The story behind My World Journal
Since its launch in December 2002, My World Journal has created hundreds of websites for people travelling all over the globe, including all 5 continents. Although still in its infancy, the project has seen some intense development since its inception in Autumn 2002. Here Iain Row, the founder of My World Journal, explains how it came to be.
A chance remark
I have a friend who was taking a year out to go travelling in the Far East and Australia, starting with a conservation project in the Philippines. Before he left, I asked him what he wanted as a leaving present. "Save your money," he said, "I won't be able to take all the stuff I've bought already; there's no space in my rucksack and I can't carry any more weight." That immediately got me thinking about a present which would take up no room and weigh nothing; a website about his trip. I was working as a freelance web-designer at the time, so I knew I could build it if necessary. But was there anything out there already that could do the job?
The search begins
I spent a couple of days looking for personal travel websites and found nothing. I wasn't interested in free services, because this was a gift; I wanted to be sure that the website would still be running in a year. My friend was computer literate but did not have any specific web design skills; additionally, as he would be updating it from internet cafes I could not rely on his having any tools other than a web browser. Blogging was still in its infancy, and the tools weren't really aimed at travellers or indeed non-techies; you still needed your own web space, for example. I decided to build it myself, and set to work.
From idea to reality
Building first version was easy; sprinkle some ASP over a base of HTML, stir in an Access database, then garnish with the Arsenal FC colour scheme, and some photos from Philip Harle (I'd link to him, but his website seems to have expired). It took a couple of weeks, and my friend was as pleased as punch with it; once he left we were soon updated with stories from the Philippines. Our mutual friends, receiving regular updates, were impressed, and confident that the idea 'had legs' - people might pay a small amount for a similar service. So I decided to make a go of it, and turn My World Journal into a fully-fledged e-commerce enterprise, even though the dotcom era seemed to be drawing to a close.
How to lose two months of your life:
...convert a backroom project into a robust internet application. It was harder than I thought. The first step was to upgrade the hosting and database; out went Access, in came SQL Server, no problem there. The actual programming was quite easy - I had been doing similar things for several years - but the usability, security and scalability testing were mind-bending. One major feature of the project was the need for the My World Journal website to sell, create and administer sites with no input from me; keeping costs down. I was charging £35 per hour for my time as a web designer; I wanted to make these World Journals available for less than that per year. Consequently, I had to be sure that the site wouldn't break if a user entered the wrong sort of character, or forgot their password. I anticipated that the majority of World Journals would be intended as presents, I didn't want a potential sale to fall through because the buyer couldn't remember the recipient's email address! There was also the problem of malicious use; making sure one Journal owner could not interfere with another. Having to second-guess every possible problem was a killer. Then there were the extra features needed to make the service worth paying for.
Your wish-list is my command
Everyone I spoke to wanted to upload photographs, something conspicuously absent from the original site. They wanted multiple colour schemes, different banner graphics and guestbooks. They wanted to enter hundreds of email addresses at once, or hide how long they had been away, or even display their position on a map of the world. That was a classic; my brother came up with it on a long drive to Devon. "How about if people can click on a map to show where they are, then when people visit the site they can see where their friend just clicked?" I came up with a number of objections there and then, but as with most of his ideas, they stuck in my head until I had a brainwave: server-side image maps to record the click, and a Flash file to display the results - I could even animate the dot. Never mind that no-one has used server-side image maps since 1996 - it was my 'Eureka!' moment. I couldn't stop there, though, because I still hadn't addressed the payment issue.
Getting paid
Although I had been a business customer of Lloyds TSB for a couple of years, I didn't know what their policy was on giving merchant accounts (for credit card transactions) to start-ups. I made an appointment with a business manager, who turned out to be very friendly and helpful. By the end of our meeting it was agreed; Lloyds would give me a merchant account, and the payments would go through Protx, a new payment provider with a phenomenally low transaction charge; just 5p! This turned out to be the easiest part of the whole process. Protx handle the payment on their server, having been passed an encrypted string from me, then take the payment and return them to My World Journal, where the personal website is activated. So now I had a fully-functional web application, which could be left to quietly do its job, providing a service and making me money, right? No chance.
So how do you get people to actually visit your site?
You get on Google, of course. Search engine placement
is something I've had some success with in the past. These days, of course,
there is pretty much only one search engine, and it is generally very good
at finding what you are looking for. The problem was that nobody was searching
for 'personal travel website' - it was not a common concept. As far as I could
tell I had no direct competition, so I cast my beady eye sideways and found...
