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.

Well thanks for your input. I actually haven't started to market it yet. But thanks anyway.

The point I'm making is who is your target audience? Who is willing to pay monthly for this service? The responses you are getting imply that many people don't see the point or value in it.

Yeah. There's always people who don't see the value in every idea. And some do. And that's marketing; to reach the people who see value in your idea.

Yes, but I only check my contents insurance once a year, and redecorate even less frequently. I think the utility bills stuff might be interesting, but it's a completely different use case and again, I wouldn't be checking very often.

What benefit are you actually delivering on a monthly basis? That's the question you need to think about and whether it's worth a fiver a month to a customer.

(If you priced it up, I think it would be a pretty cheap service to run.)

Big leap from ‘I didn’t keep a list of paint colours’ to ‘people would pay monthly for this’.

I keep a list of paint colours in a free notes app on my phone. You can also do it on the Valspar website.

I can’t believe you’re charging people £15 a month to track job vacancies. You can do that free on LinkedIn.

That's awesome that you can do that for free on LinkedIn. I wish you all the best to continue doing that for free on LinkedIn. The world is full of choices and we can pick and choose what services we wish to pay for. Have a good day.

paint colours are easy to manage - I photo the label and have a folder for them. Easier than logging into your system to input the info and then having to log into to retrieve it.

Im probably in the minority here but I like this idea and think it has potential but would probably need wholescale sign up and become a norm to have value- when buying a house i would have loved to be able to get this info on a home info pack or site but admittedly dont buy houses all the time.

I think the subscription element may put people off. But I can see how a "MyHome" type app would be helpful for some people!

Have you considered a SaaS model and offering it to large landlords that have high turnover (like students). E.g. companies like Fresh or Grainger PLC.

Offer a free trial? Have you got a reliable working website? You need to have some good tag words so it comes up on search engines.

The main problem I see is that buyers have to put in a lot of initial work to set it all up, and initially and potentially for years it won't be complete because they can't find all the guarantees, etc. There are already really good comparison sites so in that area it would be very difficult to create a presence. And you will want great security so people can't get their whole life hacked, this could be expensive.

I have to be honest, I really don't like this kind of thinking. We live in a free country; you're not obliged to use any service you don't want to. But the attitude; kind of, oh, you built a thing eh? Well you should earn absolutely nothing whatsoever for your time, let's start right there. And then why don't you give us all your infrastructure costs so we can be sure you are charging the absolute minimum for the service. Oh say, 50p a year. And a bunch of people are going to use your service and have questions, and expect friendly customer care. But you should do all of that for free. I don't know. I don't have a lot of respect for that line of thinking.

Oh and marketing, you should do that for free too. And your tax return as a company. And anything else that comes out of running a business. You take all the costs so I can pay 50p a year or less. I don't know, that sits wrong with me. If you don't like a product, just don't use it. Don't give people a lecture about how they should be charging basically nothing and building stuff for free.

Anyway thanks for all your collective input. This site is genuinely useful for me and gives me things I really wanted for my home. I can see the value. It's clear this audience does not, so I'm speaking in the wrong place. I refuse to believe out of 8bn people in the world I am so neurodiverse I'm the only person who would also find this useful. I'll go look elsewhere for how to reach people likeminded to me.

I would be hugely concerned that if your site goes bust or you decide it’s not profitable to run any more, I would’ve put in all the effort to filling it all out and then lose it all anyway.

Also, those of us type A enough to want something like this, are the ones who already have all these notes on our phone. Broadly speaking, the people who need it are not likely to be people willing to put the effort in to pull all their information together at the beginning.

I also think £5 per month is too high for something like this - minimal paid ads + maybe £1.99 is feasible.

Family, friends and partners will always be supportive of your ideas because they’re trying to see the upsides. I have several family members who get very passionate about their web-based products, we’re all polite and positive but none of them have made any money. Your best bet is to find out if there’s a market for something first (from people other than direct family/friends) before building it, and implement suggestions along the way.

I'm not saying that at all, I was a software developer for years, I am not expecting anyone to work for free - but you also need to be realistic and understand what the value of what you are delivering actually is. That's basically how business works.

If you want someone to pay monthly for something, they will expect to be getting something back on a monthly basis and you need to understand your actual costs so you can work out whether you will make a profit and if it's worth your while.

I think you should make a site like this yourself, and then I'll pay you £1.99 to use it.

Also, you'd be hugely concerned that my site might go bust... and then you'd try and force down the pricing to just £1.99 a month?

I'd be worried about all that information being together in the public domain potentially. That would be very very valuable data and a disaster in the wrong hands.

Why wouldn't you just make a spreadsheet or document of your own with this info on? To be kept privately.

Nobody else in the world should be able to know any of it except people who live in your house?!

I already have everything you say, held over a couple of documents on a folder on a secure cloud drive.

I would not, in any world, want it hosted on a publicly accessible website. Why is that more secure than an cloud hosted app that you had before?

