5 Reasons it Didn’t Hit the Mark
Today has seen the launch of a new initiative called StartUp Britain, which is a website promising “everything you need to know about starting up in one place”.
There are a number of successful entrepreneurs involved in the project but judging by the launch and the backlash from some on Twitter, it’s doesn’t really live up to its promise.
Read on to read 5 reasons why StartUp Britain is not up to the job.
It recommends an American logo design portal
Yes, it’s all about starting up or growing your business in Britain – a land where apparently, there are very few or no good logo designers.
The site recommends 99designs as a good place to go for your business logo. It’s an American company with its main mailing address in San Francisco. The idea of the site is you post your project and budget and then people submit ideas for free – you choose the winning one and pay the successful designer.
It admits to not having everything…yet
StartUp Britain launched today in a blaze of publicity, but it seems the website is not quite finished yet. It claims to have “everything you need to know about starting up in one place”, except by their own admission, it doesn’t – with a “new features launching soon” link.
The enternships link features overseas opportunities
Again, this dedicated portal for start ups in Britain seems to be happy to recommend overseas opportunities. The link to enternships (at the time of writing) features roles in Canada, Peru and Germany.
There’s no mention of copywriting as an important service for start ups
Business plans, logo design and web design all get a mention on the site but copywriting seems to be ignored completely.
As someone who works with a lot of start up and growing companies myself, I know what a positive difference professional copywriting can make to a business, but this seems to have been overlooked.
It looks like a glorified portal for big companies to offer discounts
All over Britain there are small to medium sized companies in every sector who would love to work with start ups and growing companies, offer them discounts and incentives to help make them a success.
The StartUp Britain site has offers from big corporations such as Barclays, Fujitsu and PayPal amongst others though and it seems to ignore the types of businesses they’re trying to help.
Summary
To add some balance to this article, I think the idea itself is a good one but it’s not been executed properly. The site only launched today though so it may adapt in time and provide the really useful range of information and services to start ups that it aims to.
Perhaps a more regionalised approach with links to offers and advice from local and successful small business owners would have been a better idea?
Time will tell, if you want to make up your own mind visit StartUp Britain
StartUp Britain Launch – 5 Reasons it Didn’t Hit the Mark…
StartUp Britain was launched today in a blaze of publicity but does it provide a useful service or represent another missed opportunity. Find out more now……
Some good points made in your post.
I guess what riles me is that there are already more than 4.5 million businesses in UK with less than 5 staff, and about 650k people made redundant last year joined the ranks of start-ups. What they all need is real help – not just a website that must have cost about £5k offering promotional discounts that are lower than anyone can get from the same companies with some haggling, and links that can be bettered by anyone who can type ‘business advice’ into Google.
I think this is another example of UK Government failing small businesses.
james rock recently posted..Intersections 2011 – Creative Business Summit
Thanks for taking the time to reply James. You’ve hit the nail on the head, it’s had a high profile launch but I can’t see it delivering on its aims the way the site is at the moment. As you say people don’t need to be told what companies to use, the internet can help them decide for themselves.
The site is nothing more than a government backed lead generations site for big companies, most of which are non UK based.
Here is my honest opinion from 10 minutes on the site
http://www.leebandoni.com/2011/03/startupbritain-more-like-start-up-fail/
Lee Bandoni recently posted..Mealcloud Logo Is Done – Desktop Screenshots to follow!
Hi Lee, thanks for taking the time to comment. I’ve just read your post and agree with all your points. Let’s hope they revamp it soon so it’s actually useful for the people it’s aimed at.
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I think their biggest mistake was that they hadn’t involved their target audience – British startups – in their website development process (prior to publishing the site). What would have been a good thing to do is launching the beta/demo site version first and then creating a forum or a blog on some known platform like LinkedIn or WordPress and inviting the UK startups to test the site and provide their feedback on what is good, what is bad, what features are missing, general impressions etc. In the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 domains it’s critical to communicate directly with the would-be stakeholders and evaluate / adjust to their feedback! Plus, such a practice could’ve created a buzz around the portal within the UK startups’ community, which would’ve been a good PR tactic, too.
Hi Viktor, you’re absolutely right. A lot of the issues that were raised on the launch date could have been so easily addressed by involving the startup community in some way. I don’t know about you but the first I heard about it was on Monday and I was surprised to see it had launched when the website hadn’t even been finished – what was the rush? Thanks for taking the time to comment. Jamie
The site is just advertising for big companies! Im a UK start up company and haven’t found anything useful on the site, i really want advice from company owners, articles on how to do things and best practices.
The real kick in the teeth for me was the fact they used 99designs for logo design, i run a UK version on 99designs, and although no where near their size yet, i feel that promoting a Australian site was a huge mistake! They are so many great design companies in the UK.
http://freelancelogo.co.uk
Paul recently posted..M&N Motors – Van Layout
I totally agree with you Paul – if there are any specific topics you’d like to know more about when it comes to online marketing, please just let me know and I’ll publish the articles on here. Thanks.
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