Zoltan Baranyai: how to make a big noise in business on a small budget
To grow a modern startup business you need to get hundreds of thousands in investment, like on Dragons’ Den, right? Wrong. Just take a look at our entrepreneur stories page to see Virgin StartUp entrepreneurs growing brilliant businesses on a budget. Meet Zoltan Baranyai and Marton Budai for instance. They're co-founders of Bristol-based business BillyBeanz, a startup selling unique, comfortable bean-bags. Zoltan received a £3000 loan from Virgin Startup and here he explains how he put that money to good use.
We wish we had a million dollars to invest into our ideas. But we don’t. So we have to start from scratch and be clever. We came up with the idea to show people ways to relax at home or outside by just sitting on a bean bag. So we will sell excellent quality products with the experience of smooth relaxation. We’ve collaborated with Virgin Start up and our idea earned us a £3000 loan.
We’ve also created comics about a life of a bean bag which has arrived from space and its final goal is to show people how to relax and release stress in a comfy and cool way.
These ideas cost money and most of our money is going into establishing the brand. This covers means a wide range of expense including; logo design, leaflets, flyers, posters and comics. And of course the web shop also requires investment. We’ve bought a basic web shop engine design but as soon as it’s on we will begin the development of a more professional site, which will be ready in August.
We are happy that we can access a vast amount of good offers through the Start up Scheme, we are already saving on business cards and even business banking which we find quite useful. As a part of the advertising campaign we will be running ads from our budget on Facebook and Google to achieve rising customer recognition and sales.
Another part of the branding is the label sewn onto the bean bags made from quality injected mould rubber. It’s long-lasting just like the simple likable characters we’ve created in the comics.
We also invested into raw materials from Europe to boost our stock and keep up the high quality service. We are trying to find new materials so we are acquiring different materials from many sources as well because we don’t want to settle with lower prices but cheap fabric.
We know we have an excellent quality product (we have them tested with a lot of people and use them ourselves, that’s why we are giving out a free 2 year warranty confidently along with the covers) so we have to show it to everyone. And that is where creativity comes before money. We do not have hundreds of thousands pounds to run global ad campaigns but we compensate with new and eye-catching ideas.
Our main target of the Virgin Startup loan is to raise awareness for our brand and get people to experience our #beautifulnicechillingdevice all over Bristol.
We are on schedule in our plan to launch at the end of June.
Zoltan was mentored and approved his loan by official Virgin StartUp delivery partner Business West