ALFRED MALMROS

Homes With Stories

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:36:16 -0500

Today me and Tom launched our first business idea, lean, mean and free. Homes With Stories - a simple travel blog - completely based around AirBnB. We curate the site (with over 600,000 rooms for rent) based on the simple insight that people now travel and live in people’s homes, not hotel rooms. We create stories around the homes, who owns them, where they are and what to do in the area.

The business model is as simple, we’ve signed up as affiliates.

Airbnb will pay you 40% of all revenue from guest reservation fees that result from successful bookings made by travellers that you refer to us during the first 30 days.

Let’s see how it goes! Great feeling to finally have launched something that generates revenue. Almost feels unimportant if we make any money.

Looking at the product first

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:12:28 -0500

Tom and I met a few months ago, both talking about work and ideas, about projects we wanted to do and mistakes we’ve made. It all resulted in a spontaneous brainstorm about a business we could do together.

Tom had the idea that we should write things down that we are genuinely interested in. Almost like a middle school exercise - but with an incredible result. I realised instantly that I had never considered doing anything related to the 10 things I had written down. To the things I know and care the most about.

I had always looked for opportunities around me - never within me.

I always start with a marketplace which I’m interested in and then try to find a gap in it. This leads to ideas which essentially people within that marketplace could execute - not me.

So we took our lists and combined to look for any opportunities in a field which we were both interested in.

We are both interested in travelling, cities and food (very generic interests but you tend to have less of your more niche ones in common). We then started coming up with ideas that we could do in that space. Ideas that we could execute ourselves without budget. And I think we found a pretty good one.

When we decided on our product we started looking at what marketplace it would fit into, which isn’t always obvious.

Career highlight, our One Thousand Cranes made it big at...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:15:52 -0500

Career highlight, our One Thousand Cranes made it big at @designmuseum’s Design of the Year. Humbling company. (Taken with instagram)

Our Kleenex project @sciencemuseum’s Hidden Heroes...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:30:51 -0500

Our Kleenex project @sciencemuseum’s Hidden Heroes exhibition. Proud moment. (Taken with instagram)

The start of starting a startup

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:17:00 -0500

It’s incredibly easy to have what constitutes as a ‘startup idea’, you take an emerging behaviour (streaming movies online, using YouTube as a music player, tweeting about the weather) and pair it up with a new business model (subscription, micro payments or let’s-build-it-and-see).

Next step is coming up with a name that ends neatly in a url ( .co or .ly). Register it.

Done. Or so you think. It feels like you exist.

But you’re almost further away from realising an idea than you were before you had the idea. Because the effort and excitement you’ve put in so far, will keep you from rethinking it or adapting it to the reality you now face.

Before you even start thinking about if anyone would want it, what gap in the market you’re exploiting or the famous exist strategy. Ask yourself 2 things:

Can you build it? Are you central to the idea?

Your Spotify for travel, Groupon for experiences, Foursquare for music or AirBnB for cars.

I always have to say no to those two questions.

You will always learn a lot during the process of trying to get one of those things of the ground, how to write a business plan, how to pitch, how to make absolutely ridiculous risk calculations etc.

But you will mainly learn, that if you’re starting a web based business, the first thing you write, should be a line of code. Not a business proposition.

The next thing I’m doing with my friend Tom, starts from what we can do ourselves, and what we love doing. An idea which we’re central to and can build with existing tools.

Update on that soon.

Starting a startup

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:31:00 -0500

After spending 9 months trying to create a communications solution that we knew wouldn’t work, for a product that no one wanted, I lost a lot of hope in what I do. An incredible amount of dough is wasted on clients’ behalves - but more depressingly is how much of talented people’s time is wasted.

In those 9 months, with the team and budget we had, we could’ve launched a competitor to the product we were marketing. Fixing all its flaws instead of trying not to talk about them.

But we didn’t.

So I thought, why not try to spend the next 9 months of my spare time to try and launch a product. And I did.

But I didn’t launch anything.

I tried to create something I didn’t really know how to do and became too dependent on other people.

I tried to create something too big in scale so it became too big of a leap.

And I focused wholeheartedly, on the plan of the business rather than the business. The blueprint for a house I didn’t know where to put or even why. I just wanted to build a house.

It was almost as wasteful as the prior example, in that case we still launched something, but I only invested time, not any money.

So for 2012 - launch a business - then plan it. Reversed order to make it right.

Make reflection a habit

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:25:33 -0500

The core purpose of this blog (still feels weird saying it) is reflection. To reflect on my work, the wider context of it (the communications industry) but also, about what has come to be what really inspires me: To start a business.

During the last 6 months, pretty much since the moment I got my wonderful Kindle, I’ve been going deeper and deeper into the phenomenon startup, I’ve read too much of the literature, I have Techcrunch and the usual suspects in the RSS feed and I’ve drafted a few business plans. But still not a business.

Why?

Topic for the next post.

Designs of the Year 2012 Nomination

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:22:26 -0500

My project One Thousand Cranes for Japan has been nominated for Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2012. Can still not really believe it and looking at the competition is humbling - we will never win but it is an incredible honour. The site isn’t live anymore bur you can read more about the project over on Dezeen.

New social media strategy

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:44:00 -0500

Facebook’s timeline made me realise, that the more public and open the platform has become over the years, the less I have used it for reflection. I used to report about both sad and happy times, about the struggles during projects, not just the end results.

Now Facebook is like a social CV - which means you only share the good and inoffensive bits.

It’s not a big problem, and I don’t wish for Facebook to necessarily change. I just need to switch things around. My blog used to be a broadcasting tool - I used it to tell the world about something - to openly reflect or document processes - but it became too public. Now when Facebook (and Twitter, but it has always been) is too public, I’ll start a blog again for the more personal stuff. As Ben said, “no one reads blogs anymore” - perfect.

Now I don’t have to worry, because people will actively have to search this stuff out - something that people who care about me and what I do hopefully will.

So here’s to a new blog.