Satisfaction Guaranteed
Joe Haugh is at the best part of any adventure - the beginning...
He’s seen a path to creating a business and he’s busting a gut to get it off the ground. It’s exciting and exhausting, but as with all new businesses, it takes great courage and resourcefulness to dodge the pitfalls and capitalise on your innovation. Christmas offers the best example of how Joe’s idea fills a gap in the market. There will be millions of presents given in Ireland over festive season, and hundreds of thousands of them will be electrical goods and gizmos. As wrapping paper flies to reveal laptops and sat navs, iPods and games consoles, packaging will shunted aside for that cheery sense of gratification we all get from something new.
And in all the fun and fuss, manuals, guarantees and receipts will have to take their chances with all the flashy wrapping paper and tinsel. We’d all much rather plug in, set up and start pushing those shiny buttons than fret about where we should store our receipts and guarantees. Once your product does what it says on the box in the first few days, it gradually becomes a used good. From here on in, should anything go wrong with it, it becomes more difficult to rectify the problem without proof purchase.
It’s a chore to fill in all those personal details, sending off guarantee registration forms. It’s human nature to avoid such mundane tasks. Enter www.productful.com, a one-stop-shop for consumers which offers peace of mind for anyone who’s spent a few quid on electrical goods. What‘s more, the service to consumers is completely free. Joe came up with the idea when he moved into a new apartment in Dublin city centre. After the thrills and spills of taking ownership, he soon realised he had registration forms for guarantees crawling out from under his new fridge, behind his new TV, down the side of the stereo and on top of the microwave.
Productful takes the pain out filling and stamp licking. Once you log-in for the first time, your personal details are centrally and securely stored on the site. From there it take less than a minute to register a new product, simply by typing in the bar code on the packaging. You can upload a copy of your receipt, and within a couple of clicks you’re done. You’ll get an immediate confirmation from the manufacturer and you can sleep easy knowing that if anything happens your purchase, you won’t have to go rummaging through your hunting down those crucial bits of paper - they’ll be safely and securely stored by Productful online.
The highly-evolved website also serves as a valuable tool for manufacturers, who can track registered products and quickly pick up on any faults within their range. It also takes the strain off their own customer services, and provides a direct mode of contact with the end user of their product. For consumers, the site compliments their statutory rights providing the documentation they need in dealing with a product that develops a fault. Queries with manufacturers take place in a forum environment, with all communications handled in real time via a direct messaging service, a much more efficient method than telephoning or email.
Productful is that easy. But not for Joe. Because www.productful.com is only at the testing phase, and Joe has yet to climb the mountain of marketing needed to get manufacturers and customers on board. He has done some useful research and all the indicators are very positive. He’s determined to realise his dream of running his own business, and he needs to be. His work experience over the past decade with a number of high-profile blue-chip companies whose products and services span the globe really bears fruit. Managing high-volume transaction databases, Joe knows inefficiencies when he sees them, and has spent most of his working life making key accounting and IT systems more cost-efficient and user-friendly.
The concept for Productful is simple, and has the potential to revolutionise a complex and often cumbersome process for both consumers and manufacturers. As with all innovations, there will be difficulties to be ironed out, but Joe is confident that nothing is insurmountable. He cites the ingenuity behind online air ticket sales, pointing out that initially nobody thought the idea would catch on, whereas today such methods of business are models of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
When the idea for Productful came to him first he knew he needed some guidance. He joined Dublin City Enterprise Board’s mentoring scheme, and thanks to the wisdom and guidance of Dr Tom Carey, an expert in business strategy, marketing and development, Joe has taken on a partner in the business who can develop the website, and nailed down the intellectual property rights relevant to the venture.
Joe has also found solace in DCEB’s LINK! network, where he can meet other entrepreneurs, pool business experience and troubleshoot difficulties as they arise. He’s also found many of the guest speakers at the meetings shed a very useful light on his business plan. He has beefed up his strategy and is hoping to back up his own market research with the help of an Innovation Voucher from Enterprise Ireland. Joe is also applying for a place on the DIT Hothouse Start-up Programme, which would allow him to take a year out to develop both his strategy and the skills he will need to advance www.productful.com.
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