Rachel Elnaugh is as a mentor involved with SWEEMO, the 'E-bay for experiences'. We interviewed founder and CEO Jay Nguyen, saying '.......funding - I just needed to get over the fear and embarrassment of asking - once I got over that, getting the money was fairly easy. '

How did you come up with the idea of your start-up?

The idea evolved out of the lack of exciting social opportunities that were available to me, so it was a matter of trying to fulfil my own social needs.  I realised that the majority of the great experiences that I'd had previously were always due to friends inviting me to certain events, so I needed a way to make ‘friends' with anyone who had access to something that I wanted to do.

How did you form your team?

My team has formed rather organically and I've been quite lucky that talented individuals have approached me after hearing about Sweemo, to see if they can come on board.  Given the limited budget of a startup, the challenge has been to ensure that I can get as much help as possible without necessarily having to pay for it. Rachel Elnaugh, [author of the Business Nightmares, TNW], acts as my mentor, providing guidance and wisdom gained through her 25 years of business experience.  I initially approached Rachel and she was very quick to respond as she was excited about the concept of Sweemo and it was immediately relevant to her background giver her history with Red Letter Days. With regards to names, we are still finalising the roles for several members of the team, who still employed for other companies and as such, I'm not able to advise names for our key roles (CTO and CMO) until they've been finalised.

How did you fund it and what is the business model?

Funding was through Angels consisting of friends and family. I raised £300k in angel funding. The turnover is expected to be a modest £350k in 2009. The business model is based on:

• Commissions from sales of experience listings (moments)
• Fees for premium sponsored positions at the top of listings (like on Gumtree or Google)
• Affiliate marketing

We may consider banner advertising at a later date, however in order to develop the brand properly, we've decided to keep the site clean and not to have any third party banners yet.

What makes you different from other players in your sector?

Differentiation points include:
Sweemo provides an open platform where content is user generated and the experiences available can change from day to day and can even be unique one-off's.  Experience providers simply maintain a set inventory of experiences that they resell on.
Existing experience providers compete with each other to sell the same experiences (e.g. balloon rides, Ferrari drives, paintballing etc.).  Sweemo allows these companies a cost effective way to compete on a dedicated experience platform - think of us as like the GoCompare for experiences.
Sweemo is an auction/swap platform that is dedicated to experiences.  Other similar sites like eBay will always be associated with products, and only occasionally sold experiences because there was nowhere else to list it.

What was your biggest challenge during the development process and how can other start-ups learn from that?

Every challenge as you approach it seems to be the biggest.  First it was funding - I just needed to get over the fear and embarrassment of asking - once I got over that, getting the money was fairly easy.  The development of my marketing strategy has been my biggest hurdle to date. Firstly, since we thought that virtually anyone could either want a ‘sweemo' or offer a ‘sweemo', we didn't have a clue who our target audience was - so the market itself was an unknown entity.  Secondly, I was being inundated with dozens of proposals and people offering me the best way to spend my very limited marketing budget. Choosing options became very tough. To get through it, I just needed to set a target, and then tried to eliminate all of those ‘really cool' options that didn't really help me achieve my immediate targets (e.g. hits on the site, sales etc).

What do you see in the future of Sweemo?

I want sweemo to be synonymous with "sweet moments" or a fantastic experience.  Just like people ‘google' things when they search for something, people will be having a ‘sweemo' every time they've done some cool! Now that's a sweemo!