smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Paul King and his brother David founded software company 1-day later.com in the midst of the recession last year.

Where did you get the idea?

David developed a piece of organisational software for his own use and it was so good I suggested that we turn it into a business. We then spent a year making it more marketable. We didn’t have a lot of costs, so once we launched the company it became profitable very quickly.

How did you get funding?

We managed to get a bank loan of £20,000, which we secured through putting together a really detailed business plan. We also got strong letters of recommendation, for example one from a Sage reseller, which helped to persuade the bank of the viability of our idea.

Where do you market yourself?

We’ve been getting involved in as much as we can in the North East, having gone out of our way to attend networking and also giving industry-related talks. Basically, just saying yes to everything.

How do you stand out from competitors?

Because it is a very crowded market it has been hard to achieve top rankings on Google. So a tactic has been to get good reviews of the product in computer magazines. We got 2,000 sign-ups in two days off the back of one review.

Where next?

We are moving in the corporate software direction, as that’s where the money seems to be. But we’ve got a whole stack of business ideas we want to develop, some of which we’ll need to get IP protection before making them commercially available. It’s very tempting to want to get on with the next project, but for the time being we want to concentrate on winning some more big clients.