Launching a Business in a Crisis: We hear from ‘WhyBuy’ Founder and CEO, Jamie Conway

WhyBuy is a brand-new app allowing users to rent a variety of goods with door-to-door delivery and pickup.

I was very lucky to be in the middle of launching a new business through lockdown and while seeing the despair and worry affecting my friends and family, it provided me with a purpose and engagement that I know many have missed in their lives since March.

In business, Covid-19 has generated a massive amount of hyperbole and clichés, particularly towards startups. People will sagely tell you that in crisis there is opportunity and that economic turmoil means the most innovative companies who are running efficiently can thrive while others fail, but these are usually well-meaning people who haven’t faced the abyss that all new companies face on launching.

The “positives” of a pandemic

There is no such thing as something making a startup any easier and trying to find positives in a pandemic for a new business often feels insincere and crass. By and large, business is not a zero-sum game. The pain of one company in this pandemic does not mean another company has the maneuverability to take advantage of that, and our own experience has been that supply chains are so interlinked now, disruption on this scale provides few if any positives, even for healthy companies.

All startups by their very nature are “disruptive”. It’s an overused term and it is usually driven by hubris. It is impossible not to set up a new business without the intention of it causing some form of disruption; whether to a similar business that can’t meet full market demand or to bring about a concept that is new and provides a unique opportunity for consumers. We were very lucky in that the business we were setting up tapped into the zeitgeist of lockdown; but for every opportunity it provided, Covid-19 threw up barriers to launch.

The WhyBuy app

Part of our luck was the concept, which lends itself to being easily understood. We built an app that allows people to access all the stuff you sometimes need at home, but don’t have anywhere to store it and is expensive to purchase. Things like power drills-when was the last time you actually had to drill a hole? In reality, we end up buying items to be used very briefly and then they wind up taking up space in our homes and rarely see the light of day.

And it is not just about tools. It is also about accessing all the stuff you infrequently need but has a massive impact on your wallet, storage and the environment. Do you really need a £250 printer at home that you hardly ever use and costs a fortune to buy ink for? Do suitcases, clogging up the entire top of the wardrobe, really make up for the two weeks of the year when you actually use them?

We built an app that lets you say: at 10am on Saturday until 9pm on Sunday, I want a barbecue, a patio heater and beer cooler for £60 including delivery and collection. We do it all for you using our own inventory, not peer-to-peer, where we cannot control quality and cleanliness. Whereas Amazon will deliver at any point between 8am and 8pm, we have made a conscious decision to let customers define their delivery times in one-hour slots and take it all away once you are done with it. Trying to negotiate a lawnmower back into an over packed garden shed is a misery nobody should have to go through and there is a surprisingly intense pleasure in seeing items being sent back and not having money and space being absorbed by over consumerism.

Covid-19 brings opportunity and challenges to every business

One of the positives we saw during Covid-19 has been the reduced cost of digital marketing. With those marketing efforts, we expected to generate less than 1,500 downloads from our launch on June 11th to the end of the month, but succeeded in getting more than 3,500. The only downside was we wanted newspaper and public transport to play a major role in our marketing, and Covid-19 meant we had to focus purely on digital marketing.

Another big challenge we continue to have is in the supply chain. Items we want to stock that we could have sourced in hours in the past for our customers, now take multiple days and often more than a week so we have had to use backup, more expensive suppliers and that impacts the bottom line.

A final example of an opportunity from Covid-19, which quickly turned into a challenge was the decrease in traffic which assisted our ability to deliver quickly to customers. As a business, we consider ourselves very environmentally conscious and produce almost no waste. However, with vehicle manufacturing shutting down, it meant we didn’t receive the first of our all electric fleet until the last week of June and we were then impacted by the increase in the congestion charge.

The lesson I would share is not to assess businesses in Covid-19 as having either challenges or opportunities. The entire ecosystem of commerce means that pain in one sector affects us all, and businesses need to empathise and remember the human impact to make good commercial decisions.

One of our best ideas was to reach out to companies suffering during Covid-19 and see how we could help. Businesses like gyms are now renting out their spin bikes and weight sets on our app to generate much needed income while they wait for their businesses to reopen again. While government support has been essential for many during the pandemic, collaborations such as these will be the bedrock the recovery will be founded upon.

Change is the only constant

Economies, businesses and societies are permanently in a state of flux where change is the only constant. There is no part of the human or natural world where change is not taking place continuously. Covid-19 is a catalyst that has accelerated the speed at which these changes happen. In the turmoil, and confusion, it also provides a stark realisation that our friends and families provide a focal point and a calm reminder that we should always remember what is most important.

WhyBuy is now available to download from the App Store and Google Play. If you want to get in touch with Jamie, you can find his LinkedIn profile here or email LIBS on londonirishbusinesssociety@gmail.com and we will be happy to introduce you.

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