Well, here we are then - the year of 2024 has come to an end with even more amazing things being achieved in relation to my business idea than last year - firstly, getting a chance to visit the British Library over the summer on four occasions to explore historic map designs, to getting going with some summer craft fairs and making my first sales, and securing some funding for my business idea.
To celebrate the end of the year, I would like to provide a summary of the enterprise-related events that I have been to at the University of Suffolk, and elsewhere in the run-up to the Christmas break. Trust me, there are many exciting things that I have to show you this time round!
Enterprise Festive Bootcamp - late October to early November 2024
For those who don't know what my previous posts on the bootcamps are all about, I would like to give a little introduction as to what the Bootcamp is all about. So, the Enterprise Festive Bootcamp was a craft-fair focused bootcamp, that was composed of a series of six sessions. The difference is that instead of one person taking the whole lot of £2,000 prize money like in previous bootcamps, the money was divided into blocks of ten, so that everyone gets the chance to spend money on their craft fair setups.
After being led around to the ideas room at around 4:00pm, it was time to get to the icebreaker, where another bootcamp participant shared her craft fair idea that revolved around a prototype for a wearable device for people with medical conditions, which I personally found quite fascinating. And after that, it was then time to get to the pitch deck featuring everything about the University's enterprise ecosystem (including how the team managed to raise £8,000 of seed funding in the last two years), interspersed with conversations about my adventures down to south London on the 18th of October.
With not too many people around, it wasn't too long before the introduction session was over, and it was indeed time to head home... knowing that I was quite a long way into my business idea, I wouldn't be back for the ideation workshop on the 23rd of October. I was then hoping to attend the next workshop on market research on the 28th of October, but due to the lack of interest, it ended up being cancelled.
So, the next session that I attended was the Marketing Workshop on the 30th of October, which dealt with the whistlestop basics of marketing. The content was a little bit different to the marketing workshop that I had been to on the Make a Difference Bootcamp in June 2023 - the summer bootcamp mainly focused on the marketing plan details, but this time, Amy had put in much more emphasis on the actual gimmicks of digital marketing, starting off with the most important stuff - never go with a blind approach to analytics. Firstly, use analytics tools such as GA4 to find out where your customers are really spending their time when they are on your website, but secondly, try to use a wide range of media to generate increased publicity towards your idea, and build trust with your clients by replying honestly to negative comments!
Then it was time to move on to the next biggest takeaway from the session, which is to make sure that you understand the mindset of your customers and adapt your language to their needs, and don't put your business out on platforms where you will not get attention - there really is no point in putting a fantasy mapping twist on a fashion forum. And of course you cannot forget about website functionality - make sure that your website is simple to navigate, your keywords are relevant to what you are promoting, and remember that it's never a good thing to have links on your website that lead to 404s, as it will send your website tumbling down the analytics rankings and nobody will be interested in your content anymore.
With the digital marketing stuff out of the way, let's talk about the pitching workshop on the 4th of November. The session started off with the harsh reality that business owners face when starting afresh - it is very difficult to get pre-seed funding, as you need to prove that the idea works... but once you reach success in securing such funding, it is a lot easier to then approach other investors in the future. And then it was on to the serious stuff - firstly starting off with the introduction and mission statements, which included a mission statement from a real estate start-up describing how families would purchase 100,000 homes from them. Or how about a tagline for a business that empowers new mums to take control of their money for a change?
But other than that, there wasn't that much of a change in thepitching content compared to what I remember from the pitching workshops in June 2023 - you still need to demonstrate that the market is hot for the product you are selling, and you still need a team that has the right expertise to deliver what you want. And most importantly, you always have to explain what are you pitching for.
With the session complete, I decided to make a few minor changes to my pitch material to make it look very Christmassey, and then...
...it was time to get onto the Bootcamp finale on the 7th, which consisted of nine participants pitching for £200 in a private pitch. After being led away to the glasshouse at around 10am, I would spend the next 90 minutes going through the pitching notes, getting caught up in some random talk with the other participants, and observing the comings and goings of students doing their Data Science and Artificial Intelligence dissertations. Eventually I was called up into the pitching room at around 11:30am, where the pitch started with some random chatter before getting to the serious stuff.
In comparison to the June 2023 bootcamp when I pitched my idea to around 30 people, delivering the pitch felt more like a doddle rather than a struggle as there were only three people in the room, and as before, it was absolutely incredible that I was able to maintain my composure and confidence when explaining my idea and not slip up. In fact the pitch was so good that there weren't many questions about my idea to be asked this time around and it was an easy decision to award the money.
Once the £200 prize was booked into the system, I decided to go to the Hold to have some lunch, before heading off in the direction of home, and as I was walking past the old Sports Direct shop in the town centre, I noticed a large crowd of people being evacuated from all the nearby shops due to a fire alarm going off. There didn't seem to be any visible fires on the horizon however, as seen from the second floor of the nearby library:
Hold Christmas Market - 30th November 2024
The Christmas Market that goes on at the Hold is a very popular market, and as a result it commonly receives a lot of applications from traders to run stalls this year. In fact, there were so many applications this year that initially, I wasn't originally meant to be hosting a stall - until one of the successful applicants from the initial selection in August dropped out and I was the first person to be picked out of the waiting list. 'Nuff said, let's get to the day ahead.
