Diary of my first successful business

[Roland]

OK so I am starting this thread to share with you the progress I am making on my new project and also to write some things down along the way for me to be able to come back to them later. Hopefully this will be useful to some people on here as well.

Quick background on myself: I am 28. I have been on this forum for less than a year, I registered after having read the Millionaire Fastlane . I have been wanting to become an entrepreneur for about three years now and have been making a huge amount of mistakes, one of the biggest one being to jump from one idea to another.

A few things have changed in the past few months. I won't go too much into details but I now have a real "why" and a plan forward. I have been working on this project for a few weeks and I want to share my progress here. I will succeed or will go broke but I now have enough motivation to go all in.

Enough words though, actions will speak better so we'll see if I manage to do it right.

More details about the project itself in the next post.

 

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[vinylawesome]

Great.. Looking forward to your progress.

 

[Roland]

So, first real post about this project.

Just to give you a bit of history on how I got to this idea:
- I met a south american girl on Internet while looking for people to practise Spanish
- 1.5 year later I found a way to go there 6 months "for free" (I found a way to earn enough money to pay for the expenses)
- 1.5 year and 4 denied visa requests later, I went back there alone at 23 and got married. No family, no friends but one month later she was granted her visa and we were starting our projects together.
- within the following 3 years, I helped her learn French and get a beauty therapist degree, she got to work in a luxury spa hotel and in a beauty salon on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris.
- then we moved to the UK and again I helped her learn English and find a job in a decent salon.

Something we have noticed is that a lot of women keep asking (via Facebook groups mostly) where they could find good beauty workers (spa/beauty therapists and hairdressers mainly).

There are a reasonable amount of ads on Gumtree.com (equivalent of craiglist for the US based people) from therapists offering their services but most of the people I got to talk to say that they don't want to have people they no nothing about coming into their houses.

So my idea is to build a platform where therapists will be able to propose their services and potential customers to review and compare what is available in their area and what the feedbacks from previous customers are.

This is where everything started from.

Since I signed up on this forum, I have spent quite a lot of time reading a lot of quality posts and I have seen my mindset evolve progressively. I am not quite where I want to be but I am definitely nowhere close to where I started from and that makes me happy. I need to say a big thank you to @MJ DeMarco , @JackEdwards , @JasonR , @zen******* , @Vigilante , @IceCreamKid , @Mr Cracker , @tafy , @RichKid , @LeungJan and a lot more people.

This post is already long enough so I will talk about what I have done so far in the next post

 

[Roland]

What I have done so far

After having spotted this need, I started to think how I could add value to the two parties I want to interact with.
One of the quotes from @JackEdwards really clicked with me: "Always try to create no brainer deals for the people you deal with" (the wording is probably not right but I remember the meaning)

So I tried to find out how I could create no brainer deals for both the therapists and the customers. For the customers, it is easier as my service should create value for them but for the therapists, I need to find something that will make them want to register on my website.
I went to talk to beauty salon owners, met therapists and lately contacted all the people offering mobile services to offer them the opportunity to collaborate to my project.

My no brainer deal for this was to offer them to use the website for free and my argument was to say that if they were to get business opportunities from what I was doing, I wanted them to be as adapted to their needs as possible so I needed their help to reach this objective. I have contacted about 90 people so far and two of them have actually accepted to help me. I will keep pushing as I want to get ten people to give me feedbacks in order to be sure to have a good product.

I know some people will tell me that it is silly to give them my services for free but I remember having read a book from one of the UK dragon's I think and the man was saying: "don't be afraid to give away something that is worth nothing". In my case, my project will only be worth something when people use it and for them to use it, it needs to fulfill their needs and who better than the final user to tell me what they need? If I manage to provide a better value, it will compensate the 10 free people.

Then I found someone to code my website. I don't want to start the coding right now but I wanted to see how much it would cost me. I can code reasonably but a professional will do it quicker and cleaner than me so time saved will mean money later. I found someone very proactive, proposing me his view on the project, suggesting improvements and extra features he could include in the website and after all the standard people with standard description of their service, this was the one I wanted. So I negotiated the price because it was out of what I could afford but he wanted the project and I wanted him to do it so we reached an agreement for about half of the price he was first asking for and with the condition that I will only launch the project once I get enough people wanting to use it. He offered me to prepare a sort of "prototype" in a week for me to be able to have something to present to my customers. So this is how we started...

