in San Francisco,” said Mayor Ed Lee, the project’s initiator, in a statement. “This is just the first step in a broader effort to streamline the city’s permit process and make it easier for small businesses to do business in San Francisco.”

Content for the portal, two years in the making, was put together by a team from the city’s Department of Technology, Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Office of Small Business and other agencies, along with Web design firm Tomorrow Partners. A group of small-business owners and business counselors, who had been consulted along the way, tested the site.

“What we heard loud and clear is 'How do I start, where’s the doorway?’” said Todd Rufo, director of Economic and Workforce Development. “The journey map is so important.”

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That includes things to think about before you start dealing with the bureaucracy, like creating a business plan and getting a handle on the financing — helpful hints contained in the portal’s “starter kits.” Pretty much every step — permits and licenses, hiring, managing and growing your business, disaster preparedness, going green, closing a business — is covered.

“We brought a human-centered approach to the project, and looked for common themes,” said Gaby Brink, founder of Tomorrow Partners in Berkeley, the portal’s Web designer. That included talking with small-business owners, and members of 11 city departments. “What we learned from the business owners was 'I don’t have an overview of the entire process, I don’t feel in control, the content is disaggregated.’”

From city staff, “We learned that the processes present a lot of challenges,” she said. “It allowed us to identify the pain points and map out the entire customer journey.”

As an online user who needs all the simplicity he can get — including large type, lots of illustrations and plenty of relaxing white space — I’d give the portal a thumbs up, with a couple of minor navigation nits, based on my cruise through.

Whether it works will be for the target market to judge, though testers appear to have approved. “It’s much easier now,” said Melody Stein, who owns Mozzeria, a 3-year-old pizzeria in the Mission District, with her husband, Russ. “We’re expanding our business, and just bought a food truck. We are applying for the permits and the portal has all the information we need. All in one place.”

“We finally have a go-to resource that will touch so many small businesses in the city,” said Jane Gong, project director at the Department of Technology. “As we move forward, new functionality will be added and the business process will be improved.”

Which takes us to phase two of the project. “There are 400 permit and licensing forms out there,” said Rufo. “We’re looking to see if we can move more online, and whether all the steps are necessary.”

Project cost so far: approximately $1.3 million. “Cities don’t usually bring a user-centered approach to these kinds of projects,” said Brink. “San Francisco has done a pretty bold thing.”

You be the judge: http://businessportal.sfgov.org.

Andrew S. Ross is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: asross@sfchronicle.com Blog: http://blog.sfgate.com/bottomline Twitter: @andrewsross