YourNightOut

After staggering home from a club one night Ben Taylor had an idea for a new business. When he woke up the next morning it still seemed like a winner, so he founded YourNightOut.co.uk - designed to be the ultimate guide to going out.

Name: Ben Taylor
Age: 24
Business: YourNightOut.co.uk
Type of business: Online nightclub Promotions Company aimed at UK students
Start date: 19th September 2005 was the launch but the site was in development for eight months previous

When did you first decide you wanted to start your own business?
I always knew I wanted to run my own business and always had a lot of ideas for businesses that I thought could work. However taking the initial step was the hard part and it took me working the nine to five grind in London before I realised that I had to do it now. That was my first and only ‘serious’ job and it lasted for two months, which was more than enough time for me to realise that working for someone else wasn’t for me. There were a few doubts at first but once I got stuck into the project I realised that I had made the right decision.

Tell us about your business
YourNightOut is a community website based in Manchester but is in development to be rolled out to the rest of the UK. The website predominantly deals with a lot of issues new students face at university, things like the difficulty in meeting new people and lack of knowledge about the local nightlife scene. The website allows people to interact with other local members whilst allowing them to view upcoming nights out and photos of previous nights. We also tackle the problem that a lot of local promoters can’t broadcast their nights with out spending large amounts on offline promotion. YourNightOut allows people to hear about the best nights in their city by not being biased towards the big events, thus helping smaller promoters.

Was it your first business idea and where did it come from?
I’ve had a load of ideas before, some good some bad. For YourNightOut the idea came because I felt that during my time at university there was a lack of information out there about the Manchester night scene. My friends and I used to end up in the same places because we simply didn’t have information available on all the nights. I also felt that for many people university can be a lonely time, and I wanted to create a nightlife community website where people could meet others locally with similar interests.

What makes you think there’s a market for your business?
My gut instinct said there was a market and my experiences of being a student in Manchester confirmed this. I also think that with the ever-increasing student population and the greater number of promoters coming onto the scene to setup events the market is so busy. I think an online medium to display and filter the events to your preference will be something that will be widely used in the future. Ask me in one years time and I’ll tell you if I was right.

Once you’d decided to start a business, what did you do first?
I actually decided after a night out in London that I was going to do this, so when I got home I wasn’t in the best state. The first thing I did was get as many ideas down on paper. I worked on it for an hour and thought if I still felt like this in the morning then this is what I was going to pursue from now on - luckily I did.

What research did you do?
The research was mostly through my university experience and looking at existing websites and seeing how I could improve the service. Admittedly, I feel I could have done more research but I was so fixed on my ideas that I had to make a few mistakes before I learnt to research more.

What advice did you seek?
I approached them all but most didn’t want to know, business link were actually pretty good and I still get invited to a lot of their business breakfasts and events. In terms of advice they were good, but at the time I wanted funding so they couldn’t do a lot for me. I also applied for the small firms loan guarantee scene but was denied for some unknown reason.