Size Isn’t Everything

The big game players out there have huge marketing budgets, most of which tend to be spent on cheesy TV advertising campaigns. How do they afford such campaigns? By charging lenders and providers a fee to display their products in their search results. Weʼre never going to be one of those players. We donʼt want to be.

Instead, what we can offer is the ability to put the user at the center of all of our operations. Lots of the large price comparison sites out there are starting to realise that they need to have some online presence other than their website. This often involves creating a Facebook page with an import from their blog. For us, our users will create the culture. Although weʼll have a clear idea of the features and services that weʼd like to offer – this is a site for the users. The features will never be a finished set, itʼs a continual task of tweaking and improving to make it a product of the people.

One of the risks that you run when you open yourself up in such a public manner is that you wonʼt always be able to satisfy everybodyʼs demands and there are always those few people that will remain anonymous and knock what youʼre doing just for the sake of it. Thatʼs why we have to be solid in our belief in the product – to know that itʼs good and itʼs working to give something back to the community. We recognise that not all features suggested by members will work, the same as not all features we start out with might be there a year down the line, but weʼre prepared to give it a go and if we donʼt introduce something, weʼll be sure to tell you why.

I guess, the good thing is that weʼre small enough to be agile. We can duck and dodge with the changing consumer demands and not worry about the stifling brand guidelines often implemented by big companies. This will be the strategy that weʼll adopt throughout the whole site, from our relationship with members, to providers, the copy and design. We want to hear from you – which areas are you currently under-served in? What do you think could be done better? How formal/informal are you looking for a site to be? These questions are all questions open for debate that weʼd love to hear your views on… Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Posted by Mel Kirk on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 6:57 pm and is filed under What the Users Want!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.