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Hi All,
I just wanted to start this post - mostly to document for myself our progress.
Back in October last year after reading MJ's book(s). The fact I didn't need to reinvent the wheel but instead I could just take something that sucks & do a better job of it. That leads me to the idea of becoming a booking agent for a specific type of holiday & helping these family-run companies fill their properties. It's the kind of holiday where really the average person needs a little bit of help deciding where to go so something like airB&B is not a great option.
I have 15 years experience as a software developer, so I set to work building a version of the website I wanted that would do the basics, before putting it infront of our customers & itterating based on liveChat feedback & how they appear to acctually be searching for what they want.
During that time I made some "mistakes":
1) Listed the properties without asking - pissed off half the people that we listed on. Probably should have just spoken to them beforehand but that originally seemed intimidating without anything to show. We did also get some listings in the end via this & it allowed me to get visitors on the site & iterate. But I also didn't want to ask permission to start - so I'd probably do it again if I had to.
2) Not speaking to the companies before we started. I think this is turning out okay, but looking back I should have just spent a day picking up the phone or dropping in on these companies in person. They are not so scary after all just people like myself, but I could have wasted a lot of time doing something they don't need. As it turns out most of them are happy to see what I'm building & be listed.
I've since taken to doing virtual tours & offering them for free as a way to start building a relationship, improving our website & just getting onsite to have that initial conversions.
It took about 4 months, a good few hundred pounds in ads to get our first sale/commission & when that money finally arrived in the bank account it felt sweet. We've now got about 6 companies onboard with 60 or 70 properties.
We are getting some traction now & nearly into double figures of sales/commissions. However we are just about breaking-even on ad spend vs what we bring in.
Plan now is to get to either 10 companies or 100 properties, this should give us good coverage in England & Wales so that we can have something to offer everybody. When we have 10/100 we can then work on improving our conversion rate, making the pages for those 10 companies/100 properties as good as possible, bringing in more reviews / social proof, better images etc. Hopefully bringing up the qty of sales we have but down the cost per conversion. So that's the plan.
Wish me luck,
- James
I just wanted to start this post - mostly to document for myself our progress.
Back in October last year after reading MJ's book(s). The fact I didn't need to reinvent the wheel but instead I could just take something that sucks & do a better job of it. That leads me to the idea of becoming a booking agent for a specific type of holiday & helping these family-run companies fill their properties. It's the kind of holiday where really the average person needs a little bit of help deciding where to go so something like airB&B is not a great option.
I have 15 years experience as a software developer, so I set to work building a version of the website I wanted that would do the basics, before putting it infront of our customers & itterating based on liveChat feedback & how they appear to acctually be searching for what they want.
During that time I made some "mistakes":
1) Listed the properties without asking - pissed off half the people that we listed on. Probably should have just spoken to them beforehand but that originally seemed intimidating without anything to show. We did also get some listings in the end via this & it allowed me to get visitors on the site & iterate. But I also didn't want to ask permission to start - so I'd probably do it again if I had to.
2) Not speaking to the companies before we started. I think this is turning out okay, but looking back I should have just spent a day picking up the phone or dropping in on these companies in person. They are not so scary after all just people like myself, but I could have wasted a lot of time doing something they don't need. As it turns out most of them are happy to see what I'm building & be listed.
I've since taken to doing virtual tours & offering them for free as a way to start building a relationship, improving our website & just getting onsite to have that initial conversions.
It took about 4 months, a good few hundred pounds in ads to get our first sale/commission & when that money finally arrived in the bank account it felt sweet. We've now got about 6 companies onboard with 60 or 70 properties.
We are getting some traction now & nearly into double figures of sales/commissions. However we are just about breaking-even on ad spend vs what we bring in.
Plan now is to get to either 10 companies or 100 properties, this should give us good coverage in England & Wales so that we can have something to offer everybody. When we have 10/100 we can then work on improving our conversion rate, making the pages for those 10 companies/100 properties as good as possible, bringing in more reviews / social proof, better images etc. Hopefully bringing up the qty of sales we have but down the cost per conversion. So that's the plan.
Wish me luck,
- James
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