Tag www.beneighbourly.com

what every start-up business needs…

caroline hughes Leave a comment

When you’re trying to start your own business (or in our case, trying to start four businesses pretty much simultaneously, on a shoestring and without physically coming to blows), it is very important that you surround yourselves with things that will increase your chance of success.

We’ve had the post-its for a long time now.  I now class those as essentials.  We’ve had a few recent issues with some dropping off the walls due to our desperate open balcony door – floor fan – open bedroom window breeze inducing triangulation.  But we’re taking it all in our stride.

I keep getting The Mack to put new bulbs in all of the ceiling spots.  As if, somehow, the extra wattage will illuminate my ideas and stop them being so bloody dim.  It mainly just shows up all the dust.  And gives The Mack eye strain.

I’ve bought some plants.  For that all-important 4pm oxygen hit.  And for the seed-nurture-growth symbolism.  And finally, for sustenance – if all the projects should fail, we will be able to live off two different types of basil.  The mint plant has contracted some sort of blight.  It’s essentially dead from the roots up.  I’m choosing not to see that as symbolic.

But now that the launch of Be Neighbourly is imminent, I felt we needed something more.  Something that would make us feel importantly business-like, but that wouldn’t break the bank.  Something that we could, quite literally, pin our dreams on.

So I invested twenty-five quid and bought us a whiteboard.  It was delivered yesterday.  And it is magnificent.

Already, I can see how it’s helping.  Just looking at it makes me think of all the graphs I could be plotting, the targets we can set (Q3 and Q4), the inspirational Steve Jobs or Katie Price quotes I can write every morning.

The pens were missing from the delivery, but that’s just a minor setback.

I feel certain that the whiteboard, in all its splendid 1200mm x 900mm oversized impracticality, will give us that competitive edge.  The reverse side is magnetic.  So we can multi-task – conceptual mind-maps on front, securely fastened important documents on the back.

The magnets were missing from the delivery, too, but, again, no biggie.

It is the size of our dining table.  We don’t really have anywhere to put it (maybe we could get rid of the dining table?), and it is so cheaply constructed that the whiteboard surface has a definite ripple effect when viewed from the side.  But I don’t care.  It has a flip out tray for the missing marker pens.  It has an eraser.  And it makes me feel so goddamn businesslike, I want to air punch every time I look at it.

behold its splendour

behold its splendour

creating limboland

caroline hughes Leave a comment

These past few days, I’ve discovered that the thing I like most about my Be Neighbourly business project is being able to design miniature villages and bees.  I spent several hours on Saturday creating a teeny weeny butchers’ shop complete with ham on hooks and I was deliriously happy.  Then I designed many, many bees.  A whole hive in fact.  And I went to bed feeling fulfilled and at one with the world.

BNneighbourhood2

This tells me two things:

1.  That I missed my calling and, instead of wasting all that time being a lawyer, I should have been working on Sim City or LEGOLAND; and

2.  I am avoiding doing the real work on the projects.

I know this to be true, because the post-its tell me so.  They are always there, surrounding me, with their accusatory neon hues.  Always pointing out what I haven’t done.

The Mack has a new post-it system (he is nothing if not progressive when it comes to post-its).  He adapted it from a project management seminar that he went to recently (one which overran and didn’t cover half of the promised material… hmmmm).

We used to have a 3 tiered system, with the most urgent tasks on the top line.  But this has radically changed.  Now we have a 3 tiered system, with the most urgent tasks on the top line.  But these tiers now have names: Work In Progress, To Do and Backlog.  And there are rules for the number of post-its that can go on each line.  You must not have more than 2 post-its on your Work In Progress line (in fact, it’s labelled Work In Progress (2), so you are in no doubt).  And there are a maximum of 6 tasks for To Do (6).  Backlog is more relaxed.  You can fill a whole wall if you so choose.

It has revolutionised my working life.  Because now I look at my two priority tasks and they’re on a line that says Work in Progress.  And I think: Great!  Someone is progressing these tasks.  So I can kick back and concentrate on designing some more pastel-coloured town houses…

Limbo, limbo ah-hah

We’re in a bit of limbo, the Mack and I.  Our projects are in the hands of developers, busily trying to turn my rudimentary powerpoint mock-ups into working websites.  We’re passed the design stage, so there isn’t much for us to see.  Occasionally, my developers Skype me when they’re having some “doubts” about my requirements (I choose to see this as a language issue – I’m pretty sure they’re not feeling that negative towards my entire concept).  But really we’re just waiting for them to finish programming, so that we can test the sites.

I’m not very good at waiting.  I get twitchy.  I’m a humungous control freak and leaving things to others to complete goes against everything I stand for.  I like to be able to watch over people when they’re doing a task for me, so that I can snatch it out of their hands the very moment that they make the slightest error.

