My Favourite Failure: We built something our customers said they wanted- Jessica Dante

0:00I'm going to level with you. I'm not the best manager in the world. I'm a decent coach, but management is my co-founders thing, not mine. And thank god for that because developing your team is one of the single most high leverage things you can do as a leader Which is why i'm really happy we're working with personio They're the all-in-one hr platform You need to handle everything from hiring to onboarding handling absences to managing compensation Their features touch every point of the employee life cycle from onboarding right through to exit interviews And because they automate so much of the boring but necessary hr admin you and your managers can focus on getting the best out of your people.

0:40So if you're leading a growing business and want to spend less time on HR admin, then book a demo at personio.com forward slash secret leaders. That's personio.com forward slash secret leaders. There's a link in the show notes. It was really disappointing. I think a lot of people listening to this can really relate to months and months and lots of resource time and money being put into something that you're really excited about and you think that people are going to love. And then having that first 24 hours and the reception is not at all what you thought it was going to be. It was, yeah, it was quite disappointing.

1:20I won't lie. Jessica Dante runs Love & London, a content company catering to London tourists, particularly Americans. They're big on YouTube, social, have travel guides, that sort of thing. The business is popping off today, but Jess came within a few days and one deal from throwing in the towel. But that's not actually the main story we're here to learn about. We're here to learn why building something your customers say they want can be a terrible idea.

1:59Jess could see a big opportunity because people kept asking her company to offer it. In fact, people are still asking today for this thing, unaware that they've already tried it and failed. For years, people would find our YouTube channel, they'd see our Instagram content, And one of the big questions people would ask me was, why don't you guys set up tours? And I kind of put it off for a while. I'm not a professional tour guide, but it did seem like a really good next step for the business. obviously we wanted to get basically a piece of the pie of whatever people are booking and paying for on their London trip.

2:41We are just always trying to figure out how can we be inserted into that so we can basically maximize the spending that our followers are doing when they're on their trip. So I had a thought, well, why don't we try to launch our own tourism experiences? So we spent, I think it was about three months building up this concept. And it actually started as we would be a curated marketplace for where people could book tours with independent tour companies that already exist in London and that are doing something different and something interesting. So we didn't want to just have like the classic walking tour past Buckingham Palace and past the Westminster Abbey where there's, you know, 5 ,000 other companies that are doing that.

3:31We wanted to be someplace that people could come and it would have the Love in London stamp of approval and they would be able to find something that was a little bit different and they could book it all at one time. They decided to build a marketplace with tours from different operators and they would take a 15 % commission. It was tough going from the outset. They couldn't find a tech platform that did what they wanted or needed. They couldn't get their system to speak with tour companies. But they hustled. They put a lot into marketing. They built an email list of 20 ,000 people. And then it was launch day.

4:08So on launch day, I was very excited, also quite nervous. I was actually in Florence, because I was supposed to be on a holiday kind of celebrating the launch, but we ended up having to push the launch back by week. So we did the launch while I was on holiday in Florence. And we had had so many difficulties. All these small things had popped up in the 48 hours, as often happens with launches, the 48 hours before we launched. And then we, I think it was on a Thursday, we had the big launch. We sent out the emails to our list. I think we had probably like 20 ,000 people at that point on the list.

4:45Everything went out on our social media. And I just let it run. I go for dinner in Florence. And I'm like, you know what? It's done. It's out for the time being. Let's just give it a few hours to kind of happen. And then I'll wake up in the morning and we'll have a look at it. And I wake up in the morning and I go into our booking platform. And we have one booking. I was like, no. Oh, my God. all that work, all that money. And in the first 12 hours, we've had one booking. And then I was like, okay, let's give it a little time. We get to the 24 hour mark and we still only have that one booking.

5:24So it was like, ah, okay, right. Something is not working here. One sale in 24 hours. What had gone wrong? I think people weren't buying. I think part of the difficulty was we did actually do this on purpose, but we launched during the low season. And we did do that because we didn't want a massive influx of bookings that we suddenly couldn't handle. We wanted it to be lower levels of bookings so that we could kind of work out the kinks. And we didn't have a lot of very upset customers if we had anything go wrong. However, it went a little too far in the other direction where it just was not enough.

6:09I also, I think we really struggled with the platform we were using and that to just convert in general. I think there was a lot of limitations to it. A lot of just, it was just really wasn't, I think it didn't make a very seamless experience for customers. And I'm not really sure that we communicated what was, why people should book through us. And I think we also, I think we should have had more offerings on the platform, which we had, I think we had about, we launched with about nine or 10 tour options. Um, but potentially that was not enough. I think a lot of consumers are used to going onto Airbnb experiences, get your guide, buy a tour and they have the opposite where they have tons and tons of, um, options to go through.

