The long, lonely road to starting up a business

Room and board: Baxter’s Wampuu has been designed to make life easier for the seller who wants to switch agent

10 April 2012

For the past year, I've been cooking up an idea that is going to save individual homeowners hundreds, possibly thousands, of pounds on the cost of selling their house.

The idea for Wampuu.co.uk came to me when dealing with estate agents for one of my own properties (by day, I'm a residential landlord, and a professional negotiator).

The negotiation process for selling the house was like wading through treacle, and even when I did manage to bag a good deal, there was no way of knowing if the agent was any good.

In a eureka moment, I envisioned an auction-style website, on which homeowners list their house, and estate agents bid to sell them. The agent with the lowest commission charge "wins" the auction.

However, if you're not happy with the feedback score of that agent, you can choose from any of the other bidders, based on a combination of their commission charge, and feedback from other sellers.

So, innovative idea: check.

What now? Well, any idiot can have a good idea.

If there's anything I've learned over the last year, it's that being an entrepreneur is all about hard graft. Having the idea took 20 minutes; making it happen, several hundred hours.

The first hurdle was finance. After investigating grants (and finding that I wasn't eligible) and looking at extortionate loans, I decided to finance the business myself.

Apart from raising the stakes, this had an impact on how I managed the start-up costs. I had to do a lot more of the work myself. I've also had to negotiate hard with suppliers, and my desk at home is covered in receipts for the tiniest of expenses.

Starting up has been a long, lonely process — there's been no one to bounce ideas off, no one to share the mounting costs and no one to take up the slack.

To shake off the cabin fever, I did contact a few organisations with a view to getting some business support but the advice was pretty generic — great if you're setting up a hairdressing salon, but not really helpful in launching a new business into a national market.

So if the business is a success, the glory and, more to the point, the equity is 100% mine.

But if it fails, then I have no one to blame but myself, and that is a sobering thought. This is what keeps me awake at night and kicks me out of bed at 5.30am to work on Wampuu before I start my "proper job".

Of course, there's always the temptation to slack off, but I'd say my natural inclination towards laziness of an evening has been countered by the fear that if I don't launch the site soon, someone is going to launch something similar, or worse, steal my idea. That may sound like paranoia but I assure you, it's a real risk. There was a nail-biting 10 days when I didn't hear from my web developer — not a peep, he wouldn't return my calls or emails — and I was convinced that he had poached the idea.

As it turned out, he just had a tendency to go Awol, but it made me think. I went to great lengths to protect my idea. I made my suppliers sign non-disclosure agreements, and when I was doing my market research, I made up all sorts of rubbish to avoid telling people the concept for the site.

Building the Wampuu.co.uk website itself has been a mammoth task. Initially, I discussed the site with a few web agencies (after making them sign my trusty NDA) and found to my dismay that their fees dwarfed my budget: the lowest quotation I received was double what I had allocated. To make my money go further, I decided to hire a developer and a designer separately, and manage the process myself.

The road was a rocky one. The designers produced a site that was difficult to navigate, and the developer disappeared in a puff of smoke without completing the project.

So I had to hire new designers and developers at serious additional cost. I could have saved myself a lot of time and money by plumping for the agency in the first place. I'll be chalking that one up to experience.

Having said that, the website is now live and I'm really happy with the functionality and how it looks. I'm confident that in the next 18 months, the site will put hundreds of thousands of pounds back in the pockets of UK homeowners. I just hope that it does the same for me.

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