Hi James! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?

I’m an IT professional. I guess the closest description I could give you would be “systems administrator”, though I’ve never had that as a formal job title.

Let me just clear something up: I don’t like the term “startup” because to me it conjures ideas of a trendy firm in a fashionable city like London or San Francisco burning through cash like it’s going out of fashion, with wild projections of how much money they’re going to make Real Soon Now ™.

But 99% of new businesses aren’t that. They’re started up by one or two people who are more interested in paying the mortgage than they are in being the next Google. And so, it was for me - sure, I entertained visions of making an income far greater than I could as an employee, but that was as high as I dreamed.

The business model was simple: take what I already did for a living and turn it into a freelance “IT-manager-for-hire” type model. That’s one thing I was always very clear on: I wasn’t interested in doing PC troubleshooting for individuals.

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What motivated you to start Bediwin Information Services?

Honestly, my options were a bit thin on the ground.

I’d moved to a new town with limited opportunities for my skillset; my employer was happy to let me work from home but shortly after that they made me redundant.

Realistically, my options in the locality were to take a 30% pay cut or start my own business. And if I was taking a massive pay cut anyway, I wasn’t going to answer to some other bastard!

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What's your background? What part of your background defines you, and possibly led to starting Bediwin Information Services?

I grew up the son of a self-employed accountant; most of my mum’s clients were themselves self-employed. In those days, a small business owner could (with enough sacrifice) put a child through a private school. So many of my friends growing up came from families that had a business of some sort.

So, I didn’t perceive it as being particularly risky; I just saw it as another way to earn a living.

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How did the idea come to you?

I knew my employer needed me occasionally - but the keyword here is “occasionally”. They certainly didn’t need me full-time. In that respect, their decision to make me redundant was absolutely correct. So, I offered to take redundancy and contract back to them on the understanding that I was free to seek other clients when I wasn’t dealing with them. They accepted this offer, became my first (and, for that matter, biggest) client and that gave me a basic income to get started.

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How did you build it?

I cringe as I write this because looking back I recognize a whole heap of massive mistakes I made. What I am about to write is an object lesson in “how not to start a business”, and I would implore anyone reading this takes note because you’d probably be best advised to do the exact opposite!

My working hypothesis was simple: my current employer needs a competent IT person, but they only need them for a handful of hours a week. There must be other businesses in a similar position - find them and work for as many as you can find.

Sounds beautifully simple, doesn’t it? I didn’t even need a product; my experience would make me a valuable asset that any company would delight in getting for a fraction the cost of a full-time salary. Put up a website, sort out a phone line, sit back and wait for the calls to come in. (Okay, you can stop laughing now. I actually did this).

I think I spent a few weeks on making sure I had all the technology in place to support clients and that was pretty well it. Once it was in place, I was straight to work. The initial idea was simple: get yourself an IT support contract and get professional support in minutes.

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Who was involved?

This was my first mistake, and one I never really rectified.

One of the first things I did was engage a marketing professional to help me research the market. It didn’t really do me any good - I paid £400 to be told “I’m sure your business idea is viable - I know a chap doing something very similar - but I haven’t been able to find anyone who might be a potential client! Most of the people I’ve spoken to have been extremely rude in telling me they weren’t interested.”

In retrospect, I should have taken this as a warning.

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What resources/tools did you use?

A few things:

A VoIP phone. These are great; you can choose a phone number from pretty well anywhere in the world and have it route to the phone. You don’t need a new phone line fitted; it works over your broadband.

A phone answering service. Initially, I redirected the phone to my mobile, but that just made me look amateurish when it went to voicemail. There are lots of companies out there; I used a firm called answerjam - they offer a pay-as-you-go service and it’s all set up online. Redirect the phone to them, let them take a message and they’ll text it to you.

Wordpress. It’s quite easy to set up a reasonably professional website with this; later on, I discovered Themeforest (which has a range of high-quality templates at stupidly cheap prices). Combine this with some stock photos and you can get a great looking website for £50-100.

Bomgar. This is a remote support product that I’ve used for many years. It’s a Rolls Royce product with a price tag to match, but it’s worth every penny.

I’m sure you’re hoping I’ll list off a range of “idiot’s guide to marketing” books, but the truth is I didn’t find any of these particularly helpful. Most of them would have been great at providing inspiration for someone who already knows a bit about marketing, but they were lousy for someone who doesn’t know enough about business to even know that a marketing strategy should exist, let alone what it should look like.

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How did the initial product look?

“Product”s a bit of a strong word in this context; quite simply, there wasn’t one.

The website, however, looked cheap. Because it was cheap. I had zero contact from it and in retrospect, I’m not surprised. It didn’t start to look good until I bought a proper theme for it and paid someone to write some copy.

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Did you enjoy the process of getting started/building it?

I did, but in retrospect, that’s because I was deep in Dunning-Kruger territory. I had absolutely no idea of the depths of my ignorance; if I had, I’d have been paralyzed with fear.

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Did you launch/publicize your product in any way? How did that go? Did it go as expected?

I advertised in the local press, bought ads on Google and generally did everything I could think of to make a splash.

It was a disaster. I had no concept of a sales funnel, little idea of conversions, A/B testing, market research, positioning within a market…. the list goes on and on. I tried to appeal to everyone and in the process appealed to no-one; anyone with any business experience will tell you this is a recipe for disaster; I started from there and it didn’t get much better!