OK I didn't thought it would take me so long to write this post and I need to get back to work so I will keep updating this thread later...

 

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[tafy]

My no brainer deal for this was to offer them to use the website for free

Nothing is free in this life, especially in business. The best thing for this kind of website is pay for performance, or pay per lead. You can make it really cheap if you want but you should charge something. Unless you got another plan to monetise when you have lots of users?

I hope this is a hit for you and looking forward to more of your posts

 

[Roland]

The idea is to do both. Pay per lead and charge less if performance is high (through member status). I will also have the choice to monetise it by putting ads on the pages but as I am starting from scratch this is not the priority now.
Thanks for your wishes, in the situation I am in now, I MUST make it so I need to figure out what is the best angle and go for it.

I will get the website prototype on Thursday and the website programming itself will take about two months so I want to use this time to get as many users as possible ready to register as soon as the website is up and running.
The most difficult part will be to get therapists to sign in there as they are already doing business without it, I have to show them that I will give them additional business opportunities. As soon as I have the prototype in hands, I will pick up the phone and start calling them one by one to get their email address and send them the prototype.
I am also working on parallel in creating a meetup event here to get therapists together and present the project to them. I bet the group effect will help me get them to pre-register and if not, at least I should get some feedback and work from there.

To be credible for the end customers, I need to have enough services proposed in the website for any customer to find someone in his area and I will have to drive enough customers to the website for the therapists to see that it is worth offering their services in my tool. That's why I want to start local and grow it because if I start worldwide at once, I won't be focused enough to get enough therapists per area. The end goal is to make this website one of the leading tools at national level and then scale it to other English speaking country first to then go for other languages.

Plan for today and until I get the prototype is to setup a strategy to get visible out there, make people know what is in preparation and make them interested in knowing more.

Back to work...

 

[tafy]

Great follow up Roland, tell them that you will set the profile up for them personally. Make it a no brainer for them to accept being on your site, you can take the details from their website, and ask for any missing details. This is a good time to also offer to do their website if it sucks, get a great designer on a set price per website and your commission set in advance, small business find doing websites hard as they always get overcharged

I work with booking.com and they round robin their listings and get them optimised with updated copy, pictures and other details. You could visit each property with a nice camera and take some great pics for them, they will love you!
Sent from my RM-892_eu_euro1_274 using Tapatalk

 

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[drilonnn]

In my opinion this project can become very profitable for you! Try to convince the therapists to work with you. Ask them what they need, get their feedback.
Good luck, buddy.

 

[leveragehacker]

leadgen is a great biz model as shown by many people in this thread. Don't give up if you struggle to get any leads paid for in the first few months - Remember MJ's incredibly slow start with his Limo services directory!

 

[Roland]

Thanks for your comments.

Not much to report as I should be receiving the website "prototype" on Friday. In the meantime, I have been talking to potential customers to get their feedback on what I plan to offer them and I am just back from a networking event where I met tech companie founders.
The feedback from potential customers is amazing, even better than I expected. Most of them told me that I would use definitely use it. I don't have anything to charge them to make sure that they would actually be happy to use my services but I got a few email addresses to keep them updated on the progress and let them know when they can register.
From the networking event, very good feedbacks on the idea as well although I don't give it much value as they are not potential customers of my services. What I do give value to though is that they told me the process I am implementing is good. I have also talked to people with good ideas but at the end of the day, what really hit me was that for the first time in a long time, I felt I was talking to like minded people (I am not talking about here but about face to face talks).

I have also created the contact list of people I will have to call to sell them my services. I have a list of about 1000 people and as @JasonR said in his thread: "expect to hear 99 nos and 1 yes". So if I can start with a base of ten professionals registered and offering their services in the same area, I should be able to start advertising and adjust the strategy in accordance with the results.

