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

Hi, I’m Alan from the UK and my background is in business analysis, mainly for global organizations. Last year I decided to give this up and launch my own start-up which ultimately failed and I’m currently in the process of validating my next startup Flow Metrics. This came from wanting to reduce the amount of time I was spending finding and extracting information from Google Analytics during my failed startup Fantastic House Buyers, which I’m delighted to be able to talk to you about today!

Fantastic House Buyers was an online service designed to improve the expensive and stressful experience of buying a house here in the UK. The premise was simple: a digital assistant that helped house buyers through the process and provided everything they needed in one place, including recommendations of professionals they would need during the process.

I was the sole founder and employee on this and financed it myself. The business model was to take commission from recommending professional services and it seemed like a no-brainer with low operating costs and high potential revenue per user meant I only needed a small number of users to make it profitable.

In hindsight, I committed a rookie mistake that led to its failure before it generated any revenue, one that should have been apparent and solvable from that start but took me a while to realize.

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What motivated you to start Fantastic House Buyers?

I’d always had the idea that I’d like to try running my own business, though I’d never really thought about exactly what this meant or what kind of business.

Over the last couple of years, I’d started to become disillusioned with the corporate/business world that I’d been working in for the last 15 years. Last summer I decided this wasn’t a long-term option for me so I quit my job and took the plunge to launch my own startup business.

Having recently been through the process of buying a house I’d had the seed of an idea to build a platform that helps house buyers, I was amazed at how disjointed and difficult the process was and I guess my idea was to build a kind of LinkedIn for house buying, something that would provide the advice and guidance on what to do when buying a house, would connect you with professionals and allow you to manage everything all in one place.

A lot of the jobs I’d held were around analyzing and improving processes for organizations and I wanted to apply this to something myself so this seemed like a good opportunity to do so. On a personal level, I guess I also wanted more flexibility about how and when I worked and believed launching my own startup would offer this too.

I really had no idea about how to launch a business or what to do, however, I learned pretty quickly the importance of diving in and giving it a go! It’s important to be prepared and do your research, but at some point, you just need to get out there, make the mistakes and learn from them for the next time!

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How did you build it?

I didn’t have much money to invest in my idea, but I did have a lot of time so I decided I’d build it myself and keep the costs and risk low. I set aside 6 months where I’d cover my day to day living costs from my savings and re-assess my options after then.

While I was by no means a developer I had done bits and pieces of coding and been exposed to software development in a few of my previous jobs so my first task was to build on this and learn how to build and launch an online platform. I figured that worst case scenario I’d at least learn a new and useful skill.

I decided to stick with the Microsoft stack that I had some familiarity with, I even found that Microsoft run a program for startups that offer free software and credits for their Azure cloud service so I enrolled in this and set about building fantastic house buyers – the great thing is this meant my set-up costs were close to £0, how could I possibly fail!

I already had a rough idea of the product that I wanted to build and I immediately set out defining what the final product should be and build it. In hindsight, this was one of my fatal mistakes, instead of focusing on the problem I was solving and identifying the market for it I set about building something I thought I’d want and focused on the product rather than the problem and who would use it.

On reflection, I did spend quite a bit of time agonizing over this at the start. I ultimately decided I wouldn’t know what the product was until I’d built it and would find it hard explaining to people what it was. This really should have been a red flag and is a good lesson that I learned, if you can’t explain your product to someone and the problem it’s solving then you need to work this out before you spend any time on product development or writing code.

I’ve always been quite a technical person but had never really considered that I would be able to code something myself so I was quite proud that I managed to build the entire back end, front end and database myself in around 6 months and thought the end product was pretty good.

I did quite enjoy the challenge of working out how to solve coding and design problems and learning a new skill, however, as I was working solo I also found it a little frustrating at times not having anyone to run ideas and challenges past. This did have a positive side though in that it really taught me how to identify and focus on the important tasks and ignore the noise (something you don’t really learn to truly appreciate when working in a large organization).

I quietly launched the initial version of the site in August 2017 but I had no real idea how to market my product and get users. I ended up having some success with paid adverts on Facebook and Google but I found it really difficult to achieve much traffic organically, this was mainly because the vast majority of people visited two main property portals here in the UK that were very difficult to compete with in terms of content marketing and SEO.

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Which were your marketing strategies to grow your business?

I started out with social media and aimed to grow my followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest hoping this would drive traffic to my site and generate some users. This never really worked out for me though and I quickly discovered that Pinterest wasn’t really relevant to my audience. LinkedIn and Twitter were useful for connecting with people and finding contacts in the industry but drove very little relevant traffic to my site. I did try paying for some promoted posts on Twitter but I didn’t find this an effective channel.

Facebook didn’t really work organically either but I had quite a bit of success with Facebook ads. At first, the results weren’t very good but after experimenting with my adverts I started to get a bit of traction. I was getting a couple of thousand clicks a month for about £100 so I thought I’d hit a winning strategy, all I had to do was pay for more adverts and I’d get more users!

As you can imagine, this didn’t happen. Although I was getting visitors my bounce rate was high and sign-ups were very low, those that did sign up never really came back and it dawned on me that the traffic I was getting wasn’t targeted, it was people seeing an advert and having a look at what the site was but realistically most of them weren’t my target customers and I’d be unlikely to convert them.

I then moved on to trying Google Adwords as I thought this would provide more targeted traffic since people were already searching for the terms I was advertising for. I got some success this way and around 20% of visitors from this source were demonstrating an interest and around 5% were signing up, which would have given me enough revenue to keep going. I also found that my click-through rates were consistently between 5 and 10% which I thought was pretty good. My main issue here was that the cost per click was pretty high since there was a lot of competition from big established companies for the keywords I was targeting.

I did a lot of research into marketing strategies and tried most of the tried and tested methods but none of them seemed to work which was another clue that my product wasn’t solving a problem for enough people.

I tried content marketing and wrote a few blog posts and created some useful tools such as a mortgage calculator and managed to get some traffic to these, again it was mainly paid though. I found it difficult to find relevant sites to link back to mine and with a couple of big sites already dominating the keywords competing with SEO was really difficult.

I also tried reaching out to influencers and generating some press coverage but there were very few people operating in this area and I soon realized that marketing was going to be an uphill battle or require significant investment.

