I moved to London after finishing my masters degree, and followed a varied career in IT sales and marketing. The decision to do something different came on a spa break in Thailand, where I met a Buddhist monk.
I knew I felt stressed out, but I wasn’t particularly looking to change my career. We sat down on the beach, and after a few words he handed me a bottle of water. I gulped a few mouthfuls down and he asked me, “How did that taste? Did you notice it was cool?” His point was that I should slow down, to notice and enjoy the present. Material things in life cannot actually make you happy for more than a moment and I realised that while my career was going well, it wasn’t fulfilling me. There were only so many pairs of Louboutin shoes I could buy.
Our conversation opened my mind to what else I might do. I didn’t make the leap right away, because I didn’t know what that new career would be. One of the ideas from a book called The Seed Handbook was to create a board with images of things that made me happy in childhood. The eureka moment arrived when the pictures of beautiful gardens I’d pinned up came together with the basic problems I was having as a novice gardener.
I’d choose plants because they looked good, but didn’t realise how important it was to get the right one in the right place. I wasn’t sure how to take care of them either; I knew I had to prune my wisteria, but it always seemed to be the wrong time. I thought, “I wish someone could remind me in February.” That’s how Shoot was born.
I funded and built the business on my own, with a small team of contractors. We started with a simple website that had a database of 500 plants, and we now have full, expert details on close to 20,000 species. Subscribers get personalised recommendations on what to plant, where it will thrive and how to care for it, with email reminders when something needs pruning or feeding.
One of my previous roles was with a startup, and that experience taught me the importance of testing my business model first. I went to Columbia Road flower market in east London, taking examples of the type of care advice emails we’d be sending and asking people whether would find them useful. They loved the idea.
I’ve often felt overwhelmed by the amount of work ahead. The scale of what I’m building suddenly dawned on me one day: I was trying to compile an encyclopaedia of all gardening plants, single-handed, without being an expert. At that stage I decided we’d add new plants to our database as and when our members requested them. And all our content is added by trained horticulturalists, which is important for our professional members.
There were times I’ve felt frustrated and alone, and wondered “Why have I done this?” But the good far outweighed the bad. It’s sheer joy to build something people love and find useful. Shoot now has 90,000 members, and has won awards from the Garden Media Guild and the Good Web Guide .
We’ve got big plans to improve our offer and develop our marketing, so in May 2015 we launched a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube. Shoot has a passionate community of members, and we could see how the approach would help us grow the relationships we had, and also how our investors would become our advocates. We raised £500,000, 43% over our target. The funding has started coming in and we’re actively hiring for a lead developer and product manager.
There are 42 million people in the UK with access to a garden, a market that’s worth £5bn annually. By 2020 we aim to have 1 million registered members, and we’ll also have launched a global version of the site. The opportunities for growth are fantastic.
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