All in all, not much progress yet but preparing everything to be able to push the hardest and quickest possible as soon as I can.

I'll keep you posted...

 

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[Roland]

New update:

What has been done:
- First the designer/programmer I hired for my website turned out to be unprofessional. I have not fired him yet to see if I will eventually receive what he was supposed to deliver but it will be done straight after. I have not paid anything so far so it is OK.
- Even before he was supposed to deliver his job, I tought it was taking too much time so I spent four days non stop and coded the website I wanted myself. All the basics are there and I will be able to improve it progressively.
- I have designed several landing pages to be tested and put them online
- I have bought CPV labs. It has been a huge pain to install but after four hours this morning, I eventually managed to have it up and running. I just have to understand it better and start using it now.
- I have downloaded @JasonR 's recorded INSIDERS call about Facebook ads and listened to it something like 5 times in a row to get the theory.

What's next:
- Design pictures for Facebook ads
- Create the first set of Facebook ads
- Start testing

For the time being, I am going to treat me with a sandwhich and half an hour drive around in my toy (see picture) to clear my head and keep going. I want to have the ads running before the end of the day.

 

[leveragehacker]

Love your car!

 

[Roland]

What has been done in the past couple of days:
- Fired the first programer
- Tested the first version of the website. Result: not good enough from my point of view.
- Hired another programer to help me improve the website with features I don't know how to implement.
- Practised with CPV labs in order to be ready when the ads will be running. That has been one of the biggest tasks I have been on in the past two weeks. Quite difficult to grab at the beginning but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
- Prepared images for facebook ads. That's the first time I do that. I am not fully happy with what I have done yet so I will keep doing more.

What's next?
- Basically keep pushing in the same direction.

Bonus!
As not much visible progress is happening these days on my project, I will try to stick to @(zen*******) 's advice and leave some breadcrumbs on here with what I have learnt and might help some of you.
I have been reading in this forum and a lot of other places about entrepreneurship that the main vector of your success (or failure) is how long you will be working before giving up. I thought: fine, I am a stubborn person and that's gonna be useful for once and I started to work hard, and I mean really hard. But I forgot something: there is a huge difference between working hard and working smart.
I mean, it is exactly the same as if you are trying to unscrew a bolt with a hammer. You can try as long as you can, as hard as you can, you will keep damaging you, the hammer and the bolt but you are not going to achieve it until you use a spanner. In this case, unscrewing the bolt is your project whatever it is, the energy you put in the tool is how hard you are working but the right tool is your mindset.
I don't know if it really is possible to realize that without experiencing yourself. In my case, I had read a lot of books, articles, watched videos... you name it, about that but it is only after two years of working 5am to 10 pm everyday and almost getting burnt out that I realize that I was missing something. Feeling the burn out coming was the wake up call for me and if you can avoid two years of working the wrong way, please read what I am writing now and put it into practise: change your mindset and do it now. I did it because I had no other option left but if you manage to do it now, you will save a lot of time.

Note: I am not a millionaire yet, I have not made it yet, I have not a supercar... but I can assure you that since I changed my mindset, a lot of things have changed without me having to do anything. The first thing you have to realize is that if you have no confidence in yourself, who will? You are supposed to be your biggest fan. Set up your objectives, break them down in smaller reachable ones and go for them. It doesn't matter how fast you are going towards them, all that matters is that you don't stop until you reach them

OK so just as a conclusion, to avoid the mistakes I have made, if I had to give a piece of advice to a freshly starting entrepreneur, I would say, work on yourself before starting to work on whatever business project it is, you will save time, energy and money.

Hope this helps.

 

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[Blue Lion]

Good work so far, keep it up.

Are you planning on creating an online directory type website? If so, have you thought about using a SaaS? Something like http://www.brilliantdirectories.com/

Also, how much are you budgeting to spend on the website development cost? Are you going to be preselling listings first?

I am working on a similar project, so I'll be following!

 

[Roland]

Good work so far, keep it up.

Are you planning on creating an online directory type website? If so, have you thought about using a SaaS? Something like http://www.brilliantdirectories.com/

Also, how much are you budgeting to spend on the website development cost? Are you going to be preselling listings first?

