Believe it or not there are nearly 10 million bread makers sitting in kitchen cupboards the length and breadth of the UK. That’s nearly £500 million worth of kitchen equipment not making bread right now.
National Real Bread Maker Week, from the folks behind the Real Bread Campaign is a new nationwide initiative to get those bread makers out from the backs of cupboards and making fresh bread again.
A couple of weeks ago Tiffany Philippou, the founder of secretlondon wrote a heartening article on Techcrunch that highlighted the collaborative nature and general esprit de corps that is the hallmark of the digital start-up scene here in London. The Secret London website was built in a weekend for less than £3000 thanks to the help of a raft of committed volunteers which shows what can be achieved at speed when a good idea needs to be capitalised on – stat.
Secret London is one of those amazing success stories the every start-up founder wished happened to them but the truth is for every well deserved overnight success there are scores of start-ups that have to go about building their web businesses the slightly more old fashioned way: build it yourself or find someone to do it for you and pay for it either from your income, savings or investment.
It sucks losing your job. All the more so when you realise that whilst your employers have brought you in because of all your skills and experience they actually want you to leave them at the door – or preferably further away than that. We’ve all be there. It’s the old lets-hire-a-mould-breaker-and-then-shove-them-back-in-the-mould manoeuvre.
To add insult to injury the guy who pulls the strings has likely never visited the internet unaccompanied in his life. You never stood a chance. (Quick sidebar: I know the feeling I once had to explain to a ‘digital trendsetter’ popstar the difference between an inbox and a web browser. We can catch up on who that was over coffee).
It all looked so good on paper. After years of being the groomsman but never the groom you were getting your shot at being the marquee-brand CEO (screw you Zuckerberg!). You even risked a PR nightmare to take the job and got excoriated by Michael Arrington in the process. But it was worth it. Wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it? Getting canned by Rupert Murdoch is no big deal. In fact, being fired by the least savvy internet mogul on the planet probably serves as a ringing endorsement of your skills but you’re still stuck with this Facebook-Project Playlist-MySpace job jump.
Now every time you go for a blue chip interview some anal retentive board member is going to raise their ‘concerns’ about your ‘willingness to see things through’ or your ‘ability to play well with superiors’. And those conservative VCs aren’t going to risk their cash installing you in their start-ups in case you duck out at short notice.
It’s a dilemma. You can represent it as what it was – a streak of bad luck and misleading promises by prospective employers but the doubts never go away. On the plus side, some people survive the jumper syndrome. Look at Britain’s Dawn Airey for example. She’s got to have set some sort of jumping record and she’s doing fine back where she started. But there’s the kicker. She’s back where she started. You don’t want to go back to Amazon do you?
Word on the street is you want to be your own man. We’re in London far away from the Alley and the Valley so our info is second hand but that’s the word we’re hearing nonetheless. What you need is to become the CEO of a business with prospects that you can build into the next Facebook or Amazon rather than taking over something that’s already been built.
Stay away from media and social networking start-ups. We know they’re sexy but where’s the money? It’s not fun having to get funding every 10 months when revenues are rising slower than damp.
What you need is a great start-up with revenue generation at its core. In a market that’s only just being created that you can define. With founders who know what they don’t know and will let you get on with doing what you do best.
So let’s talk terms. We’re a new company with a great idea. Renting is going to be the next big wave of online commerce. Look at Chegg and AirBnB. Sarah Lacy loves the web’s ability to take down traditional business models and there’s nothing more traditional than buying goods when you can rent or borrow them. Hell, even Esther Dyson thinks it’s the future.
We’re passionate but not evangelical which means we’re not the kind of founders who are going to block development. We’re bootstrapping guys but that’s necessity at the moment. The small and nimble thing is cute but we want growth. revenue and market share. Stat. At heart we’re old-school get-big-fast types. We love being in London but are realistic about needing to focus on the US and who better to help with that than a veteran of the US tech scene.
So what do you say? Want to be the CEO of LetsAllShare.com It’s crazy gamble but it might just work. Drop us a line and let’s talk details. We can’t fly you over (hey we’re looking after the pennies), but you could probably afford the flight. If not there’s always Skype. Call us. Lets make a deal.
Someone famous (but not so famous I can remember their name off the top of my head), once said something along the lines of ‘ideas come when times are ready for them’. It’s a simple statement but one that’s full of truth.
You can have the best idea in the world but if you have too soon you are likely to be a footnote in history. The annals of business history are littered with business visionaries who had great ideas too soon. They paved the way for others but very seldom their own visions are realised.
To celebrate the launch of LetsAllShare are are giving away an iPod Touch.
Why? Just for fun…
It is curious how various sectors, organisations and companies are trying to cope with the current environmental revolution but none more so then the car manufacturing industry which clearly has a great deal at stake. 
