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YourButler – Lean By The Numbers

Marcus Holmes
Marcus Holmes

Thilo Kaipert saw people having some success with a business model that he thought could work here. So he started it in three days flat. It’s been going for over a month or so now, so we got him to give us a progress update.

//SN: What’s the story so far? How long has YB been going, how did you get it started, how have you been growing it?

I guess it all started with the fact that I wanted to my life being outdoors every day. However, I was always frustrated by how much time I had to spend on organising my daily life: Car servicing, dry cleaning, organising surprises, making reservations and bookings, grocery shopping etc.  I really did not want to waste my time with all these things and I had several business ideas around reducing the time to organise daily chores.

Then I saw this great idea, which has been a huge success in North-America and Europe and thought that we need a service exactly like this in Australia. I knew I could do this quickly and cheaply to test the idea, and so the whole service was launched in 3 days – from creating the website, getting the number and incorporating the business and getting our first customers.

The service is now 6 weeks old and over time the requests have increased so now we’ve serviced over 100 unique requests from all over Australia. Most growth occurred via word-of-mouth and on Facebook. We have also now over 200 casual drivers registered with us to increase our service availability and response time.

//SN: What’s the plan for YB over the next year or so? How are you going to achieve it?

In one year we hope that we can fulfil any request in under 60 minutes (if a delivery is included).  And it will be a normal thing to text YourButler to get things organised and on-demand. By then, YourButler will also be your friend who reminds you of specific occasions – so you never forget an important date (e.g. your wedding anniversary, a birthday etc.). We will achieve this by raising angel investment and scaling the business significantly and building partnerships with businesses across Australia (e.g. coffee shops, take away shops, franchise companies, supermarkets, courier services, bars etc.). The team is also growing – so far we are in total now 4 (+2 interns) to cover all the requests.

//SN: What’s been the biggest hurdle so far?

The biggest hurdle is actually get some of the product pricing. For example when people are ordering some food – it is not always easy to find a price list etc. Also building up a drivers network is not easy but we are getting there.

//SN: What’s been the biggest surprise so far?

The biggest surprise are probably the request we receive. We really get all types of requests. Food/drink deliveries are very common as well as bookings/reservations for functions, tickets, restaurants and helping to get someone to do household chores etc. Some of the rather unusual requests were to write a love letter, organising a ‘car key delivery’, buying new furniture.

//SN: If you had to do it again what would you do differently?

I would have started a business earlier! The biggest challenges were to communicate as a team while dealing with the customer requests.  We started off with a mix of e-Mail, WhatsApp and Facebook. Eventually we had to work out a more advanced procedure and find the right technology to help us. If I could change this – I would have thought about the right team communication platform from Day 1. Slack works really well for us!

//SN: What’s your advice for anyone contemplating a similar service-oriented startup?

Think about what makes your service different from the other service providers – Why would a customer choose you and not someone else? This was the trigger for YourButler – we make on-demand services easy to use for everyone. Ask yourself – why a customer would choose you. Get out there and actually ask random people whether they would use your service.

//SN: How can the startup community help you with the project?

We are moving now to the next phase of our business by integrating far more technology into our processes – I am sure that we can learn a lot from the startup community in Perth when it comes to the integration of APIs, website development, targeted marketing, crowdsourcing technologies. We are looking forward to work together with the startup community in Perth to grow our business.

//SN: thanks Thilo! amazing progress for only 6 weeks in, so we’re really looking forward to seeing how the business grows

Check out Yourbutler – an awesome example of Just Do It And See What Happens

Read more about some of Perth’s best founders and investors here

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Marcus Holmes

Marcus Holmes

Gentleman Technologist and co-founder of Startup News. His vision has made //SN a sustainable media cheerleader for the startup community. Former CEO of Phnom Penh Post, he can be found somewhere in S.E. Asia coding away...
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