I am working on a similar project, so I'll be following!

It is more than just a directory website. The SaaS is not really adapted to what I want to do. An app would probably be better but I won't focus on that right now. This will be done further down the road.
I have checked your link. I like their landing page but it is not what I am doing.

The cost of the website development is pretty low because I have done a big part of it myself but let's say that with about $1500 I should have a quite nice tool to offer to my customers.
I am not preselling listings because this is not my business model. I don't want to put my customers in a position where they have to pay before having seen what they can get. So they will only pay based on the performance. But, that being said, I do have people waiting for the website to be ready for them to register and also, I have future users that are reviewing the progress and giving me feedback for me to adapt this tool to better suit their needs.

I hope it is clearer

 

[Roland]

I am back for a new update. Sorry for the big gap since the last one, I have been quite busy.

What has been done since July:
- First developper was not performing -> I tried to understand why and help him, after a week, no change -> I fired him
- New developer found and hired, we agreed on the amount of the job and the planning. The final delivery was planned for August the 15th but this was in an ideal world.
- The developper underestimated the complexity of certain features I need him to implement so it took longer.
- I got blocked a moment when I wanted to implement a Paypal payment gateway as they were requesting a business account and I only had a personal one. I don't want to register the company before I start making money because this would mean starting to pay an accountant straight away and so on and I can't afford it yet. I finally managed to convert my personal account into a business one without having to register the company yet.
- Then I needed more money to accelerate the development of the website so I sold my car (with a good markup), bought a cheaper one and invested the difference into my website.
- I worked on the marketing campaign and hired someone to help me improve it.

Where I am now:
The website is almost done now. The developer is struggling on one of the main feature I want implemented and as this is THE feature I hired him for implementing, I am helping him out as much as I can. We are already one month behind schedule partly because of this problem and I still don't know how to fix it.
Basically, I need on one side people to be able to give the radius arount their base within which they are happy to work and on the other side, when a customer inputs his postcode, the website needs to be able to return the list of people whose area defined by the radius is covering this postcode.

If any of you have already done it or know how to do it, it would save me some time and would be much appreciated.

Customer-wise:
Taking advantage of the delay in the website development, I have been attending networking event where I have been presenting my project, I have also found new professionals and potential customers waiting for the website to be up and running in order to start using it.
I have found several competitors which I find great because it confirms that there is a market for me and something I found interesting is that none of them is doing exactly the same thing although they are all in the same domain of activity and my website will be in a slightly different niche as well that has not been really focused on so far.

Personal development-wise:
- I have found someone who has been going through the same situation I am going through at the moment and become millionaire after recovering from it and I have got a first contact and a reference for him to mentor me. He has already started actually.
- I am still dedicating time to improving my public speaking skills. They were almost inexistant six months ago and I am now registered to be part of a national humourous speech contest. It is quite funny actually because I have always loved to make people laugh but never dared to do it neither thought I was able to do it and as I was getting more confident standing in front of an audience, it appeared that I was naturally quite good at it. I have won several prizes in the past three months and I am going to see how far I go in this contest... This for me is a real achievement considering where I started from.

That's all I can report on at the moment. Hopefully my next update will be to report the launch of the activity.
If anybody is able to help me with the problem I am trying to fix at the moment that would be great as well.

Bonus:
A quote from Napoleon Hill I read today and found it was quite adapted at my situation:
"Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success."

 

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[Sehcill]

I'm working on a civil engineering web service that SORTA deals with the mapping issue that you mention. So what I'm about to say may or not be helpful. Apologies in advance if this wastes your time.

I would start by looking thru the Google Map APIs. They probably already have a framework set up for close to what you want to do.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/webservices/

If you want to stay away from generic APIs, have your developer create a map of your geographic region, that MUST BE TO SCALE. It doesn't matter what scale, but with computing power where it is, I'd go 1:1 or something close. Then pick a coordinate system. You can use something like UTM or Lat/Long, but I recommend something Cartesian based. Then it's just a matter of point insertion. You'll still have to run the zip code or address thru some flavor of geocoding api to get your coordinates, but that should insert your clients how you want them. Same for these radii. Then it should be a simple matter of bounds and collision detection for matching values.

