L
et’s start by going back in time – to 2009 in fact. I was feeling particularly sorry for myself during that summer as a massive writing contract had been discontinued through no fault of my own and I was licking my wounds. Working as a freelance writer had its perks (working around the demands of my young children for one thing), but I’d had enough of working short-term assignments, not knowing if I’d find the next one. I still wanted to be my own boss, but the time had come to look to pastures new. The eureka moment occurred during autumn 2009 when, over a coffee with a friend, we jointly decided that it would be good fun to set up a competitor website to – well – the ‘other’ marketplace we all know. So we set about designing a website and deciding on terms that would make us favourable – the key to this being lower commission rates and increased advertising. We signed up a graphic designer friend to put the website together, and we thought we had it all covered … hmmm J of WowThankYou was launched in the early hours of 5 March 2010. The week leading up to the launch was so hectic – we converted our dining room into a multi-laptop office; the four of us, myself and Huw (husband), Georgena and her husband Steve, worked in shifts – loading products and looking after our four young children, and when the website finally went live, we stood outside the house and popped the cork on a bottle of champagne (that in honesty we were too tired to drink! – I can’t actually remember sleeping during that time!) It was a lot of fun though. Launch day was my mum’s 71st birthday and we spent the day at the zoo with my children, and my friend and her children. It was a nice day out – though tense, as we wondered how well the site would be received. Before that week had ended, we realised that the website was not remotely user friendly – we had to load all the products ourselves because of the complexity of the system. We persevered anyway and although we did ok, we certainly didn’t strike any kind of fear into our competition! Alas the workload became too much for my business partner, and we went our separate ways, leaving me with a website that certainly couldn’t be managed singlehandedly. So I was faced with a ‘do or die’ situation – throw everything I had into it, or walk away. Not one to shirk away from a challenge, I cashed in my savings account and took on a top notch website developer to sort the business out. I asked all the sellers on the site what they needed it to do; I told them that I needed it to be as automated as possible, so I could manage it myself …. and the upshot of that was 9 solid months of website development, starting from scratch again.
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