Top Five Tips in Setting up your Dream

So, you have a dream? A desire to be bold and brave and set up a business. Scary, isn’t it? That’s just where we were some eleven weeks ago now.

Two sisters with a plan, an idea, a concept we wanted to put out there. We walked for hours in the early autumn bashing out ideas, worrying, trying to talk ourselves out of it! We decided in the end to be bold and brave together and GO FOR IT. After all you’ve already failed if you don’t try, right?

So, this first blog is our raw and honest top five tips on how we started up our dream.

 Ignore your inner critic

Bold and brave is a favourite saying as you can tell. But seriously you have to make yourself vulnerable in life, just ask one of our favourite motivational speakers, Brene Brown who says, “vulnerability is at the core, the centre of meaningful human experiences”

You have to listen to that inner voice and do what you want to do anyway! Acknowledge the conversation but speak kindly to yourself, try to make the voice a gentler one. We decided to make friends with our inner voices, hell we even had a party.

Chose the right business partner

This is a tricky one and we have had some bad experiences with this before. It must be someone you know you can disagree with, talk to about anything with, brain-storm with and most importantly laugh with until you need to pee!

We exploited our cognitive bias for family and chose each other – sisterly love you might say.

It’s also important to know each other inside out – you need to know strengths, weaknesses, predispositions, loves, hates, attitude to learning and so on. A great example here is that we are a classic early-bird/night owl combo (no prizes for those who know us, in working out which one is which)

Choose the right name

Sticky is a great marketing term and we knew our name needed to be sticky, be remembered, be fun and try to convey what we did – no mean feat! 

It’s a funny story. Big sis has a life-long love of hippos and collects them in all guises. Little sis had just given big sis a very cute little hippo to sit next to her mac in the office to inspire her. “Ooh ooh something hippo” big sis was heard to say. “Needs to be something quirky” said little sis.

Job done.

#quirkyhippo

Be prepared to learn

And learn we did and are still to be fair (WordPress for this blog for example). Luckily, we are prepared to push ourselves and we both like to activate the brain on a regular basis and add new skills to our repertoire. Website design, product sourcing, coding, search engine optimisation, app selection, social media marketing, marketing automation, supplier communication and so much more in the last two months alone. 

On a practical and positive note its helped us engage so much with the dream and what we are doing, we have sweated over it for hours, it really is our baby. We are truly energetic about it. Plus, added bonus, great new skillsets for our cvs!

Know, and stick to what you want

We always knew what we wanted Quirky Hippo to be. A shopping experience that was fun and made people’s day just a little bit brighter. We knew the categories of products that we wanted to sell and we knew the kinds of products we wanted. We had a vision for the website and an image of what we wanted the logo to be. We were passionate about the quality and look of products and were keen to represent every days and special days. 

Ordinary and extraordinary. And that is just what we are. Two ordinary sisters, mothers, daughters, wives, workers, friends trying to have an extraordinary journey together.

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Quirky Hippo