Again, sorry if this wasted your time lol.

 

[tafy]

That sounds like the solution to me, good luck Roland!

 

[Roland]

Thank you both. I am working in this direction.

 

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[Roland]

A new update almost 1.5 month after the last one. I apologize for not updating you before but a lot of changes have happened.

First of all, I was subcontracting as a project manager for a big aircraft manufacturing company. This contract went to an end and as my company didn't have any other mission to put me on, I did what I had thought about doing for a few months and resigned.

The reason behind my resignation is that I couldn't cope with both my day job and my fastlane project. I didn't have enough time to work on my project and what made me make the decision is that some of the potential customers I had talked to about my project gave it a tweak and told me that they would be my customers if I managed to achieve the result they asked for. It is a big pain point in the industry and nobody is really efficiently working on it. I have now customers waiting for the service to be ready and I even have people wanting to work for me as soon as I launch it. I didn't even have to look for them, they heard about my project and came to ask me if they could work for me...

I also would like to say a very special thank you to @GetThreaded. Thanks to her INSIDERS call and the time she put in answering my questions both in the thread and in private message, I could draw a clear action plan to work from. If I manage to make this work, it will definitely be thanks to the help you provided me with.

Having full time to dedicate to my project, I also registered in two places that are very important to me:
- The first one is that I prolonged my membership in a toastmaster public speaking club. Not that I love to speak in front of an audience, all the contrary actually. I am not very comfortable speaking in public and this has helped me a lot since I first registered so I will keep practising as I think it is very important to be able to clearly express what you have in mind
- Secondly, there is a training I had wanted to do for a long time and never had time for it so now I made it and registered in a hypnotherapy training. It is only taking me a weekend a month for ten months but I think the power of this tool is amazing and its potential for helping people both in the professional and personal fields is almost limitless.

Although my wife is working, her income is not enough for us to live on so I have about 6 to 7 months with the little saving I have to make something work before I must find a job again and I promised myself when I walked away from my job on the last day that it was the last time I would work for somebody else so I have to make it happen now. This is the pressure I am under at the moment but I am confident I can make it happen if I don't do too many stupid things

So this is where I am now. I will post an update on my progress every month at least from now on and share with you what are the ups and downs I am passing through.

 

[MoneyDoc]

If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been - Robert H. Schuller

Beautiful.

 

[Jamesdoesmith]

Sounds like alot of good progress. Love seeing it come from just your idea baby in your head to what it is now. Really smart to start it offered free. Thats a great way to get a ton of volume. FREE.....its the hotword of all time.

 

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[Roland]

An earlier update than the monthly one because a lot of things have been going on since.

What has been done since November the 1st:
- The company has been nammed. Not a huge step I know but a good point to start from.
- The domain name has been reserved
- The UK trademark database has been checked to see what we will be able to protect and what we need to do in order not to use something already protected (the trademark protection will be done as soon as we make some money).
- The logo has been created based on the previous check (see my avatar)
- I got a toll free phone number
- I hired someone to create the first leaflet. This took me a bit of time but I created the content myself, had it checked by different people, then had someone from eLance to design the leaflet for me. Then I found a good printing company and in parallel, I printed business cards with my name on which I handwrote a personal message. The leaflet and the personal message have been put in an envelope and posted to our prospects.
- Yesterday was the official launch of the first marketing campaign and I got the surprise when I went back from the launch to see that we already had two customers from it.
- Following the confirmation of the bookings, I incorporated the company and this morning I subscribed for an insurance. We are now officially in business. The bank account opening will follow very soon.

What is ongoing:
- Facebook page: it has been launched and I am in the process of building an audience for it. If you want to help liking it and sharing it with your friends this would be very helpful for us: http://facebook.com/rrexperience
- Website: apart from the domain name reserved, there is nothing online yet. I am currently working on that and will update you as soon as it is done.
- Customer base development: this has just started with the first marketing campaign but I am currently working on press releases and other people from my network that I could contact to help me getting known out there.
- I already have one person working part time for me at the moment but the problem is that I need to be able to attend my customers full time so I am currently in negotiation with a potential future employee to complement the first one starting in the New Year.

