Get Groomed — Latest update from mobile barbers

Get Groomed | Mobile barbers: where are we now ? A lot has happened since we pushed our last update 4 years ago. The pre-covid era was very good for premium beauty services. We were working in London and covering a number of offices, co-working spaces and hotels, we were planning our pre-seed round and covid-19 didn't exist yet. What happened ? Fundraising We started our fundraising on Crowdcube for a pre-seed round. Our funds came from a mix of family and friends and angel investors. Our goal was £50.000 at a valuation of £1M. For this kind of industry and our size at that time, our valuation was really, really high, but bear in mind that, at that time, the market was very good for young startups & another company raised £150.000 at a £1.15M for the same offering and just a landing page. With our paying customers, it was a no brainer for us to believe that we could achieve same results. So we launched around ~Feb 2020, then Covid happened. With the chaos all around the world, the people getting sick and dying, the lockdowns and pretty much all the industries being stopped, there was a lot of uncertainty. The government issued a mandate to forbid beauty services in salons and at home. The mandate lasted for a year and half. Our investors got cold feet (rightfully so) and we decided to cancel our round. Side note: Some beauty companies tried to offer the 'zoom call with a hairstylist' but it was not really in our DNA so we never really went down that road. The staff at Crowdcube was the most amazing staff to work with, giving really useful tips with a genuine will for us to succeed. The system (capture the money but only approve at the end) is also very helpful if there's a need to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances without having to refund hundreds of sponsors. What we learned during that time ? * There are circumstances that we can control, and some that we cannot and we just have to accept it. * Our fundraising video was not very sexy, if we ever try again we need to have a very different approach. We started a different format for our videos like our hair colour promo video: * Investors like full time founders. If you need to keep your day to day job while building your startup (because you have bills to pay), it will make fundraising 10x harder. * Succeeding in a bull market is very different than succeeding in a bear market. * At the end of the day, cashflow is still king and being bootstrapped and profitable is still a very, very good strategy for any business. Improvements on the website * We started improving the user experience on our website with beauty tips like: The Right Hair Colour For Your Skin Tone https://www.gogetgroomed.co.uk/b... 10 Modern Business Professional Hairstyles for British Men https://www.gogetgroomed.co.uk/b... Hair trends in the UK 2023 https://www.gogetgroomed.co.uk/b... What beard style is best for your face and how to rock it https://www.gogetgroomed.co.uk/b... Hairstyles that women find attractive on men https://www.gogetgroomed.co.uk/b... and many more articles to guide our customers to get the right service for them. * We added a 'hair type' feature where customers can select their hair type to get a more personalized experience * We updated our website to work outside London and launched our services in other cities in the UK: Birmingham, Manchester, Kent, Guildford where we now have barbers ready to serve our customers. Our services, prices and areas are available here: https://www.gogetgroomed.co.uk/s... * We added pages for our barbers: https://www.gogetgroomed.co.uk/o... with details about their reviews and ratings. We are in the process of adding more barbers to the list. * We updated our mobile apps, relaunched our android app and we are now in the process of re-launching our iOS app. * We spent time improving our website speed and making sure the website is fully available for mobile screens. Others * With our first corporate event in Manchester and a number of promotional and corporate events in Birmingham in 2022, our first year of growth outside London has been quite successful and we are planning to have many more in 2023. * Not really related to the haircuts, but we stopped running after investors. Accepting the nature of our business helped us saving a lot of time to dedicate our focus building a better product for our users with tips, new features and a better platform for our barbers. Running a business is a lot easier when you just have to please customers and barbers. * We "rebranded" as 'Get Groomed | Mobile barbers' instead of 'Get Groomed' We have a lot of big plans in 2023 with more country level coverage, membership subscriptions and e-commerce. Stay tuned !

Greetings . Fantastic work on getting your product on PH! 🎆 Looks interesting! I'm going to give this product a try. What was the most difficult part of the process?