If you have red the blue ocean strategy book you’ll know about a red ocean and a blue ocean. A red ocean being an existing market and a blue ocean being a new or innovative twist to the market.
We live in a time where many services existed long ago in it’s digital form. There is still room for blue oceans. My journey was or is a move to try to create a blue ocean. A red ocean isn’t a crime I hope because sometimes people make do with what they see.
My intention is or was to create an ofsted registered childminder booking service where parents can find and book nannies, childminders, babysitters on an hourly or monthly service and also make selections based on preferences like religion and language.
My rational was or is that there are loads of foreigners living in London and they would like their kids to grow up religious and has similar cultural backgrounds. Also being able to book a carer on short notice for an hour or two so that mum or can go for an interview or appointment can or should be helpful.
Whether this is a blue ocean remains to be seen. Forgive me if I am wrong because many ventures start as assumptions.
I assumed and I set to work. I found a flask based template or boilerplate to use in reducing the amount of time I spent on building things like login, signup etc. I have some familiarity with Python & Flask, so I had to choose this combo instead of the Python Django combo.
I got my minimum viable product working on www.daycarer.org with stripe payment connected.
Now whatever the strategy was, blue or red, I need customers or users and the two options are free or paid. Google search offers free traffic and paid traffic. Facebook also offers paid traffic.
The question is, how do I get accross to my audience when there are competitors to keywords? Many Muslims don’t usually start search for a Muslim Nanny, do they? Do Christians do the same? Not quite sure but you do get where e I am coming from don’t you?
At this point the strategy seems irrelevant until the user starts coming in. Or maybe not. I am bootstrapping so I don’t currently have a huge pocket of money to invest in it. So I need to find the free traffic from Google and run some inexpensive facebook campaign.
Currently I have about 1600+ urls indexed by Google, some keywords with zero traffic have been ranking on page one, some on page two, some on page 1 million.
I’ve thrown in two press releases from two different platforms, prlog and releasewire. They were different press releases and they are distributed across many web properties in the hope that I’ll get some dofollow backlinks to increase my domain authority and aid in Google to push some keywords upper in the search engine rankings.
I do intend to follow on the blue ocean but I am also aware that it is a red ocean until the actual bookings occur.
Am also pursuing the demand first before I start going after the supply.
Some questions I have are:
What can I offer to my customers to make their life better? Something that other platforms aren’t offering? I’ve identified bookings, lower percentage commissions and free use of the messaging. Is this enough? The answer can be both yes and no.
What are your thoughts?
