This is a guest post by female entrepreneur Rachel Armitage, who started the travel website Zoombu one year ago. She talks about her experience as a startup entrepreneur, now that she has just launched the public version of Zoombu Ski.

A little over a year ago I left my relatively comfortable job as a management consultant and embarked on what I’d always really wanted to do; start a business. I spoke with The Next Women back then in the start-up interview series about our idea to build a multi-modal travel search engine, our experiences taking part in Seedcamp, and what it felt like to take a plunge into the unknown.

A year later we’re going strong; it’s already been a heck of a rollercoaster but with the launch of our first public product Zoombu Ski, we’re feeling positive.

I wanted to report back and share a few of the highlights for me on this entrepreneurial journey.

Raising Finance: The Pitch to Sir Philip Green and many others

Raising financing has been one of the toughest aspects so far.  We tried many avenues, have talked to countless interested investors and after a good 8 months have been successful with a Venture Fund associated with the Saïd Business School in Oxford.

The start of that fundraising process was an on stage pitch to Sir Philip Green (one of the Fund’s benefactors), which was one of the more gruelling pitches we’ve done!  The process of raising money has made our business plan stronger, so it’s not time lost, but it has taken longer than expected.

I would urge others to pursue multiple avenues when it comes to raising finance since it’s hard to predict which will work out.

Building the Core Team: I totally underestimated it

The second biggest challenge has been building a core team, and the effort involved in getting this right is something I totally underestimated.  I’m lucky to have had a strong co-founder relationship from the beginning, but adding the next two team members and finding the right blend of personality, motivation and skill-set has been tough.

As a start-up, getting the message out to the right people is never easy and chance more than design has meant great people have found us! We’ve now got a solid team who all bring outstanding technical skills and our product development has rocketed forward as a result.

Building the Tangible Product: Hard Work and Technical Hurdles

Finally, building a product which is game changing is difficult.  At the heart of Zoombu is a travel search engine that compares many different modes of transport (flights, ferries, trains, coaches, taxis, driving) and tells you the cheapest, fastest or greenest way to travel from your door to your destination.

I’ve lost track of the number of people who have said ‘I had that idea’ or been surprised this hasn’t been built before.
Having the initial idea is one thing, but the difference between that and building a tangible product is essentially a lot of hard work and many technical hurdles to overcome.  Devoting serious amounts of time to making it happen is the reality, and there are always surprises along the way.

Building the User Community: Listen to Feedback

Zoombu Ski covers routes from anywhere in the UK to resorts in the French Alps and is a fraction of the coverage we’ll have in the main product, but the functionality is similar.  There’s a long way still to go before we achieve our full vision, but we’ve reached the first major milestone.

It’s great to have real users trying the product and booking trips as a result of our recommendations.  The feedback from users is crucial to ensure we continue to build something people really want and we listen carefully to all of it.

The next stage for us is to launch the wider Zoombu search to the public and we’ll be doing that at the end of April 2010.  I’ll report back to The Next Women again soon with highlights of the next stage in our journey.