Tips for starting a business around family life, by Vivien de Tusch-Lec, Founder of Bubele

Thank you to Vivien de Tusch-Lec for this great blog post. Vivien is the Founder of Bubele, the free must have local app for parents. Download it here and find out what's on in your local area. The phrase I hear the most often from parents who want to start a business is “I had a few ideas, and one I was working on, but it never got any further, and anyway it probably wouldn't have worked”. Overcoming a lack of confidence is an important step when starting a business. To help you along the way, here are the top 5 things I wish I’d known when I started my business:   1)    You may as well START. In 3 months, 6 months, 2 years, etc. your business is going to look nothing like how you imagined it, unless of course you have a flawless thinking process, perfect execution, and your competitors and the market all behave in the way that you think they do…Part of the skill of the entrepreneur is to take all of the information that you gain from being in the marketplace and mould it to create a business that works. So you may as well get going. It’s only by doing it that you learn what works and what doesn't.   2)    But hang on a minute, you do need to make sure you PLAN My biggest mistake when starting out was not thinking far enough ahead. The steps to go through when planning are:

• Establish market need – do you have a product that people actually want?
• Establish business model – can you make money from it? If you can get one client, can you get a few more?
• Do the numbers – can you use your common sense to gauge whether this is a business that generates money. E.g. If it is going to cost £1000 to build, store, and market your product and you are selling it for £0.01, do you think you can shift enough to break even? If not, you’ll need funding for the initial stages, or perhaps find a way to increase the sale price.

And just to be clear, if you are starting a business, then making money needs to be one of your key objectives. If you have a social aim then think about starting a Community Interest Company, a Charity or a Social Enterprise, all of which have different structures and therefore can be approached in different ways.   3)    One thing at a time. Take STEPS. You don’t need to do everything at once. And really you shouldn't if you want the business to succeed. Different activities are suited to difference stages of the business. For example, I’d recommend not hiring PR the minute your product is finished, but rather wait until there is some momentum around your company and then the PR effort will have much more impact.   4)    Go to market strategy Yes, you need one. A go to market strategy details how you are going to reach your customers with your product. Have you thought about that? It’s essentially marketing, and working out the different channels you may want to use. E.g. Did you know that in the parenting market Twitter works best when trying to engage businesses, and Facebook works best when trying to engage parents?   5)   Hanging in there is half the battle I never fully understood what this meant until my company started to gain traction. Essentially you never know what is going to be the catalyst for user growth, or sales, or whichever metric is the most important to you. Therefore hanging in there is perhaps the most important tip I wish I’d known. It would have saved me a lot of “should I stop now or continue” questions in my head. I used to give myself deadlines: If I don’t get to xxx number of users by the end of the year then I'm stopping” (I never stopped!). As long as you are taking the steps to enable your business to grow then over time something good will happen. I'm not saying it’s necessarily going to be what you imagine, but sticking around to find out is half the fun! Take a look at Bubele here - the free must have local app for parents

Recent articles