End of an era
I’ve just finished university forever! I’m going to indulge in a week of partying or so and then it’s time to give the business our full attention. We’ve just been awarded another £6k from Liverpool St John University, which is great news; we’re on a bit of a roll at the moment! There seems to be a lot of money for business start-ups at the moment, particularly in Liverpool following its winning of the ‘Capital of Culture’ award.
Huetility has just been awarded another £1000 from the University of York. We’re doing well with acquiring money for it, but have yet to sell it. The website is built, although very minimal and requires a lot of content to fill it out. We’re just in the stages of trying to work out how we can make the most money from it and how to price the product. Our aim is to sell directly to the end user by being a one stop website. Although at one stage we were thinking of selling out to a big company like Microsoft, that’s now looking a bit impractical as there’s no copyright on the product and there’d be nothing to stop them just developing it themselves. Also, pitching to a huge company is tricky; one urban myth goes that Microsoft refuse all pitches because they’re so big, they’ve usually got someone within the organisation working on something similar. If it then takes off, they’re in a position to get sued, being unable to prove that it was their version and not the pitched one that got developed.
So we’ve been studying our competition, looking into what they charge and how they sell; one business we’ve found in the U.S. receive half a million dollars a year in funding from Tom Clancy, the author. We weren’t that impressed with their website’s method of testing colour blindness when we looked into them though, think we could do a much better job!
Our research has also turned up that there are a lot of worried parents whose children have been diagnosed with colour blindness looking for help and information. We want to create a site that supports as well as sells, so our short-term goal is to create the content and our long term one is to create a small community around the website.
