London’s certainly not short of people with brilliant ideas and concepts. Everyone’s got one whether it is half-formed and scribbled on a phone during a lunch break or talked about at the pub and never touched again. What’s actually rare is someone who gets theirs out of the starting blocks. So, if you’ve been sitting on a candle brand, a pop-up kitchen, a streetwear label, or some service nobody else around you is doing yet, here’s a checklist to get you from notebook to launch day without giving up halfway.
Prove the concept before you start anything
Before you even design a logo or decide on a domain name, sit with the idea until you can describe your concept in one line. Ask yourself who your business is targeted at, what does it replace in their life and why would consumers choose you over the 50 other options on their phone. London audiences are both sharp and a bit jaded so the new ventures that take off solve something real rather than merely chasing a trend. Make sure that you talk to five people who fit your target customer first and get their opinions.
Choose a name and lock it down
The name of your business is all important and should be easy to say in a noisy pub, easy to spell without a caveat and able to survive being shouted across a market stall. Make sure that you resist anything that is too clever; a name people have to have explained to them is a name people forget. Run it past the company name checker on GOV.UK to make sure nobody else has got there first.
Claim your online home
Once you have decided on a name for your business, get it online before anyone else beats you to it. Securing a domain name is all important, and if you’re weighing up where to host it, an independent one.com review is worth a read first. Your brand shouldn’t look like two different businesses depending on whether someone finds you on Instagram or on the web. That mismatch costs you trust exactly when you need it most. Once it’s yours, decide what you’re building on it. A simple website builder gets a basic site live in an afternoon with options for a menu, a portfolio or a booking page while you find your feet. However, you might be looking for something with more moving parts, such as a blog or a shop with regular new stock. WordPress hosting gives you room to grow without starting from scratch, and switching from a basic builder to WordPress later is painless. Either way, don’t skimp on hosting; a site that crawls or drops offline the week you get featured somewhere is a worse look than not launching at all.
Make noise from the get-go
Remember not to wait for the perfect logo or a full product range before you post. Document it all, from the failed test batches and the 4am panic about packaging to the trip across town because you forgot something. People back the person behind the brand as much as they do the brand itself. Don’t be afraid to post before you feel ready – the first month is meant to look different to month 12. London’s lockdown-era founders built loyal followings from a single Instagram grid before they had a shopfront to point to. A weekly update, however rough, beats one perfect post a month.
Give people a reason to show up
You don’t need an extravagant launch but rather a reason for people to turn up. It might be a stall at a weekend market, a pop-up night in a friendly pub or opening your DMs for a first batch of orders to be collected in person. Make it easy for people to attend. Check what’s on around London before you commit to a date; a quiet Tuesday with nothing else on can work better than a Saturday up against three other launches. You need to attend to the mundane work before you take a single payment. Trading as yourself rather than a company means you’ll need to register as a sole trader with HMRC once money starts changing hands. It’s a short job online, and considerably less stressful, than doing it retroactively after your first sell-out weekend. This may not make you an instant success but it will stop your idea sitting in a notes app for another year. Founders who are still around in five years rarely had the best launch but they never stopped working on their business, from restocking to replying and fixing the small stuff nobody sees. Remember that competition never lets up and the ones who win are the ones who actually did their preparation and actually launched their businesses.
