Hello, are you still there?

I know I’ve not posted anything since Monday, but I’ve got my excuses!

We’ve had a remarkable few days, and I’m not sure I can quite take it all in. Ross & I keep having to pinch ourselves. It’s finally all going well, after so many frustrating weeks of not getting anywhere quickly, so why are we still so nervous? Believe it or not, I’m actually getting a little frustrated at the lack of criticism – too many positive comments about us and our idea is just putting so much pressure on now!! How bizarre is that!

Anyway, to fill you in. We went down to London on Wednesday evening, and after I’d done some ‘proper work’ ie presenting a seminar on Thursday morning, we had some great meetings in the afternoon. We’ve secured the interest of editors of parenting magazines, and they’ve agreed to review our site in January, and even provided us with a comment! They also gave us some useful feedback and some areas for us to develop or think about a little more.

So hopefully that is a real investment and we might get some positive PR in their magazines around March (they have a 2-3 month lead time). Now we’ve really got to get on with inputting lots of fabulous content so it’s not a disappointment when they do review it. All this market research is great fun, but there’s no point at all, if we don’t get on with the actual site itself.

We also had a smashing meeting with our lawyer to make sure we had covered all our commercial risks, and sort out our shareholders agreement. We need to look at trademarking pretty soon too. He’s great. Very good (I’ve worked with him lots of times before when I’ve recommended him to clients) and yet easy to talk to, and quite flexible on fees aswell! He knows our situation with cashflow, so hopefully we’ve struck a deal that’s fair to both of us, but I know he’s agreed much lower fees that he usually would for the work he’s doing for us. Really chuffed he’s part of our ‘team’.

Then we met up with Jen, our newly appointed Regional Manager for Greater London. Quite an amazing story how we came to be introduced – I actually trained her husband on a course a few weeks ago and we just got chatting about the site. But she’s just perfect for us and we had a really lovely evening. I’m sure we could’ve talked all night. Looking forward to having her on board, and I’ll meet up with her again over the next couple of months when I’m next in London.

The next morning we found out that www.startups.co.uk want to publish a weekly round-up of this blog – so welcome to any new readers from there! I’ll have to write a ‘catch up’ for the first edition I think.

Then on our way home we collected the market research questionnaires from our old primary school. It was absolutely amazing! Really similar results to that research we’d done a few weeks ago at Luke’s nursery. Same response rate, around 20% (pretty good, apparently you would normally expect 10% for questionnaires), and once again it looks like we’ve got our pricing spot on.

Last night I managed to speak to a high-flyer in the website world, who very kindly gave me half an hour of his time to pick his brains. I’d approached him to be chairman, but unfortunately his contract precludes him from taking any other commercial roles, but he did agree to talk to us. So I gave him a quick overview of who were were, what we were doing, our USPs, our successes so far, and our challenges. He probably told me the most useful thing he could have done – he didn’t think our business model would work! He said if we manage to charge members to use the site, we’d have achieved what many had tried to do already and failed at. I’m not sure that’s strictly true, but it certainly threw down the gauntlet to us! It’s not borne out by all the market research we’ve done, with parents and professionals, and I’m still a great believer that websurfers are more and more prepared to pay if it means they will get quality, relevant information for their needs. He also recognised that the environment for an internet start up is completely different nowadays to where they found themselves back in 1999 at the height of the dot.com boom. And that led to me rethinking our approach for advertising the site, simply because what they did (predominantly a national radio advertising campaign) is not necessary appropriate to us now.

And last but not least, we’ve spotted a competition for budding entrepreneurs which is just down our street! So we’ve decided to enter that. I need to submit our business plan, so I’m going to look at our original plan from last month (which was mainly written for the banks) and update it. I want to get it in by end of next week. The deadline’s 4 November, so we’ve only got a couple of weeks anyway.

Phew, so am I excused for not doing a blog entry since Monday?!!!

Kirsty