Startup 1 - Peitho

OK, so whilst I've been settling into life in SE aisa over the past week, I also decided to start working on my first startup.

Walking around my home town (Birmingham, UK) recently, I noticed how many shops had closed down in the past 5 years. It's not really a surprise, seeing as we went through the pandemic, followed by the cost of living crisis; but I was still quite amazed at how bad the high streets looked, here and in many other places in the UK.

After talking to a few shop owners in the few remaining places, it was really clear that they had two main problems:

1. 1. There was nothing differentiating them from the coffee shop, bakery, stationary store etc next door.
2. 2. People were just buying online, and unless they had a reason to come out to shops, they just wouldn't.

It seems pretty clear from the success stories like Pizza Pilgrims that in order to stand out, you need a strong social media presence.

Being present online is such an important thing for a business, but at least half of the 58 shops and small businesses I talked to actually dont even have a website or social media channel. What's interesting is of those who did have social media, every single one told me they knew how important it was but still didn't post regularly or didn't know what content to post.

So, after learning this, I believe that I've found quite a big pain point that (if solved) could provide quite a lot of value to a group of people who haven't had it easy over the past few years.

As a result, I am building a post generation tool to help these SMB owners out.

I've decided to call it Peitho. She is the greek goddess of persuasion, and as I'm building this to help persuade customers to shop at my clients' stores, it seems like a fitting name.

The tool will learn all about the business from online reviews, url context, blog posts, existing social media channels and even interview questions with business owners. Once it has a good idea of the brand values and style of language the business prefers to use, it will generate posts every day for every text based social media channel.

All the SMB owners have to do is sign up, copy and paste the posts into their social media accounts, make any small tweaks needed, and hit post.

So far, I've built a basic web app and landing page:

I decided to go minimalist on the landing page to save time

Over the next three weeks I'm going to test whether I'm actually onto something or just pulling ideas out of my ass. My plan is currently to:

1. - Do a tonne of cold outreach
2. - Create a demo to put onto social media channels
3. - Message tech blogs to see if they will feature the product in their newsletters
4. - And more (I can't think of anything else right now)...

Let's see how it goes!