TLabs focus on startups featuring UK and US-based BookingBug.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
We are BookingBug an online booking/reservation/affiliate engine created by Glenn Shoosmith and Greg Bock. BookingBug is designed to help any kind of small service business from diving classes to B&B's get their time and availability online and in front of more clients. Shoosmith's background is in writing low latency financial transaction software and Bock comes from high-profile multimedia design and e-learning.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
BookingBug is to date completely bootstrapped with both Glenn and Greg working on a contract and freelance basis to support the development of the product. This has been combined with the usual support of friends and family special note to Glenn's father for his hard work and investment into the company.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We are trying to solve time online. Physical Goods are represented very well in the digital space. So well in fact that there is an entire business model based around the affiliate promotion of products and certain online storefronts. In services this is different however in that unless the service is an airline or hotel chain your typical SME has been left with very few real options to get his services in front of potential customers.
We also know the more steps the customer has to go through; the more likely they are to abandon the process. The sooner you can answer the question of 'are you free when I want you', the more likely you are to get business from that customers.
Finally we are also trying to make it easier for businesses to take payments online for their services. This may be just a deposit, or it could be the full amount, but reducing now-shows or last minute cancellations is vital for a lot of very small businesses.
Describe the business, core products and services?
To start, BookingBug is a robust booking and reservation system. BookingBug can handle businesses from a personal business owner offering a single service, all the way up to an enterprise level business with multiple locations, resources, and staff combined to offer a range of services, for hour, day or week based services, or even classes, courses and events.
It can allow these businesses to take enquires, accept a deposit for the service or payment. The system also allows for the idea of members, so a business can allow members to reserve their time without deposit or approval, but non members need to pay in advance. Prices can vary by time or day, and even complex prices such as 3-day or 4-day stays for cottages for at different prices for different times of year can be handled easily.
We help a business get that time in front of their customers, by offering customizable embedded widgets that can be added to any site. A business can embed multiple widgets, such that a holiday villa could have a booking widget for all of their villas on one page, and also have the availability of each villa on a page dedicated to each villa.
These can be customized for size and colour to fix seamless in the businesses site - all helping give the user a better experience and answering their most important questions quickly without them having to hunt around for the answer.
The depth and breadth of the types of businesses BookingBug can handle is what makes the second part of BookingBug possible. BookingBug's affiliate model:
Our affiliate model is two fold, it gives directory sites a new way to monetize their content as well as providing them a new source of real time content for their sites. It also allows the businesses to get the real time availability of their services and resources in front of new potential customers.
The affiliates can charge the business on a couple of models, depending on service type and the businesses can choose to embed or not based on the value a particular directory provides. We have tailored business directories for a number of vertical markets, from B&B's to experience sites who are building their site around integrating and offering BookingBug to their businesses.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Key customers at launch were any SMEs that were unsatisfied with the current online booking systems available, which are many. The SMEs we were interested were those that had not moved of a telephone and paper diary because the solutions out there were not flexible enough to fit their business needs.
The personal trainers that operated at many different locations, the small B&Bs that needed a cost effective solution for online room booking, and a lot of other small businesses that didn't fit into the mould of 1 hour slots available 9-5.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
We were kind of our own customers to start with. We were both frustrated with the lack of available service information online. Glenn was tired of phoning around to different councils just to find out that their squash courts were only available to members or simply unavailable on the day he was looking.
Wasting his time digging through websites that didn't have a convenient way to display time and no way to keep it up to date. Greg was frustrated that it was so difficult to collect money for services when it was so easy to so for products.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
BookingBug has a simple Software-as-a-Service fremium model. There is a limited free version either as a taster, or for the smallest users. Payments plans start from only £10 per month, which significantly undercuts other less able booking systems.
If we take the transaction online, which we can do via Paypal, Google Checkout, or several merchant Accounts, we charge a 2% fee. There are also addition features such as receiving SMS’s when someone enquires, or sending SMS reminders to clients.
It is in the affiliate model however that things start to get interesting, as what BookingBug offers is revenue for 3rd party affiliate sites. These sites can earn for embedding booking widget on behalf of businesses and helping to bring them new customers.