Struggles:
- No struggle at the moment but just a concern: as I quit my job to fully dedicate to this project, I am now living on my tiny savings and I see them diminishing very fast. Two consequences to that: the first one is that I am getting a bit nervous about it because as I am alone in this country, if I don't manage to make it work, I will loose my flat and have nowhere else to crash but at the same time, this is giving me even more motivation to work 300% on it. Let's see what the result is...

All in all, a few things done and a lot still to do but I am quite happy with the progress achieved in the past three weeks.

Stay tuned for the next update.

 

[Roland]

New update:

The past two months since the incorporation of the business have been hectic. To summarize it quickly, we have been making a few hundred pounds a month and the customer base is growing. This is quite nice to see although it is not enough to live on but I will come back to this further down.

so what's been done since my last update:
- I wanted to develop a specific technique to make us stand out of the other companies. I have been helped for that by one of the best clinical hypnotherapist in the UK who introduced me to someone who has already been working with the technique I wanted to implement but for a different application. I have had several workshop with them and after a month, our technique was tested on a number of our customers. The results are very good and this helped us a lot to get off the ground.
- Marketing-wise, the best results came from free advertising websites and facebook groups (not even paid advertising)
- We have now a small customer base which is growing slowly but surely.

What's the plan for the coming months:
- We need to grow the customer base more quickly so I am focusing on developping it by word of mouth first as this is what works best in this field.
- As soon as there is enough money to do it, I want to protect the image of the company and trademark our technique.

The struggles:
- So far, we have been working and delivering our services to our customers' house but this is not sustainable neither cost-efficient in the long run so I want to open a fixed location as soon as possible. This has not been possible yet because I cannot afford it.
- As I quit my job to work full time on this project, my savings are now running low and I only have two months left before I have to take any job to make a few quid. This is quite stressful as I am already restricted to the minimum

This is where we are at the moment. Very exciting and a bit stressful as well but that's what I signed for

Stay tunned for the next update...

 

[mastasef]

Thank for updating seems your business is about to take off

 

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[Roland]

First financial report three months after having launched the business:

December sales: £39
January sales: £109
February sales: £248
March sales (up to the 3rd of March): £104 and £143 worth of service are already booked for the coming days so we should be making more than in February hopefully.

To grow the business quicker, we need to rent a place instead of delivering a mobile service but as we are still lacking money for that, we save all the money we are making for that.

In parallel, I am making a few quids where I can. I have sold a few things I didn't really need, I have bought broken toys, fixed them and resold them and I have found someone who is operating his business from a classic van (street coffee sale) and needed help to fix some problems he is experiencing with his van so I am doing that for him this weekend.

Still not enough to live on but we will get there.
I am also looking for a consultant position in project management which is what I am good at and when I get it, this will accelerate considerably all the process.

I am really enjoying this and even if I don't loose sight of my end goal, and even if sometimes it is not going as fast as I would like it to, I am really starting to enjoy all these battles. It is like a game and it is fun to try and find the best way to win each level one after the other.

That's all for the moment

 

[Roland]

It has been only 10 days in March and we have already reached February turn-over!

I wanted to share this achievement with you

 

[Roland]

March is over and here are the revenues we made:

December revenues: £ 39
January revenues: £ 109
February revenues: £ 248
March revenues: £ 2385

Almost multiplied the revenue by 10!

In terms of profit, almost most of it is because the service itself doesn't cost a lot and on top of it we only have to add the petrol for the cars for the moment. But all of it is saved for the next step of the plan.

I struggle a little to assess what the evolution is going to be in the coming months but hopefully we will keep growing.

 

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[tafy]

Your providing a service using your time right? How do you plan to scale this thing once your hitting the 40 hour work weeks?

 

[Roland]

I am not providing the service myself. I am marketing it. When the first person is fully booked I will hire a second one and so on until I can afford to have someone to market the services for me and I will be able to dedicate 100% of my time to growing the business.