It’s primary natural energy resource is slowly (some say rapidly) depleting so what to do? It would seem that each manufacturer has a different solution and take on what the answer is. Better economy, Stop-Start systems, Hydrogen Powered Vehicles, Hybrids, Electric Vehicles, etc but what is curious is that for all of their new ideas they are all charging a premium for these products over their base models and people are willing paying them.
Now this could be a sign of our desire to change or simply our guilt kicking in but being sensible with regards to the environment and what we use should ideally less, possibly the same but not more.
It would be wrong to say that LetsAllShare.com is trying to appeal to either the green movement specifically or to more commercially minded folk (who can see the potential revenue that they could raise through renting out of things that they rarely use). In truth the aim of the site is to simply create a common sense tool that is of clear benefit to users, has a positive affect on the planet and the resources that we use, but does not cost more than the alternative. It’s an interesting challenge to see how we all take to this change in behaviour.
If you missed the Horizon programme on BBC two some time ago then I’m sad to say that you’ve missed it on iplayer also. I watched and found myself getting very worried, stressed and annoyed. Overall the programme was very bleak in it’s outlook and did not make for comfortable viewing but the overriding facts were clear.
So, what to do? Well my annoyance came from the fact that the programme was a but thin on “soultionising” but that’s a personal thing, the key message was that we need to change our behaviour. We need to fully understand our reliance on fossil fuels, We need to educate people, We need to increase awareness and social responsibility around contraception and we need to waste less, especially water
Sharing what we have and learning once again to depend on a community (and not just ourselves) is the way forward.
That’s enough of a “soap box” moment.
In September we asked friends, family and LetsAllShare users to take part in our survey to better understand what you wanted from the site and to which we had a great response.
We will post up the full results later but for now a quick summary.
It definitely highlighted a few key things for us:
1. The vast majority of people were both prepared to give and take free items from one another
2. In addition the majority of respondents also expressed the desire to be able to rent items from one another, specifically large rarely used items
An interesting survey out from Which? online about consumer attitudes towards recycling which once again backs up the need for a site like LetsAllShare.
Which.co.uk undertook some consumer research into exactly what consumers do with the unused, unwanted and broken goods and the findings are remarkably similar to the findings of our own LetsAllShare survey which we ran throughout October.
I had never heard of the Sustainable Consumption Institute until today which is a real shame because they have been doing some fascinating academic research into consumers, retailers and sustainable lifestyles which would have been invaluable in helping us plan LetsAllShare, if for nothing else than providing the facts and figures that make people like VCs, bankers and sceptical friends and family see that there is really something in what you’re doing.
Richard and I had the pleasure of spending a chunk of Saturday night on Skype working out the SEO strategy for LetsAllShare. This was round three of our SEO discussions and every time we talked about it, it only seemed to get more confusing. We think we’ve worked out a decent strategy now but not without some serious head scratching.
We’ve got a few questions we’d like you to answer. No need to call for your lawyer.
So, estimated time of arrival: two months.
It’s been a while in coming and, chatterboxes that we are, it’s been hard to keep it quiet up to this point but we’re ready to start talking about the all new LetsAllShare with the world – or at the very least our friends and family!
Over the next couple of months as we get ready to launch the new LetsAllShare website we’ll be using this blog for four main things:
Since LetsAllShare was launched in 2008 we have had some fantastic feedback from our community on what we could do to make the site better. We have been putting all the feedback into a special folder alongside our old school reports - the ones marked ‘Could Do Better’. But unlike our reports we have been busy paying a lot more attention to your feedback.
Since we launched we have also learned a huge amount ourselves about the limitations of our current site and business model and what we need to do to make the site more engaging, useful and indeed profitable for us.
Our chairdog Bailey enjoying some downtime away from the office.
Homepage
The new LetsAllShare homepage is still a work in progress but we’d thought we’d share it with you at this stage.
With the old site one of the major challenges was the fact that nearly all of the site was hidden behind the login.
This was fine if you got that far but the average drop off rate on sign-up/sign-in is somewhere in the region of 60% and we had a suspicion based on some quick analysis on our traffic-versus-registered users it was even higher for us.
LetsAllShare Logo
If you don’t have time to read this post. Skip to the bottom and fill out our poll letting us know what you think of the new logo!
Say hello to the ninja jellybabies! We’ve yet to name them individually but these little guys (whether they are actually guys or not is impossible to tell but we just get the feeling that they are), are part of the new face of LetsAllShare.
Does a logo really have an impact on the success of your business? Who can say for sure? The folks at Pepsi certainly think so. They recently spent $100 million on updating their logo.
Stas and I meet for the first time in February of this year – the exact timing of which can be tied to a specific Techcrunch post of which more later…
It was about this time a couple of business deals I was working on fell through and I was a bit depressed about the prospect of being stuck in the corporate environment for another year. It was a good job but I was ready for something different. Although I had been working in the online space for 12 years and had built a lot of different web businesses I was simply out of good ideas. Read the rest of this entry »