The site can charge on a CPM basis, per booking or enquiry as a flat fee, or as a percentage of the service cost. We track which site bookings and enquires came from, charge the businesses as appropriate, and collate and pass the revenue on to the affiliate sites – creating a whole new revenue stream for destination sites that they will not have had before.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
BookingBug’s strength is in its ability to create value for businesses, consumers, and for destination affiliates sites. The opportunity lies in the way that other sites can build their business around our technology, offering value to the businesses they are working with and well as providing core content for their site.
The greatest threat is fragmentation of the market. At the moment BookingBug is the only significant broad reaching affiliate system for generic services (rather than hotels or restaurants specifically). Other entrants who come along behind us might attempt to fragment the market, which will lead to same problem where one site can only show you half of the picture of available services.
BookingBug is attempting to compensate for this by offering open API’s which can work with other platforms as they are developed to still allow a complete picture to be formed across multiple providers
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?
Few people have said it wasn’t going to work, but some did raise the issue of converting people across from the traditional paper diary as a barrier for many small businesses.
We feel however that as e-commerce started as a niche idea with very few businesses taking it up, it has completely changed the way business operate, and now for a business not be able to sell or offer their good online is to miss a sizable chunk of your market. Businesses adapted to selling online because as their competitors did, it started to affect their bottom line.
The same will happen to service businesses in many areas. Those you cannot book or enquire about online will see a dip in sales compared to those whom you can.
A large driver for this change is the more ubiquitous availability of broadband internet. 5 or 10 years ago, a small business with either no internal access, or only a dial up line would not have wanted to manage their business online.
Now with broadband and smart phones, the ability to access your booking online from anywhere has value to a small business and the ability to show that availability in real time to your customers can only help increase your sales.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We have many different measures of success. Some of the partners we are working with now have the power to completely transform our business in many ways.
Within the next 12 months we would like to be in a position that we can help any small business integrate their live calendar into at least 6 different destination websites that are directly relevant to their business – the more sites they can integrate into, the more new customers they can access.
At that point we will start to see a snowball effect as more business see that value in getting their services online and in front of customers, and more 3rd party destination sites see that value on showing live service availability as way of adding value to their site and earning revenue from doing so.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?We are BookingBug an online booking/reservation/affiliate engine created by Glenn Shoosmith and Greg Bock. BookingBug is designed to help any kind of small service business from diving classes to B&B's get their time and availability online and in front of more clients. Shoosmith's background is in writing low latency financial transaction software and Bock comes from high-profile multimedia design and e-learning.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
BookingBug is to date completely bootstrapped with both Glenn and Greg working on a contract and freelance basis to support the development of the product. This has been combined with the usual support of friends and family special note to Glenn's father for his hard work and investment into the company.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We are trying to solve time online. Physical Goods are represented very well in the digital space. So well in fact that there is an entire business model based around the affiliate promotion of products and certain online storefronts. In services this is different however in that unless the service is an airline or hotel chain your typical SME has been left with very few real options to get his services in front of potential customers.
We also know the more steps the customer has to go through; the more likely they are to abandon the process. The sooner you can answer the question of 'are you free when I want you', the more likely you are to get business from that customers.
Finally we are also trying to make it easier for businesses to take payments online for their services. This may be just a deposit, or it could be the full amount, but reducing now-shows or last minute cancellations is vital for a lot of very small businesses.
Describe the business, core products and services?
To start, BookingBug is a robust booking and reservation system. BookingBug can handle businesses from a personal business owner offering a single service, all the way up to an enterprise level business with multiple locations, resources, and staff combined to offer a range of services, for hour, day or week based services, or even classes, courses and events.
It can allow these businesses to take enquires, accept a deposit for the service or payment. The system also allows for the idea of members, so a business can allow members to reserve their time without deposit or approval, but non members need to pay in advance. Prices can vary by time or day, and even complex prices such as 3-day or 4-day stays for cottages for at different prices for different times of year can be handled easily.
We help a business get that time in front of their customers, by offering customizable embedded widgets that can be added to any site. A business can embed multiple widgets, such that a holiday villa could have a booking widget for all of their villas on one page, and also have the availability of each villa on a page dedicated to each villa.
These can be customized for size and colour to fix seamless in the businesses site - all helping give the user a better experience and answering their most important questions quickly without them having to hunt around for the answer.
