Announcing our imminent arrival

Written on Friday 27 Jan

I’ve had a real sense this week that we’ve now started telling people that we exist, and what we’re going to be doing. And it’s actually quite nerve-racking.

The thought that, after all that planning, secrecy and decision-making, we are now opening ourselves up for scrutiny, announcing what we’re going to be doing, and then just holding our breath for the reaction.

We’ve had the second week of preview evenings (6 out of 9 now done), and those in themselves have made me feel quite exposed. I’m an experienced trainer, so the nerves don’t get to me because I’m presenting using the PC in front of a group of strangers. It’s more that I’m looking straight at people’s faces when I tell them about our ‘baby’, the thing we think is really fantastic, and I’m imagining they are (or maybe they really are) just sat there thinking “well go on then, show me what you think is so good, try to impress me!” You’ve got to appear really confident, when in actual fact underneath you’re quivering!

Thankfully, they’ve all been, without exception, just so worth our while. We’ve had amazingly positive feedback from all of them, but we’ve also acquired some very useful contacts. Not just for the marketing of our site, but also for the operational side aswell. Although the numbers have been a lot lower than we expected (I booked rooms with capacity of 50, and we’ve had much less than that), but they have been worth every penny of the cost. That’s even without the general profile raising and marketing from the mailings we’ve did with the invitations.

Still 3 more to go, so hopefully we’ll have more feedback and good comments from those too. I’ll report back next week.

Lots of ideas have been generated from the preview evenings, some good, some not really appropriate or not so good. However all have been welcome, and we will be making some changes to the site to reflect some of these comments.

However, the time this week I felt really vulnerable, was when I’d sent out a press release to the national media. It was meant to be introducing our brand, by offering ideas for parents about how to entertain their children in the half-term holiday - I'll post it on the next blog entry in case you want to read it. And after I’d sent it, it suddenly occurred to me that it made us quite exposed. We had told so many people, with hundreds of contacts themselves, what we were going to be doing. What if someone else decided to jump on the bandwagon and had a far larger marketing budget behind them than we did? What if they stole our ideas?

Then, I pulled myself together! After all, you can’t keep yourself and your ideas a secret for ever. And our idea has been done before anyway, in a different format (and obviously not as good!), so let’s tell the world I say!

We’ve been discussing our site changes with Fluid and progress is being made slowly but surely. I really want to instruct our beta-testers next week, and then shortly after we can issue the media packs. We’re reaching a critical time, and ideally we would have already done this by now.

Another piece of fantastic news is that we’ve appointed a Travel Editor. Wendy Sloane, a freelance journalist for many parenting, women’s and travel publications, is going to edit our Family Holidays pages for us. Whilst we aren’t providing a database of children’s holidays as such, it’s still an area we need to cover because so many people are asking us about it. We were thinking we’d leave it until after we’d launched, but the appointment of Wendy has allowed us to provide it from launch. So she’s currently commissioning various journalists to review some breaks over the half-term holiday, and we’ll have these articles in time for our launch in March. This should help us get some

We’ve also been considering exhibiting at some Baby Shows in March. There’s a large show in Harrogate (albeit an unknown quantity because it’s the first time it’s been run), and a couple of smaller shows in Cheshire and down at Kempton Racecourse. We’d like to be able to let people use our site, so the big logistical problem (and cost factor) is accessing the internet. We have a few alternatives, but none of them are particularly cheap. Cost is obviously a key concern for us, so we’re just holding fire on that decision for a couple of weeks.

So all in all, it’s been a great week, can’t quite believe we’ve crammed everything in that we have. Next week is the final run of Preview Evenings, and I’m currently investigating a few major strategic initiatives, so if they get anywhere, I’ll let you know about those too.

Kirsty