The set-up of the stall wasn't too difficult - I arrived into the building at approximately 8:30am and I was finished setting up the stall at 9:30am, with most of the time being spent trying to make the price list sheet look not so wonky. And I didn't have any problems setting up the card payments either - the good thing was that the Hold's event internet connection was working reliably throughout the fair.
Moving on to the actual goings on at the fair, I had to say that I had a really good experience running a stall at the Hold - the atmosphere was really pleasant with an abundance of activities for children, the face paintings that were going on upstairs, and the Christmas music constantly playing. Generally, I had a lot of interest at my stall, as everybody that came along offered plenty of moral support, and some even had others in their family that were interested in fantasy maps and wanted to share their expertise.
Towards the end of the fair, I managed to make a sale when one of the fellow stall holders selling flowers was interested in buying the map of Kingdom of Ventura and Lorentia, and not to mention that I was fairly successful in increasing my Instagram followings to my social media pages, gaining a total of two followers after the fair.
The University Christmas Fair - 12th December 2024
The final icing on the cake for 2024 has arrived... it is time to show off my work at the Festive Fair!
The process of setting up the stall was the same as previous fairs - except this time, I decided to try something different by bringing along some of my work-in-progress maps to hang up on the pinboard at the back of my stall space - and for the sake of the fair being two weeks away from Christmas, I also bought the price down by 25% in the hope that I might get some more sales. By 10:30am, I was among the first ones to get set up with their stall.
Moving on to my experiences of running a stall - as in the previous fairs, I did manage to get quite a fair amount of interest in my map drawings - at one point I even had someone with an interest in creative writing came along to my stall (no, it was not Amanda this time) and they said to me that my imagination and thought behind my maps was well and truly believable. I also had some success in attracting people to my business idea overall, gaining an extra two Instagram followers from people who came to my stall.
Just before 1:30pm, one student came along to my stall, talking about his desire to get further into the world of tabletop gaming, and at one point, he said to me that was interested in buying a fantasy map. He was originally interested in buying a map of Vergun, but as I was getting the payment machine ready, he changed his mind and went for a map of the Frattisham village, the first sale that I have ever made of that map. I thought to myself that I was proud that I was getting sales for other styles of maps.
During the latter parts of the fair, I couldn't resist the temptation to have a look at what the other stall holders were up to - one of the stall holders was selling spirituality magnets that tasted lovely, another was selling out 3D-printed dinosaurs at the speed of light, whilst another was running a stall that was based on wellness traditions from south Asia.
And besides the student delegation from Suffolk New College who came along to the fair to perform some live music, just to make the vibe of this place look very Christmassy, the Careers team also had their own fun game to play at their stall - attendees at the fair had to knock out a ball using three pellets from a toy gun in order to win a prize.
Conclusions from the UoS Christmas Programme
I have to say that I generally had a very positive experience on the Festive Bootcamp. Compared to the June 2023 material, I believe that the Enterprise team has done an even better job in delivering the whistlestop marketing sessions - of course marketing plans are important, but she has gone one step further in terms of putting a greater emphasis how we could put our digital marketing knowledge into practice.
Exploring the subject of pitching from a newcomers' perspective, I would have to say that the material that was prepared for the workshop was really easy to understand, as blindly judging how people got on in the private pitch, it made people feel more confident about how I should structure each part of the pitch presentation.
Moving on to the actual craft fair experience overall, I have to admit that there hasn't been that much of a difference in how I perceive attending craft fairs as a stall holder in comparison to the summer craft fairs. Comparing my experiences selling last year to when I tested my idea out at last year's Christmas fair, I do still believe that they are a really good tool in gauging general interest in the idea, as most potential clients that came to my stall gave generally pretty good feedback about my idea and wanted me to continue pursuing the business idea in various ways.
However, the myth that I might get more sales of maps around Christmas time has been busted - with the amount of sales not being enough to consider that route to be gainful in a financial way, it really does mark the end of the quest to host a fantasy mapping stall at a craft fair.
So, going forward, it is definitely a case of continuing to build an audience and hopefully selling something at an online marketplace - the good news is that quite a few people are selling some 3D fantasy map prints online and are doing pretty well... which gives hope that I can still have a shot at success with my business idea. And whilst the Geek Retreat is out of the question as far as selling them physically due to budgeting pressures on their end, other tabletop retailers, such as Langden Games, are not out of the question either.
As far as 2025 is concerned, I still believe that there are many opportunities out there for me on the horizon. First and foremost, I am currently in the process of applying for a job as an archive assistant at the Hold, a role that aligns well with my fantasy mapping aspirations, and is a role that I am hoping to get an interview for. And I am also thinking of exploring other possibilities around becoming a freelancer in the social media marketing sphere - that means building a portfolio by looking into relevant volunteering opportunities in that area, pitching to local magazines, and even looking to tap in to some of the connections that I had established from the June 2024 bootcamp and hoping that they may have something that they could use my expertise in.
With that, I am off to enjoy the few days' break that I have before returning to normal fantasy map business, and figuring out what else will I do with my life.
Wishing you a happy new year with much love,
Jakub
This post was edited to address privacy concerns raised by the University on the 19th of June 2025.
Comments
Post a Comment