How would founders market a £5-a-month digital home manual service?

[jsecure]

So I had this idea to create the complete manual for your home, as written by you. Where is the stopcock for water, the shutoff for gas and electricity. What rooms do you have in your house and what items are in there, with PDF copies of the instruction manuals. An automatic home contents insurance report. Bills and utilities over time. Stuff like that. The wifi code. Basically your own complete guide to your house.

Everyone I've spoken to (friends and family) think it's a really useful from day one idea, and my wife is really impressed with how it's turned out. But I'm thinking, how do I go about marketing this now? I launched a career helping website which tracks applications for roles, and although that's really useful, it has been a lead balloon in the marketing phase. Clearly people need work, and some people are really struggling. But I have not managed to make contact with those people. We are on opposite sides of the hypothetical river.

This website about your home will only cost £5 a month, so I can't really look to spend £50+ per head acquiring customers. I learned with my last site, it's one thing to make a really amazing product, but it's quite another to market it.

Why would I pay anything to have that hosted online?

But I have to do all the work up front so what’s the benefit for me?

It means you have a simple place online to keep everything together rather than having a folder somewhere with a bunch of manuals and stuff. And just... remembering where to shut off everything. And you can also store paint colours and decoration details for each room, which I find maddening because I can't remember what colour I painted my walls and now I need to touch up the paint.

I think some people are just not going to get the idea all and think it's terrible. That's OK. I think it has benefit.

If you’re storing passwords and access details, security would be a high concern. Someone might pay one off, but not monthly, it doesn’t change that much. Potentially useful for landlords where tenants change regularly.

I agree that people might pay for a one off but not £5 a month. I think it’s a good idea but people haven’t got £5 a month to store manuals and stopcock information.

There's actually several strands to it. It can also produce detailed analysis of your utility bills and show you how your usage, unit costs and overall bills have changed / risen / fallen over time. And later I want to add in a feature to help people switch to lower cost tarriffs and save money. So there's lots more to it than a facility to store a wifi code.

Landlords is definitely an area I'm looking into; the ability to share a subset of the information with someone else via email and redact the share later.

All the sensitive information uploaded is stored in the cloud with cloud provided secure encryption controls around it, to ensure that the information remains safe and confidential.

While I get it if you think this is a silly idea, I'd love some suggestions about how I could market it :)

why wouldn’t i just make a folder on my computer or phone? If I’ve got to do all the work of putting the info together I’m not paying you to store it. £5 a month to access my own information? No way.

I can see the use, as we do house swaps and need to leave practical details with our visitors. I might pay £5 a year if it was really well done and recommended on MSE or something like that. But otherwise I already keep stuff in notes and links on my phone. By and large I find the tech is better when I use a generic product and adapt it to my needs, than when I use a specialist product. Eg Google calendar and To Do, although it’s two apps, is much better tech for a family calendar and lists, than Cozi.

The thing is, I might pay £20 or even £50 for a one off physical folder with sections, checklists etc etc.
But £5 a month? No way.

I fear you are having ideas, but you aren't solving real problems. Which is why marketing isn't working.

Digital doesn't always mean better.

I think the only people who would find this worthwhile would be landlords who do short term lettings or house swappers. Otherwise mostly it's specific to the owner or tenant surely? A new long term tenant will need to set up their own broadband contract and a new homeowner may well bring their own appliances. Energy usage is down to lifestyle to some extent so it's helpfulness would be limited. As for things like water stopcock etc is remembering where your circuit board etc is that difficult?

Agree that your market is holiday home owners and house swappers. People who need to regularly share this info with others. So find out where they ‘hang out’ and go talk to them. FB groups? Owner forums on Reddit?

You realise £50 is like, a year’s worth of £5 a month. I should send you the sign up link :)

Why would you need it on a subscription basis?

But her £50 is for life not a year

Work out your market first, then tailor your marketing to it. To work out your market, work out what problem you’re trying to solve.