Blogs. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't think that blogs were really attempting
to accomplish the same thing, but they were getting a lot of press coverage,
so I figured I could piggy-back on that. But of course a fundamental difference
is that the majority of blogs are free (as well as often being unfocussed
and ephemeral - unlike World Journals), so the comparison was not made by
the press. I made it, though, in this article.
Ultimately, though, the best source of traffic I found was
Gumtree, a bulletin board
for Antipodean travellers in London.
So people visit your site. How do you get them to buy?
Ah, the murky world of conversion rates. This industry is still in its infancy, but successful sites like Amazon reckon on converting 6% of their visitors into buyers. Amazon has a huge advantage over My World Journal, of course, in that the products it sells are well-known and understood by the public. Pretty much everyone knows what a book is, but hardly anybody knows what a World Journal is. Luckily there is an obvious solution; give away free trials. Which I did. And finally, after giving them a go for a few days, people started to buy.
Result!
You said it. Now I had a product that actually sold, the key was to get more visitors. I reckon I have a conversion rate of about 2%: for every 100 visitors, 6 people will take out a free trial, and 2 of them will actually buy one, so if I could attract 1,000 visitors, I could expect in the region of 20 sales. Banner ads are useless at driving traffic (only something like 0.3% of all impressions are clicked on), and anyway, I had no budget for advertising. I would gladly pay people to refer buyers my way, though, which is why I started an affiliate scheme.
So how do affiliate schemes work then?
Affiliate schemes are brilliant. If someone else links to My World Journal from their website, and a visitor from that site comes to mine and buys a Journal, I give the referrer 10% of the sale. So, if I get no sales, I pay nothing, but if I make some money, I pay a proportion of it back to whoever sent the customers my way. You see stuff like this all the time in the offline world - the leaflets stuffed inside magazines are a common example - but the web is perfect for this, because all traffic is accurately trackable in real time. I built the system in a couple of days, but spent a few weeks promoting it around various traveller and gap-year-related websites. Now I have some affiliates, I'm really hoping to get the ball rolling, build up some critical mass, and make My World Journal the premier brand in personal travel websites.
Getting some media attention
I had a major break when a friend of mine in the PR industry forwarded me an email from a magazine that was looking for stories on interesting websites. I replied straight away, and within weeks My World Journal was featured in Practical Internet Web Developer (you can read the article here). This coincided with the Christmas rush, so I'm not sure how many sales, if any, were due to the article, but traffic has certainly kept on rising. Suitably encouraged, I decided to pay a PR agency, PR4Everyone, to write and distribute a press release on my behalf. This yielded immediate results, with a travel magazine, Cruise Traveller, picking up the story. At the same time, other media organisations were also picking up on the story of My World Journal and writing their own articles.
Disaster strikes
In late March 2004, my hosting provider was hit by a malicious Internet 'Worm', which destoryed the database and backups, meaning that all of the journals were irreversibly deleted. In the three weeks it took the hosting provider to admit this, I purchased my own dedicated server and set My World Journal up on the new machine instead. Thankfully, the pictures were not stored in the database, so my customers were able to recreate their galleries easily. Everything else, though, was gone.
By way of compensation, I offered the users a choice of either:
- a full refund of their year's subscription, or
- two years free subscription
I was delighted to find that over 90% of my customers decided to give it another go, and took the offer of two years free subscription. Moving to a dedicated server brought immediate speed and resilience benefits; uploading and resizing pictures is now much quicker, saving time and money. I also instituted an additional backup policy, where the My World Journal database and all images are backup daily to my office machines, which are themselves backed up daily, with a weekly DVD backup which is stored offsite.
I learnt two important lessons from this:
- You can never be too paranoid about backups, and
- Unhappy customers will forgive you if you keep them informed, admit your mistake, and put steps in place to learn from it
Stronger than before
Amazing as it may seem, after the disaster of March and April, things were soon back on track. Many customers commented on how much better the new dedicated server was, and I took the opportunity to ask my customers if they had any other ideas which would make the My World Journal experience more streamlined and enjoyable. The response was great, and some of the ideas could be implemented immediately. Others are scheduled to be developed during the summer of 2004.
In tandem with this, user numbers have continued to grow. Thousands of people around the world now receive regular updates from their friends and family on their travels.
Check back soon to see how it's going!
Iain Row