Her Magazine is New Zealand’s only women’s business lifestyle magazine! Her Magazine highlights the achievements of successful and rising New Zealand businesswomen. Her Magazine encourages a healthy work/life balance.
Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54854
her technology Biting Off More Than You Can Chew In the third article in a series for Her Magazine Katherine Armon encounters the usual glitches that working with technology brings and gets a taste of doing business with the big boys. WITH THE LAUNCH FIVE days away and the ASG Parent & Child show for three days before it I wonder if we have bitten off more than we can chew! We should have launched two weeks ago, but problems with the payment gateway caused delay, which was frustrating to say the least. The launch is now just a day after the show and I definitely underestimated the tiring nature of trade shows! With the first day over we are dead on our feet, but the response from people was overwhelmingly positive. It gave me a huge boost at a time when I was really in need of one. With the trade show over I know there simply isn't time to rest with the launch just hours away, we all rush to get the thousands of subscribers, who signed up at the show, into our database in time. Merchants have been easier to sign up than I imagined, it's not as if I could show them a website or how their deal would look. Truth be known, I didn't really know how their deal would look! Yet companies like Baby Banz NZ and Decoralicious, to name just a few, are prepared to give it a go based on a lot of goodwill and not much else. It is the morning of the launch and with bubbles in hand and flowers arriving at the door we watch as the site goes live. Seconds later our initial joy turns to stress and we realise that the payment system has a glitch and within minutes the website is taken offline. What follows has to be the worst 12 hours of my working life! Our web builders tell us the problem should be fixed within the hour, but that hour turns into two and eventually into 12. James and I sit trying to jiggle all the merchants who have already been through one delay back yet another day. Our opening 'Polkadots' weekend is looking more like a Sunday special by the hour. We set to trying to utilise our social media and email to keep everyone informed. The wait seems interminable, our spirits drop, we bicker amongst ourselves and we are totally deflated. The flowers sit on the top, vaseless, and the bubbles don't get opened. At 11.34 p.m. the website finally goes 'live'. At this point we try to rally the troops but we are simply too tired. Then the counter starts moving – 1 sale, 10 sales, 30 sales – and we get a second wind as we realise we aren't the only people who have stayed up all night, and with a flurry of excitement people start purchasing our first deal, the tickets for The Polkadots concert. At midnight we pop those bubbles anyway and at 4.00 a.m. we fall into our beds, mentally and physically exhausted! The website has been running for over a month now and things are going really well. We have real variety in the deals running on our site and I am constantly surprised by what sells over other things. We are enjoying promoting smaller Kiwi owned companies – that's a real thrill. During our second week of operation two of the larger daily deal sites decide to launch a family deals page. It would be untruthful of me to pretend I wasn't concerned initially about the impact this might have on our site. I realised though it was in fact a compliment to our website that the bigger companies thought it must be a great idea and wanted a piece of our pie! One of our biggest hurdles was the amount of companies that are tied into contracts with the 'big boys'. However, it wasn't long before many companies made the choice to switch to our site, loving the fact that the entire website, not just one page, is geared to kids, a real chance to showcase their business to exactly the right demographic. One area in which we function quite differently to other sites, I have noticed, is that I do not believe in pressuring merchants to offer what they simply cannot afford to. I think that the future of daily deal sites will be in jeopardy if the industry continues to pressure clients into unrealistic deals they simply cannot service. We reach mid December and the Polkadots concert is suddenly upon us, with corporate and site sales we end up selling thousands of tickets. I am absolutely terrified as I take the stage to introduce the show. Even with a drama school training, standing up and speaking as oneself in front of a stadium full of people is fairly intimidating! The shows are an absolute hit! The Polkadots do us proud; we are inundated with emails and social media messages of congratulations. With the big launch behind us we look forward to what 2012 will bring. Katherine Armon www.kidzgrab.co.nz HER MAGAZINE | February/March 2012 | 67 Three Little WishesPhotography, DeborahForeman