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.

Eww, I mean I get it, I see that you could make money selling people’s data, but I’m definitely more on the Apple side of the fence than the Google one…

For sure. It makes it a much more viable business though, especially as you'd know some pretty specific stuff about energy usage + preferences on white goods and their age. I'm afraid I think the subscription model is a non starter because people expect this stuff for free (or "free").

DH and I have a whatsapp community with different chat groups for topics like this (utilities, house work, kids schools, etc) and we just put all the info there
-> what would be the added value of your website?
(genuinely asking, as the answer might help figure out how to market it)

When you searched online for similar services, what came up? What keywords led you to a useful site?

I think you would have to spend a decent amount on Google/social ads to get traction with this; on the upside it will be cheap as the keywords may not have a lot of competitor bidders. On the downside, I don’t know how many people would be searching for such a service.

At least you can target audiences down to quite a small demographic; I’d go for women 30-50 who are mid to high earners and see what happens.

£5 a month is £60 and a one-off £50 is one-off, not every year.

As I said I like the general idea of your plan and I am glad you are on top of the security requirements.

As for your marketing, I think your target market would be landlords with a couple of properties and new home owner/ renters so they can get everything organised right from the start.
Like pp I have been in my house for 20+ years so some of the aspects are not needed + I rent so things like boiler maintenance, gas safety checks and building insurance are not needed.
I don't drive so mot & car insurance isnt needed , however i do have pets so their insurance, booster, flea treatments, micro chip info would be useful so I'd want something I could adjust to my needs .

I also think you could tailor it to air b&b owners, insurance , liability, quick response repair teams for that job / area - and their guest what goes in what bin , what day they go out , stopcock , white goods instructions, key box codes , local attractions, nearest petrol- EV station, hospital, garage .
This would have to be two separate documents, one for the owner and one for the guest.

I think the OP has the wrong idea about marketing. Marketing departments and consultancies contribute to product development - they don't just sit around waiting for a Genius to come up with a product. Also we identify the size of your audience and the pricing strategy. If that's 1,000 total global customers who will pay £1.99 a year, that's what it is.

Also your investment and running costs are of no concern to the customer. If it costs you £4 per head to run this service and no-one will pay that much, then you will lose money. You're not a charity. Nobody is obliged to give you money because you invested your time and resources on an idea.

The Tesco example is irrelevant. Tesco sell good quality food at a great price using their supply chain efficiencies and scale. And it took them 50 years to become a national chain, and their net profit margin is about 1-2%. You're not Tesco.

I like a lot of your ideas. I mean, you're not going to get everyone with everything, but you could well argue pets are part of the home. And across this country, a large percent of the population have pets. So adding functionality for pets increases the value of the offering generally. I wouldn't ever charge more than £5 a month; the idea is to have a low price that is very low friction for people to pay, and then add more and more value to that. Pets. Like it.

You're not getting this product for £1.99. If you can't afford it, you'll have to skip it I'm afraid.

£5 a month is £60 but as with every other SaaS on the planet, I have a 12 months for the price of 10 deal, and you can bag a year for a nice easy £50.

... and then pets leads into offering (affiliate) accounts with vets or pet insurance plans, possibly deals on shopping at pet stores, things like that. Yeah pets could be a very useful extension.

OP I think you are leaping ahead to marketing before doing the research to get feedback on your product and use that to refine it and really understand who your customer group is. Of course your friends and family have said 'That's a great idea' they are either polite or know that you just want to hear that/don't want feedback. Your posts feel like you are setting yourself up for failure if you continue straight to marketing rather than doing real consumer research (which effectively you have already got some of on this thread whether you like it or not). I would encourage you to look up from your 'great idea' long enough to ask yourself an others for some objective product development.

I think products like this aren't necessarily ever 'done'. Startups pivot their core offering quite severely many times in the early days. And the shape of this is not set in stone. Different parts may be developed, emphasized or de-emphasized. I need marketing to convey the basic idea to people and get them curious enough to give it a try. I expect heavy discounts and free accounts to feature strongly in the early days, in return for feedback and input, which will strengthen the product.

I work in SaaS development and have done for over a decade. I've also developed and sold apps for Android and Apple store. So have a track record in this area. The following is just my point of view, take it or leave it.

I wish you luck but I think this idea is a dud. You are approaching this from the wrong end which happens a lot with developers starting out (app dev is not called the Valley of Death for no reason!). You are confusing what you think it's worth (time and effort) for what the market will think it is worth. £5 per month is too high a price point for this, way to high. I'm guessing you're hosting this in Azure and you're pricing up hosting costs and Dev costs to reach your figure.

