Fordham Soho Hair Salon – Newest Place you can use a Wahanda Spa Salon & Fitness Voucher

The very cool and stylish Fordham Soho has joined the Wahanda network of over 350 places (and growing) that you can use the Wahanda Spa, Salon & Fitness Voucher. The owner Sean was kind enough to put up the Wahanda Voucher “accepted here” sticker in his window, which looks great and matches their colour scheme.

I have actually been to Fordham twice now to have my haircut, and my stylist Adam is just fantastic.  I am recommending him to all my male & female friends because he is that good, and super-friendly and has great intuition.  Read my reviews of Fordham Soho on Wahanda.

Check the place out and I think you will agree it’s a great little find, and very centrally located in the heart of Soho, on Greek Street.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Wahanda Voucher Window Sticker at hydrohealing spa, Notting Hill, London

I was walking past hydrohealing Spa in Notting Hill, and spotted our Wahanda Spa Voucher sticker in the window.
Always good to see!

hydrohealing just joined as one of the over 300+ venues that accept the Wahanda Voucher, and also have a great offer at the moment: 2 treatments for the price of 1, including facials & massages.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Wahanda Window Sticker at Scin Spa in Notting Hill

Late Saturday night I was walking past Scin Spa in Notting Hill, London and spotted one of our Wahanda stickers in the window!

"We're always open on Wahanda"

We created various “We are always open on Wahanda” for all of our partners who accept the Wahanda fitness & spa voucher, which includes over 300 spas, salons, gyms, yoga & pilates studios, clinics, etc.

Its always good to have a bit of free organic advertising, and hopefully we will see more stickers in windows in the coming months. We got the idea from the likes of TimeOut, Qype, Google Local, etc, and think it’s a great way to let passing shoppers know where they can find more information and buy online, even when the venue itself is closed.

Wahanda at the Conde Nast Traveller Reader Spa Awards in London

The swank Mandarin Oriental

Last Monday in London, I was fortunate enough to be (somewhat) invited to the Conde Nast Traveller Magazine Reader Spa Awards which took place at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge (which has a lovely spa apparently) and was sponsored by ESPA.

What the supplement will look like

See, it happened to be snowing that day – very heavily – and so due to many a cancellation, I was able to get a ticket to the hot event.  (Yes, Wahanda is only about nine months old in terms of being a living breathing website, so we are still on the outside knocking in at times, but we are making good progress).  A few pictures below of the evening.

Anyway, it was really a fascinating evening.  The magazine was expecting over 300 guests, but due to the inclement weather there were only about 100 people, but that made for an intimate evening with lots of Laurent-Perrier champagne for everyone.

Snowing in London

I will write another blog entry detailing the winners which will be featured in the March issue of Conde Nast Traveller in a separate Spa Guide that will come packaged with the monthly edition of the magazine.  The goodie bag for the evening was our very own copy of the annual edition.

For those of you who cannot wait, you can see the shortlist of the 2009 nominated spas & winners here on Wahanda:

• Top 25 Spas in the World – Conde Nast
• Conde Nast Traveller Nominees for World’s Best Spas
• Conde Nast Traveller’s Best Day Spas
• Conde Nast Traveller’s Best  Hotel Spas
  
• Conde Nast Traveller’s Best Medical, Thermal and Natural Spas
• Conde Nast Traveller’s Best Spa Retreats

Sponsored by ESPA

The room itself

See and download the full gallery on posterous

When is the best time to start a company?

My previous blog post got me thinking about when is the best time to start a company, in terms of when is the best time to start a company that will survive. Is the probability of success higher for companies founded during good times and lower during poor economic times? In thinking about this, inherent in the quotation above “tough time to be at a new startup” is the notion that starting a company in a good time will give you a greater probability of survival.

I only look back to the dot com boom which occurred during a strong economic expansionary period and see that this statement can be turned on its head – if you look statistically at the survival rate of companies that were started in the hey-day boom times of 1998-2000, the failure rate was extremely high, and the losses were spectacular. During these boom times, one can make the case that companies started during good times may be more prone to failure due to the following factors:

• Easy access to capital for unvetted business plans and continued funding of weak ideas
• Strong competition from copycats and other competitors
• Poor management of critical business drivers and lax oversight of costs
• Delayed recognition of poor performance due to a rising tide boosting all ships
• Audience first, monetisation later (or even never) strategy
• Exit by acquisition a higher likelihood

Conversely, companies like ours started in this tougher time have to deal with these factors:

• Tighter funding markets making those projects that do get funding the ones who have the strongest ideas and teams
• Lower competition from existing and new players
• Greater management attention to costs and performance indicators
• Stronger oversight from investors regarding strategy and performance
• The need to execute on a business model that drives cashflow and achieves break even as soon as possible
• The necessity to create a business that can stand on its own two legs for the foreseeable future given the lower likelihood of a white knight coming in to acquire the company

Techcrunch has written an interesting article about how a down time can be an opportunity for startups, and I have to agree wholeheartedly:

This is your time to vault in front of your competition, to earn rapid and sweeping visibility, for a fraction of the time and money that was required to excel during the “good days.” Your rivals are retreating right now, so what are you going to do about it?

The last thing I want to say is that I was watching the leWeb Panel video “Money Talks: Getting Financed in a Recession” and something Eric Archambeau (General Partner, Wellington Partners
) said really made me take notice. In looking at 25 years of startup company data from 1980, there is almost an equal probability of being a successful company no matter what year you were founded – regardless of the cycle, regardless of whether its a recession or a great year, the probability of success was uncorrelated with the year in which you were founded (I wonder if that was the case for companies started in 1998-2000, as per my discussion above). Eric says that the implications for a VC are to not stop investing in a down cycle and that you will have an equal probability of spawning a successful company in a down market. Nice. Other panelists included Fred Wilson and Martin Varsavsky.