Bit tricky when your developers are in Jaipur…

If I were a different (better?) person, I would be using this time to get ahead of the curve.  Drawing up my checklist for testing the website; pulling together all of the content sources that I need to get the first info up onto the site; identifying the local businesses that I want to partner with to attract users in the first few months post-launch.

Alas.  It seems that my time is already taken up with designing tiny meat products.

Still, I’ve got as far as putting those tasks on post-its on the “To Do” tier, so I’m bound to get round to them soon.

early adopters, where for art thou??

caroline hughes Leave a comment

So I’ve spent the past few days leafleting for one of my business ideas in various parts of London.  I’m testing some basic assumptions about the concept – i.e. that anyone, however remotely, anywhere in the whole of London, gives a gnat’s toss about what I’m trying to set up.

oh lovely flyer!

oh lovely flyer!

Which is all about real friends and happy, safe neighbourhoods.  And the flyers are nice, bright colours with pretty pictures of cute little houses.  And I spent a lot of time designing them.  So you’d think that someone would give a damn.  You’d think that friendship and belonging were pretty basic tenets of civilisation and happiness. Apparently not.

Even the blatant bribery attempt (“fill in our 5 min survey at www.beneighbourly.com for a chance to win £50 Amazon voucher”) – which still stands, by the way, so get filling – hasn’t spurred many people on to bother.

Yesterday was a particular delight.  I had trench foot by 3.30pm and not a single bloody response to my survey.  People of Cricklewood,  I two-finger salute you.

On the strength (um weakness) of feedback received so far, I think we’re going to have to pivot and start selling unicorns, ‘cos we’ve got about as much chance of making a go of it.

early adopters

One of the pillars of wisdom in startupville (which I imagine is a place where people are really friendly and create nice neigbourhoods and use the website www.beneighbourly.com to enhance their sense of community), is that for your product or service to succeed, it needs to appeal to early adopters.

“Early adopters” is a fancy term for people who like new, cool stuff.  They are the ones who actively get involved with new technology before the rest of us.  They are like Umbrian truffle pigs, always snuffling around in the dark, dank woods to unearth little nuggets that go on to be worth gazillions.  They are the lifeblood of start-up businesses.

Trouble is, most of these people live in California.  Or, at a push, New York.  The three that live in London are so exhausted by being the epicentre of all things new in business that they’ve barricaded themselves into a rec room at Google campus and are communicating only via an hourly twitter feed.

no thanks, we’re British

It’s tricky trying to start up a business in this country.  Particularly an online, networky type business.  Because we’re just not very networky type people.  And we’re not very good at cheerleading.  Or responding to surveys.

If you’ve ever worked with Americans, you’ll know that, on the whole, they’re incredibly perky, upbeat and enterprising.  Sure, statistically there must be a few really grumpy ones in each state, who just spend all their time on the couch, mithering about how unbearably cheery everyone else is.  But most that I know are optimistic and believe in that whole land-of-opportunity thing.

I think it could be because they have space.  A lot of space.  So they feel that there’s room for everyone to grow, and that one person’s growth isn’t going to leave less room for everyone else.  So it creates a culture of encouragement.  Whereas we Brits, on our very small island, are always worrying about someone encroaching on our personal space.  So we don’t really like it if someone has ambition to outgrow their little patch.  And we don’t go out of our way to boost one another.

You see it acted out daily, in a microcosm, on the tube.  I was on the victoria line yesterday evening.  I had my own space, next to the door, on that leany-ledge bit (which is the next best bit after an actual seat, as long as you’re on the opposite side to the opening doors – small wins, people).  This 20-something girl got on at Oxford Circus.  And stood into me – not next to me – into me.

And by that I mean that she pushed herself backwards so that her right shoulder was just touching the back of the leany-ledge and her left shoulder was in front of mine.  So she was at a slight diagonal.  But not for long.  Because, keeping her eyes averted at all times, and maintaining the unflinching posture of the self-righteous, she then just jimmied her sharp little shoulders until she’d crow-barred me out of my space.  At which point she became still.  For 2 stops.  And then she got off the tube.  Inwardly triumphant, no doubt.

And I’d like to thank that deeply discourteous girl.  Because I was starting to feel discouraged about beneighbourly.com.  But now I’m even more convinced that we need something like it.  So I think I’m going to build it and see what happens.  And if that means skinning my knuckles on a few more letterboxes, then so be it…

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I have included some incredibly subtle subliminal messaging in this week’s post.  Don’t worry if you didn’t pick up on it – that’s means it’s working (and thanks for completing the survey!).