The depth and breadth of the types of businesses BookingBug can handle is what makes the second part of BookingBug possible.
BookingBug's affiliate model is two-fold:
- Gives directory sites a new way to monetize their content as well as providing them a new source of real time content for their sites.
- Allows the businesses to get the real time availability of their services and resources in front of new potential customers.
The affiliates can charge the business on a couple of models, depending on service type and the businesses can choose to embed or not based on the value a particular directory provides. We have tailored business directories for a number of vertical markets, from B&B's to experience sites who are building their site around integrating and offering BookingBug to their businesses.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Key customers at launch were any SMEs that were unsatisfied with the current online booking systems available, which are many. The SMEs we were interested were those that had not moved of a telephone and paper diary because the solutions out there were not flexible enough to fit their business needs.
The personal trainers that operated at many different locations, the small B&Bs that needed a cost effective solution for online room booking, and a lot of other small businesses that didn't fit into the mould of 1 hour slots available 9-5.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
We were kind of our own customers to start with. We were both frustrated with the lack of available service information online. Shoosmith was tired of phoning around to different councils just to find out that their squash courts were only available to members or simply unavailable on the day he was looking.
Wasting his time digging through websites that didn't have a convenient way to display time and no way to keep it up to date. Shoosmith was frustrated that it was so difficult to collect money for services when it was so easy to so for products.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
BookingBug has a simple software-as-a-service fremium model. There is a limited free version either as a taster, or for the smallest users. Payments plans start from only £10 per month, which significantly undercuts other less able booking systems.
If we take the transaction online, which we can do via Paypal, Google Checkout, or several merchant Accounts, we charge a 2% fee. There are also addition features such as receiving SMS’s when someone enquires, or sending SMS reminders to clients.
It is in the affiliate model however that things start to get interesting, as what BookingBug offers is revenue for 3rd party affiliate sites. These sites can earn for embedding booking widget on behalf of businesses and helping to bring them new customers.
The site can charge on a CPM basis, per booking or enquiry as a flat fee, or as a percentage of the service cost. We track which site bookings and enquires came from, charge the businesses as appropriate, and collate and pass the revenue on to the affiliate sites – creating a whole new revenue stream for destination sites that they will not have had before.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
BookingBug’s strength is in its ability to create value for businesses, consumers, and for destination affiliates sites. The opportunity lies in the way that other sites can build their business around our technology, offering value to the businesses they are working with and well as providing core content for their site.
The greatest threat is fragmentation of the market. At the moment BookingBug is the only significant broad reaching affiliate system for generic services (rather than hotels or restaurants specifically). Other entrants who come along behind us might attempt to fragment the market, which will lead to same problem where one site can only show you half of the picture of available services.
BookingBug is attempting to compensate for this by offering open API’s which can work with other platforms as they are developed to still allow a complete picture to be formed across multiple providers
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?
Few people have said it wasn’t going to work, but some did raise the issue of converting people across from the traditional paper diary as a barrier for many small businesses.
We feel however that as e-commerce started as a niche idea with very few businesses taking it up, it has completely changed the way business operate, and now for a business not be able to sell or offer their good online is to miss a sizable chunk of your market. Businesses adapted to selling online because as their competitors did, it started to affect their bottom line.
The same will happen to service businesses in many areas. Those you cannot book or enquire about online will see a dip in sales compared to those whom you can.
A large driver for this change is the more ubiquitous availability of broadband internet. 5 or 10 years ago, a small business with either no internal access, or only a dial up line would not have wanted to manage their business online.
Now with broadband and smart phones, the ability to access your booking online from anywhere has value to a small business and the ability to show that availability in real time to your customers can only help increase your sales.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We have many different measures of success. Some of the partners we are working with now have the power to completely transform our business in many ways.
Within the next 12 months we would like to be in a position that we can help any small business integrate their live calendar into at least 6 different destination websites that are directly relevant to their business – the more sites they can integrate into, the more new customers they can access.
At that point we will start to see a snowball effect as more business see that value in getting their services online and in front of customers, and more 3rd party destination sites see that value on showing live service availability as way of adding value to their site and earning revenue from doing so.
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