(24th minute is where you want to forward to…the remainder involves important VCs telling us how much they enjoy saying “Non” to French entrepreneurs

Forward to the 24 minute mark for this illuminating piece of information!

See my recent blog post from Seth Godin that also addresses this topic:
http://busterblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/great-advice-from-seth-godin-how-to-approach-challenges-with-the-correct-mindset/

“Tough time to be starting a company”?? Is it really?

Given the recent economic meltdown, I have had many people (from friends & family to former work colleagues and even strangers) say to me:

“Ah, you started your own company…hmmm….tough time to be at a new startup”.

My early reactions to this statement were to shrug my shoulders, grit my teeth and think to myself – “man, you need to really crush this thing and make Wahanda work!”  I was trading stories with my business partner Lopo last week when he told me that he had a similar conversation the previous evening with an ex-Yahoo! colleague of mine.  Lopo’s wife Sandrine was also party to the conversation, and her reaction after hearing the ex-Yahoo! colleague of mine say the infamous line (“yeah, tough time to be at a startup”), later on privately said to Lopo – “Actually, isn’t it a tougher time to be at Yahoo!?”

Sandrine’s comment firstly made me smile, and then totally put things into focus – having left Yahoo! Search Europe in March 2008, I started Wahanda with Lopo to not only capitalise on what we think is a great idea and an underserved opportunity, but also to control our own destiny and create a company where we wanted to work.  My final two years at Yahoo! were marred with downsizings, cost-cutting, rumours, management departures, poor communication from senior execs, bad hires and questionable executive decisions.  Given that Y! is now undergoing another round of layoffs and uncertainty about its future, and given that Wahanda has started gaining traction and is in a good position funding-wise, when now confronted with the infamous line above, I actually confidently respond, “Actually, its a fantastic time to be at Wahanda!”.  I am surprised it wasn’t something that occurred to me before, but thank you Sandrine!

When is the best time to start a company? (click to read my next post)

Google Adwords auto opt-in for iPhones and other mobiles…”Don’t be Evil?”

I recently noticed, by accident, that all of my Google Adwords campaigns had been automatically opted-in so that I was also now (unbeknownest to me) spending my advertising budget on showing ads on iPhones and other mobile devices. The reason I came across this change is that I noticed an increase in my bounce rate on a few of my campaigns – obviously this is a bad thing since it means that more users who were clicking on my ads were not staying on my landing pages on Wahanda, thereby costing me money that I would have preferred not to spend. This also ate away my daily budgets more quickly, preventing other consumers from being able to see my adverts, and potentially also making a purchase.

It was only when I noticed that my top-line metrics had changed that I visited the “Edit Campaign” settings and noticed this new tick mark (see screenshot) for the mobile devices box.

Google decides what's best for me - thanks Adwords!

Now, I know Google has a very widely pubclized “Don’t be Evil”, so I wonder if this mantra guided their decision to:

• automatically opt-in all my campaigns so that I did not have a decision on whether I wanted to spend my advertising budget on mobile devices
• not inform me of this option via an email or even notifications in the site
• not give me the choice of being opted in, but assuming that I would want this
• time this “innovation” just before the Christmas period when every dollar/GBP of budget makes a difference
• not breakout the effectiveness of this medium in the dashboard so you can see the impressions, clickthrough rates and conversions by this channel (why not make this transparent?)

Google’s “Don’t be Evil” code claims “it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect.” Not providing a head’s up, nor providing transparency into the change seems to be at odds with their claims.

I can understand that some advertisers would love for their ads to appear on iPhones and mobile devices, but my general feeling is that users on mobile devices today will be less valuable in these early days for online retail sites.

Showing ads for location based offers, information, etc, maybe even some impulse purchases may have some early traction, but typical e-commerce sites may find what we found – that this change will just eat away at budgets and not deliver the sales and conversions we are typically used to from advertising on Google Search as conducted from desktops and laptops.

Free designer bag worth £140 for purchases of Wahanda spa & wellness vouchers of £200 – a good deal!

Latest from the Wahanda blog

Bag that bag Posted: 12 Dec 2008 12:48 PM CST As a special Christmas treat, we’re giving everyone* who buys a £200 Wahanda gift voucher a free designer handbag, worth £140. The perfect party piece, this luxury leather bag with pure silk lining is guaranteed to put a twinkle in anyone’s eye this season – especially if there’s a wonderful Wahanda voucher waiting inside! Or if you’re feeling more naughty than nice, why not give the voucher as a gift and add the bag to your Christmas collection instead? Taken from De Roemer’s latest range, the coveted brand was launched four years ago by Tamsin de Roemer (former business partner of model and designer Jade Jagger) and Justin Packshaw. Since then the label has continually received rave reviews and now features classic cashmere designs for both men and women, alongside striking jewellery and the sought-after bags. A cult classic amongst A-listers and the like, these are a must for anyone who moves in haute couture circles – you won’t want to be seen clutching anything else. To view the entire De Roemer range, visit www.deroemer.com *until stocks last

You are subscribed to email updates from The Wahanda Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner
Inbox too full? Subscribe to the feed version of The Wahanda Blog in a feed reader.
If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: The Wahanda Blog, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610