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I'm Alex Major, I graduated from Aston University
with a degree in Computing for Business.
Our business is Hobzi. We're a social platform
that allows anyone to showcase their creative talent, skill or hobby.
We identified a gap in the market
where people - who weren't necessarily professionals - wanted to be able to
show what they were doing, to their friends and to people who had more expertise
in that particular area, for example cake makers, artists, photographers...
We came up with the idea because we actually wanted a service like this
and we'd been using other sites
to try and show what we were doing - one of the co-founders is in a band
and he wanted to be able to upload music and distribute it,
someone else in the band wanted to be able to upload artwork
and then people like our parents - my mom loves knitting and crochet
and she wanted to be able to upload
her content online and the only way
we were really able to do that - at the time - was by creating
albums on Facebook. But only your friends can see it when it's on Facebook
whereas we felt that people wanted a wider audience, for example
my mom uploading crochet didn't really want her friends to see it.
She wanted someone who'd been doing crochet for ten years to see it
so that she could get feedback, like
"try this kind of pattern, this kind of stitiching."
and people just weren't able to do that, at the time.
We knew that our idea was worth doing
because we actually went to the public. Before starting Hobzy
I'd had a previous business and one of the
lessons that I learned from that was "talk to customers as soon as you can"
and also "be careful about what you ask customers".
For example, going up to someone in the street and asking them
"Here's my idea. I want to create this new social network. Do you like it?"
Everybody will go "Yes. Love it. Really good idea. Go and do it."
And if you talk to your friends and family,
they'll say exactly the same thing. But that's not necessarily what they really think.
If you go up to people, tell them the idea and then go
"Can I have your phone number, your email address, your details, so that I can sign you up for the service?"
Then people tend to get a bit more coy and you really start to
see what people's true feelings are about it.
And that's the kind of feedback you want. You don't just want
people saying "yes" to everything.
We are currently on something called Oxygen Accelerator. It's a business accelerator programme - intensive, three months.
We - as I said - launched HostMyPortfolio
and that's currently got 2700 users
in the six months that's been live.
And we're about to launch Hobzy, which is
essentially a much more social and
improved version of HostMyPortfolio.
We've have a couple of challenges that we've had to overcome.
For example, the initial... getting users on the site to begin with. That's a challenge for any kind of
new website. We overcame that by
really understanding what people were searching for.
So...on Google for example, you can go and check
what people are actually searching for, how many people are searching for
certain terms every month, and with web content,
the only way - the best way to get users on for free
is by good search engine optimisation.
When you're starting out with an idea, you don't want to put money into advertising
because you don't actually know if it's the service people want
and so making sure that you're found
on Google for the kinds of things that people would be searching for, that want
your content is incredibly important.
My advice to students starting their own business would be to
"think big but start small".
Mark Zuckerberg didn't start Facebook knowing that it would be
a social network with a billion people on it. He wanted something inside his college...
University to be able to connect with his friends on.
We want to build a social portfolio platform but that's not what we've started at.
Definitely have the big vision but
start small and every hour that you spend on the project needs to be
an hour well-spent. An hour delivering something that people
want to use and something that people will pay for.
It's no good starting a business that has a million users if none of them are paying
so make sure that you're spending your time wisely, going towards both
users and paying users. The longer you can go
without taking investment, the more of the company you'll keep.
And - at the end of the day - that's...
the more of the company that you have, the more money you'll make from it.