rollercoaster ride

Starting up a new venture has its ups and downs in an emotional sense as well as others, if you are starting out and haven’t experienced this yet, beware, it will come… we experienced our latest episode last week. 

The up……..I was sitting in a café drinking my morning coffee, leafing through the Daily Mail and came across a small advert for an item that we stock, when I looked at the name of the shop selling this item I was delighted (and somewhat shocked) to find our web address listed next to it, albeit spelt incorrectly :(.   This of course sparked a raft of visitors to our website and even better, some orders.  I have now become obsessed with trawling the Daily Mail each day to see if they have found any other products they like from our little boutique….

The down……..the very next morning, a friend dropped our Daughter back from a sleepover and we had a chat at the door as you do about everything under the sun and Istarted telling her about Lindsay Interiors, at this point she announced that a mutual friend was doing the same thing, i.e., had started up a business selling interior accessories and told me the name of her website.  I was a little speechless at this, back in September I had hired this mutual friend to take photos of our children as a gift for someone, at that point she was doing photography for a living, but I do remember her asking me lots and lots of questions about Lindsay Interiors (we were due to launch 2 weeks later).  I took this for interest, silly me!

Over the next few hours I steadily grew angrier and angrier at this, I took a look at her website and saw that she was selling a few of the same items as me but overall did not have a lot of products on the site – perhaps 15 in total….  I checked Facebook and found a business page in her company name.  I can see from this that she set up her new venture approx 2 months after we launched but she has not updated anything since January so I do wonder if it were a 3 month wonder and she’s moved on to the next thing already.

Now I know I don’t have the monopoly on selling interior accessories online, far from it and after sitting down and really thinking about what made me so angry about all this, it’s not jealousy.  It’s also not the thought of competition on my doorstop (I don’t view it as such), it’s that she did this so sneakily without ever mentioning it to me.  She pumped me for information which I took to be interest where instead she was planning her own operation.  It made me sad to think that people operate in that fashion, I guess I always tend to give people the benefit of doubt, but once they’ve proved their real character I will cast them aside and move on.   

Onwards and upwards say I