Also your USP is confusing because you're struggling to articulate it yourself, as evident in your posts. If you can't describe the USP simply and clearly in a few sentences then you need to go back to the drawing board. The USP is the starting point for development, not when you're considering marketing. If your USP is unclear, your UX is likely to be unfocused. I'm guessing you're at MVP stage and hoping to launch to gain income to work on v2.0, with patches and upgrades.

Don't fall into the trap of taking feedback from family and friends as a real life viability check. Most will be telling you what you want to hear.

You may be able to sell this to a smaller audience but I think you're being too ambitious trying to sell an MVP for £5 per month. You'd be better off doing a one off fee and then launching a monthly subscription for v2.0 that has significant upgrades. So bring customers in and then upsell. But you'd need a significant marketing budget and you would be running at a loss to build your customer base. It doesn't sound like you have deep pockets to do this so you're back in the valley of death.

I'd go back to the drawing board if I were you and look for something more simple. Good luck

I shall prove you wrong :)

It seems like a pretty pointless product tbh. Certainly concerns about security and why on earth would anyone pay to store info like that when they don’t need to.

I have a file for manuals, I have a room where the services come into the house in which everything is labelled. I have access to apps for my water and electricity bills. I have reminders in my calendar for renewals, and they email me anyway. Oh and I have a list of paint colours and paint pots.

Pointless 🤷🏽‍♀️

I am not sure why am bothering as OP is clearly not very open minded. But - here's my feedback on the 'idea'. There is no way I would pay you in order to give you a shed-load of my valuable data and there is no way I would trust you to keep my data safely. I can quite happily keep all this home admin in my digital folders myself and I can get all sorts of analysis directly on the relevant supplier's website. As a previous poster (with loads of relevant expertise) said - 'the idea is a dud'. But feel free to waste your time and money OP.

If I had a pound for every time I heard that 😂

The problem is your idea is just too unfocused and at this stage you shouldn't be running off in other directions chasing new ideas. MVP is about one clearly articulated function which can be easily communicated in a USP to a specific target audience. I don't think you're anywhere near that based on your own posts.

Just don't get yourself into too much debt chasing this project. I've seen a lot of people go down that route and end up significantly in debt with hosting costs before they could let go of an idea. I'm hoping also you're running this alongside a day job, not working full time on this project. I'd be worried if you were.

Success isn't about blindly chasing a goal with boundless positivity, it's about making hard realistic choices based on what the market will actually pay for. The hardest part is cutting your losses when it's not working.

I like the idea, I can see it could be a useful product.

However, I don't think you have got your marketing strategy wrong, I think you have the wrong pricing strategy. It is not a product I would pay monthly for, or potentially pay for at all. I would consider funding via advertising.

It's way to expensive. If you flipped the pricing, you'd do better. Make it free to users, but let energy and insurance companies advertise their tariffs. The only apps people pay that much for are ones that provide a lot of content like Spotify, analysis like health apps or Huckleberry, or emotional reassurance like backups. They're all apps you use every day, not once per month.

You could make this easily on CANVA. can’t see anyone paying for this tbh.

That poster shared quite a lot of detailed and insightful information and that’s your response!

This is also how many, most I would hazard, app ideas start out.

Free with ads, sign up to get rid and addtional features. You can do that as you add functionality you talk about.

The premise isn't terrible, done well it could be handy, but I could create that myself on a google doc folder largely. You're appealing to the more digitally minded and most of them could create a simple digital storage solution themselves on a number of already available platforms.

It's a neat solution to your own issue, and as I say the premise isn't bad. But for a product you want to be saleable, you need to tailor and target it better I think.

I have some questions. Your examples are: stopcock and utility shutoffs. Who is this product actually for? I, the homeowner, already know that it's a) under the floor and is a bastard to get to, and b) where you'd normally find said things. Who forgets where their fuse box is or the aforementioned stopcock? They don't...

Where are you hosting the information and what is the contingency for when it inevitably goes down (as even AWS does from time to time)?

Edit - I have grave concerns about safety here actually. You want people to put their rooms and their contents (with presumably their address?!). This is asking to be hacked by burglars.

Well I would pay for it. And I don’t think I’m the only person like me in the country. I knew it would be bad when I posted on the Internet that I had created something, but really don’t understand people’s passionate need to shoot down anything anyone creates. That’s why this world is so messed up. If this product isn’t for you; if you feel for you, it’s pointless, then just go post elsewhere. I don’t expect this thing to be McDonalds. I would be quite happy if it had a small niche customer base. But really, telling me, well I wouldn’t use it… just a waste of your time.