7:08And we were trying to, you know, I think having too many options is a problem as well. Cause then you have decision fatigue. You can't, you just don't know, can't decide like, is this walking tour better than this one? They look very similar. But maybe we went a little bit too far in the other direction and we should have had a little bit more so it covered a bigger breadth of interest that our customers potentially would have. So on the one hand, you're told to listen to customers to make sure you build something people actually want. But on the other, you're told to be wary of building what people ask for, or Henry Ford would have tried to make faster horses, as the saying goes.

7:45So what is the right way forward? Ever since this experience, and it's something that we actually have done quite a lot over the years in the business anyway, but ever since this experience, especially, because I have some other ideas of things I want to do, which are a bit more like brick and mortar, kind of more hands-on stuff like this, where it requires a lot more touch points than just our digital guides that we sell. But I've always been in the mindset of doing some kind of pre-sale or testing that... Any way that you can dip your toe in before going in full force to definitely do that. So that's something I wish we could have done in some form or I had thought to do in some form before we did this big launch.

8:37And it's something we've done before with our digital travel guides, the majority of them, you know, we, especially when we had a smaller audience, we would pre-sell them. So we could see if people actually wanted to put their money where their mouth was and actually buy this thing or not. And so, you know, like 50 % of the time we would hit our pre-sell goal and we were like, cool, great. Now we can make this. We have a month to make this and deliver this to people, but we know that people will for sure pay around the price point that we're looking to sell it at. But we've also had other times where we've done pre-sales for guides and they did not hit the level that we want.

9:15And then we knew, okay, you know what? Obviously we've invested the time into doing this pre-sale period, but we see that people aren't going to buy it. So we're just going to scrap it. And then we just refund everybody who did the pre-sale. So anytime that we can do something that is along that line, we do it. Jess learned some other important things. To not rush hiring. To really get into the detail of what a potential hire has actually done. The results of their work and examples, if it's content. She also learned that if things are going well as the content business had been doing, then sometimes it's better to stay in your lane and just go deeper.

9:56The business is doing better than ever today. But before this failure, they came much closer to the brink. we ended 2019 really strong and I also was um coming out of going through a divorce so I had dealt with all that in 2019 and then we got to early 2020 divorce was finalized and I was looking ahead thinking having really good plans for the business um our revenue was going to be I think I'd projected like um it was gonna be double what it was the year before we've always been profitable So that was, um, we had planned to, I had planned for a really good chunk of profit as well. I brought on, um, some more team members and then we got to, as everyone knows the story, March, 2020, and especially for us, our target market, um, it are Americans that are coming to London.

10:48And, um, you can, you can see in like basically all of our analytics for sales, for our website traffic, our YouTube traffic, you can see the day that Trump announced the ban from Europeans going to the U S because everything just completely dropped off. Um, which was interesting because obviously that's the reverse of what our audience was doing. But basically as soon as Trump said that, um, every American was like, well, I don't want to go to Europe and get stuck there. So we're canceling our trip. This obviously tanked the company. Revenue went through the floor. The next few months were brutal with failed pivot after failed pivot.

11:28It was shocking and so disappointing. And it felt like I had worked for five years before that, building up this, um, building up my baby basically. And we were finally getting to the point where I was feeling mentally good and things were really starting to take off and it just completely, um, went off a cliff. So yeah, the, the pandemic was really difficult. And to be honest, it didn't really start to pick back up again until the middle. It started in the middle of 2021 when, um, the government said that travelers could start coming back to the UK again. And I remember I was in Hyde park actually, um, on my, on my own sat on a bench and my friend texted me saying, did you see they're going to let Americans come back into the UK again.

12:15And I just started crying. And that was like, oh, I'm getting choked up even talking about it. But it just showed me like how much, um, like how much it had been weighing on me, uh, and how difficult like the year and a half previous had been. That wasn't even the worst of it. At the end of 2021, we, things had picked up again, but the government at the end of the year, we had that Omicron, um, wave that came back and the government started to clamp down a little bit on people traveling back in again. And I remember at the end of that year, just thinking, you know what? I don't think I can do this anymore.

12:53Like this is, I, is this years more, more years of this that we're going to have to deal with. And I can't grow a business with these ups and downs. It's just not viable at this point. Um, so I basically gave myself two weeks off at the end of the year around Christmas and new year. And I said, I'm going to see how I feel. And then the beginning of January, I'll make a decision on if I just want to shut everything down. And on New Year's Eve, I got a proposal through for a really good sponsored campaign with a language learning company. and it kind of gave me the little bit of boost that I needed to stick with it because they were like really believed in what we do and were really excited to work with us.

13:44And I was like, you know what? Okay, let's just give this one more go, hang in there, give it a few more months at least, and then make a decision. And I'm really glad that I stuck with it because after these lockdown, the final restrictions were lifted, which was, I think it was like mid-Jan. So they don't even last that long. Um, that's when really things started to just take off. So, um, it was a good learning to stick with it as long as you can, um, and lean on people that can understand what you're going through to a point and also can just give you a shoulder to cry on when you need. So So yeah, I think that was probably the main thing.

14:28That was Jessica Dante, showing what can happen if you can just survive long enough. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. I'll see you next time.