But the security issue of publishing the contents of my house and the WiFi code is huge. Therefore it’d need to be behind a log in. Then it’s just like the app you mentioned was riskier?

I think what is marketable is an app where you can put that information in, and people are familiar with apps under a subscription model so I think that will be less of a barrier there.

The only way I might consider it is if it reduced the admin from me updating my own spreadsheets and documents - the utility thing is a bit of a faff to extract the data into a spreadsheet but I’ve been meaning to use Claude or ChatGPT to shortcut this for free, I just need to spend 15 mins figuring out how best to do it.

How much of the initial setting up do you do for the £5 per month? Is all the grunt work still on the user?

OP, you’ve come here for market research because you haven’t been successful in marketing your product so far, and you’re being unnecessarily salty to people simply telling you that they think this is because potential customers can’t see the value of it as a subscription product and have security concerns. If you don't like a product, just don't use it. That’s what people are telling you - they don’t like it and can’t see why they’d want to use it and are suggesting a different pricing structure or different product options that might make them think about using it. That might be market research feedback you don’t like, but it’s feedback. It sounds like a service that’s trying to do and be a lot of things, rather than one thing well.

ETA: there are quite a few similar services going for the death market: I use a cloud-based “I’m dead now - it’s your fucking problem” recordkeeper for maintaining and updating where important docs and files are stored and changes to pensions, financial products etc I have. If you can, try and tap into market research for those services and what the successful ones do well and how they price structure it for both one-time and subscription pricing.

Actually I haven't tried marketing it yet. I came here for some light touch suggestions about maybe some sites online where people who really take pride in their home, might congregate. Or maybe some people who like having information neatly stored might find a spark in this, and share where they might discover something like this.

I haven't tried to market it yet.

I get that this audience is not the audience that would want this service. Thanks anyway.

They say the Internet can be an echo chamber; you can find a lot of people who just have the same point of view as you. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Respectfully, everyone who "wouldn't use this" are not valuable to me. I want to use marketing to reach the people that would, and tell them the service exists. I don't think I'll either achieve that here, or achieve any suggestions of places I might achieve that. So respectfully thanks for your time, but I won't require any further feedback.

I lime the idea of having all the info in one place.
Security would be a big concern for me.
It would be useful if the system could be set up to text / email you reminds for annual renewal dates like insurance, mots , vet checks .

How would it cope with energy price changes? Could it be set up to track them ?

I definitely wouldn't use it for decorating, like most people I always have paint left over for touch ups and anything more than a year or so means the paint on the walls will be faded compared to new ( or stored ) paint.

That’s fine, I hope you find what you’re looking for. As I’ve said, very similar services already exist so it’s worth looking at what those ones are and do and considering how and why they’re successful. In an ever-digitalising world there’s also scope for more sophisticated services which record individuals’ e.g. cryptocurrency holdings, online gaming accounts, monetized social media accounts etc rather than paint colours and where the stopcock is.

I guess there's two strands to marketing. One is finding where your potential clients hang out and targeting them there. This seems to be what you're aiming for, and that's fair enough.

But there's another potential stand where you try to create your own market. And I think that's what people on here are trying to explain to you. If you can make people see 1. Why they would benefit from having their house data on your webpage (and explicitly in place of having a physical/digital folder or remembering stuff) and 2. Why it would be so important and so useful that it's worth £5/month of their hard earned cash, then it's probable that you would create for yourself a much larger pool of potential customers.

You're clearly passionate about your product and have worked hard on it. For what it's worth, I agree with other posters that, at the moment your target audience will be people who need to share this home data frequently, so should be looking for landlord/holiday let forums. I think it's potentially a really great product for that market. Good luck!

We have been in our house 30 years.
My method would cost £50.
Yours would cost us 5x12x30 which is £1800 so far ...

I really like the idea of reminding on annual renewals. I actually get price changes of energy units from uploaded utility bills. The information is buried in there but not particularly accessible. I can also hook into the various Uk energy companies and get their tariff information and look at someone’s pattern of usage and suggest where they could make savings, which might quickly by itself provide more than £50 of savings.

From your utility bills I know which company you are with and which tariff, and there are only a handful of them, so I could monitor their tarrifs for price changes and alert people to what this would mean for them, even showing them up to three months of future energy use, modelled on their typical use in the past. This would be a good feature - thanks for the feedback.

Security is a big concern for me; the data uploaded is secured in a very safe encrypted cloud provided storage facility and you need to be logged in as the uploading user to be able to retrieve the data. Security has been a considerable area of the design. I have been a software developer for 22 years so far and still actively work as one today, and yes security is something I take seriously.

OP, there is absolutely no point in asking for input and then being cross that people aren't positive. As described, this smacks of an idea you've been working on with ChatGPT. It isn't clear what you are offering that people can't easily do for free.

I would change the model- offer the app for nothing. People might be interested in that. You make your money from selling their data, which could potentially be more lucrative than a subscription model. You could also tie in to promotions/advertising although I think keeping the app super-clean and user-friendly might rule that out.