As you listen to this interview, ask yourself if you could have stood up to the challenges that faced Naomi Simson when she launched RedBalloon, a site that lets you give experiences as gifts.
Her first big challenge came before she even launched. The designers that built the first version of her site wasted all her seed capital. Then her marketing ideas — like walking down the street with balloons attached to her briefcase with the URL on them, hoping people would go home and type it in — proved naive. It was one challenge after another, until the company hit its stride.
As a result of all the creative problem solving, in the 8 years since launching, the company sold over 588,000 experiences and is now profitable. In this interview, you’re going to hear how she did it.
The transcript for minute 0 till minute 5 is BELOW this line.
Andrew: Hey everyone it’s Andrew Warner founder of Mixergy.com home of the ambitious upstart and I’ve got Naomi Simpson here with me she is the chief experience officer of Red Balloon and Naomi what is Red Balloon?
Interviewee: Oh we like to give people a good time Andrew. So instead of giving somebody a physical gift you give them a voucher to an experience and an experience could be anything from learning to fly a helicopter to belly dancing lessons. We’ve got more than two and a half thousand different activities through-out Australia and New Zealand that people use as gifts, either personally to give to moms and dads and weddings, all that sort of thing or all the way to corporate gifts and reward recognition programs, so business to business giving.
Andrew: What I here is that in your office you’ve got a big number that says how many people or uh how many experiences...
Edited excerpt about a near disaster
Naomi: It was actually really quite sad because I spent $25,000 to build this website, and then it was delivered and it was crap, it was really bad. Of course, I wanted to change it and make it from red to white and change some more. I went back to them and I said, “Look, guys, we need to change this, we need to change this.”
Of course, they said, “Well, that’s going to cost you $150 an hour” or whatever it was, but it just was a fortune when you’re not making any money.
So, you know, sometimes there is a God. We got new neighbors and I had little kids, and we went next door to meet the neighbors. I said to this guy, I said, “Oh, hi, welcome to the neighborhood. What do you do?”
He said, “Oh, we moved here because my wife’s been transferred with work.” I said, “But what do you do?” He said, “I’m a ColdFusion programmer looking for work.”
I didn’t realize that ColdFusion, which our website was built in, was such a unique sort of language, such a boutique language. I said, “Oh, really, ColdFusion, that’s interesting, because I’ve got a ColdFusion website.” And I said, “Look, I’ve got no money, but if you’d like to come next door and practice while you’re looking for a job, please do.”
And, as it would happened, he ended up being with us for four years, and it really was the turning point. I do wonder if Mark hadn’t moved in next door would I’ve persisted and carried on. He’s just a gorgeously, wonderfully generous person.
Andrew: Would you have? Knowing yourself today, knowing who you were back then, would you have just found a way?
Naomi: Look, I know I would. You know, I’m like a dog with the bone. I’m so persistent and I don’t give up. And you know, this is a bit embarrassing really, but it’s a bit about ego.