2 weeks in!

Is it really 2 weeks since we went live? It has absolutely flown by and I think I’m just catching my breath. I don’t know where to start!

At the end of our first week we exhibited at Bambinos, a baby & toddler exhibition in Harrogate. It was an ideal opportunity to meet the public, promote the brand and see whether, after all our market research, we were right about people being willing to pay a membership fee to use the site.

Were we right? YES! Fantastic, problem 1 sorted! We received such a favourable response, and even pregnant mums were buying an annual membership (£12). So we’ve overcome that issue. Now we have many more issues to deal with:

- promote, promote, promote the brand
- overcome apathy and actually get people to logon and have a look
- review our stats to understand our ‘numbers’ – response rates, conversion rates & later on, renewal percentages, so we can plan a bit better
- keep the content up to date and expand it
- and promote a bit more – efficiently though!

Although the visitor numbers at Bambinos weren’t as high as expected, and therefore it wasn’t as cost efficient as it should’ve been, we realised that this form of marketing was very effective for us. We have a very visual stand, with the website being projected onto a big screen. I was very proud of our stand. It looked good, and we had plenty to draw people in – a kiddies colouring table and some cool water for all those pregnant mums! We also started off with some helium and lots of branded balloons, but unbelievably, half way through the first day, we ran out of helium!

So I’ve now done some research into the other baby shows around the UK. There’s the big one, The Baby Show, sponsored by Practical Parenting, which is now in 4 locations during the year. The advantage to exhibiting at this is that it’s very well established and gets massive visitor numbers, 20,000+. The disadvantage is cost, although on a cost per visitor basis, it’s probably the best value. However, cashflow is extremely tight, but more about that later!

There are several other smaller shows, usually much shorter in length, but some also running for the first time (like Bambino) so you take a risk on visitor numbers. However, sometimes the cost is so low that it’s worth taking the risk. So I’m in contact with the organizers of these now, and over the next couple of weeks we’ll decide which other shows we are exhibiting at.

I’ve also been investigating advertising costs. There are some ideal places for us to advertise offline, and I’m looking at the relative costs of all of these at the moment. The online advertising is still up for discussion and review. Of course we’re doing all the ‘search engine optimisation’ (seo) work with Lee and it’s on the agenda to be discussed at tomorrow morning’s management meeting. But I think we need some more information about online advertising before we take it any further.

We have been interviewed by some local newspapers, and I’ve been distributing the advertising/business cards around various groups. So the public relations (PR) is still gradually building up, and hopefully that will show results soon.

We’re now looking at the next phase of our funding requirements. The funding we had to date was mainly to get us to the current stage, and now we have 2 options. We can either have minimal expenditure, and wait for the business to grow by word of mouth and PR, before we spend any more on advertising etc. Or we can go for another phase of fundraising, this time for a much larger sum, and get the budget to really go for marketing & advertising in a big way.

To a funder, we are at the stage where we have a product, it has been proven, and we have met all our deadlines, so to some extent the management team is also proven. Therefore any risk will be reduced.

However, we still don’t have adequate proof of our membership assumptions. We have quite a unique offering and so we can’t carry out research to compare our sales projections with any other business. On the positive side, my target for new members in March has nearly been reached, and that was supposed to be for a full month when we didn’t start trading until 13th of the month.

The other negative is that we don’t have any security to offer a funder, therefore we’ll have to either use the DTI Small firms loan guarantee scheme (SFLGS), or we’ll have to sell equity shares to a business angel or venture capitalist.

So guess what? I’m writing yet another version of the business plan! It has to be completely updated now that we’ve launched, and that’s on my task list for Tuesday when Luke is in nursery. Talking of which, he has been a bit unwell for the last few days, and so it a bit more clingy than normal, which is making it more difficult for me to spend as long at the computer. It’s amazing where you can pull the hours from if you need to though, and it’s certainly one advantage of working from home. This is what they really mean by ‘flexible working’!

Kirsty