Personally I have a sheet in the notes app on my phone which can be shared. Not sure why I’d need to track annual gas and electricity usage. When my fixed rate energy is up I go to a comparison app which already has my usage.

Because every time someone accesses the site, pulls data from the databases, or the secure file storage, or whatever, it all costs money. There are very few websites that can be free. Ones that are free are usually either supported by ads, or by selling your personal information to marketers (which I am not doing).

You need to figure out who would use and pay for it. I think you're struggling to market it because noone wants it tbh. Sorry.

You can take a punt; pay me £50 and use the site for "life". But suppose it really takes off, and people are in there once or twice a week, checking on their utility bills, updating information about stuff in their house. It's basically a ponzi scam then; you hope that the new signups will pay enough money to bankroll the ongoing running costs of all the "life" customers who continue to incur costs. But it's OK. As a company, you can always just "go bust" if it all becomes too much. But I think that a subscription basis is much more aligned to real costs, and also incentivises me to take the whole platform forward and develop more ideas around it, so one day it can be saving people money on their bills, integrating with suppliers to get cheaper rates and deals and things, useful features I can't even imagine yet. Also it's good that the person who actually stopped watching Love Island long enough to build something, should get paid a bit for it. We wouldn't go to Tesco and demand that they stop scamming us by making a profit, and demand that they sell us everything at strictly wholesale cost basis, or less, and make a loss.

I can see why you need it to be subscription based, but why would a customer? Most subscription based things continually give me something back, streaming, news or fitness apps, for example - I'm interacting daily with them. Your app wouldn't be doing that, for a lot of people it would be recording stuff on registration and looking at it rarely.

What’s to stop someone signing up for one month, copying all the info and cancelling? Why would they give you all the info when they could just creat their own folder?

Once or twice a week?!!!!! Have you ever actually don’t any home admin?! You’re not really listening are you…?

Yeah I built that into the pricing. My job search helping site is £15 a month; this is just a fiver. It's designed so it's pretty much a service fee. You pay it, you can park your data for a year and whenever you need it, it's right there. I also offer big discounts if you pay for a year or three years. It is largely just a service fee. Like paying to park your car. But I think that it is useful to have this service as opposed to not having it. It comes from my three of my own motivations

• I need to repaint my dining room but I don't remember the ridiculous name of the paint shade I painted it in. Had I had this site, I would have recorded it there
• I used to have an app that had all the items in my house and then produced a home contents insurance report. There's a few on the mac app store. But I lost the backup file or something like that, and the data is all gone. Storing it on a site eliminates these issues
• I actually didn't originally think about utility bills, but when I was doing the complete manual for the house, I thought, why not. And it has genuinely surprised me. Some things confirmed what I suspected; I do use less Gas in summer, but I hadn't noticed my water bills have been going up the last 18 months, and now I can see if that is based on increased volume usage or increased cost per unit. The answer is a bit of both. I do genuinely feel like for the first time ever I have this great visibility into my utilities. I'm thinking about switching tarriff because looking at these charts, I realise I could be doing a lot better - in future I want the site to actually suggest new tarriffs to people right off the bat, and even suggest how much they could save

So I think it's genuinely useful. It would have solved a bunch of issues for me. And for £5 a month, I see that as little more than a service fee. It's not like it's a broadband subscription.

I get it, you don't rate the idea. All feedback is good feedback as they say. But I do rate the idea, and I'd use it. So thanks for your input. You've said your piece...

I'm actually down with this. I made a feature so that once you've uploaded all your bills or whatever, scraped them together from a bunch of supplier websites or whatever file on your computer you might have them saved in, you can hit a big Download All button. And it'll download all the bills you uploaded, in a zip file, sorted by category and date. It's really neat. I'm going with the idea it's "your data", at all times so I'm not going to stop you leaving with it. If it's not useful, if it's not for you, you can go. I won't try stop anyone.