As I relaunched SmallBusinessIreland this week and the fact that the Instagram page is nearly at 1000 followers, I wanted to give a brief re-introduction as to what this page is, its history and its potential future.
What is SmallBusinessIreland?!
At SmallBusinessIreland, we* highlight and promote Small Businesses that are in Ireland (See how I got the name? 😮) to other entrepreneurs and potential customers.
We aim to have ‘highlights’ of businesses and their products for upcoming events (eg. Christmas, Easter, Hallowe’en, etc) so other businesses can see what other businesses are doing and customers can see what businesses have to offer.
We try to follow as many small Irish businesses as we can and whenever we see them on our feed, we try to repost them onto our Stories for exposure.
(* We being just me, Padraig! I can be found @pf.ie)
How SmallBusinessIreland started:
It was October 2020 and a post on /r/CasualIreland’s Reddit had caught my attention. Someone was looking to buy Christmas presents for kids from Irish-based businesses as they wanted to avoid Amazon. From what I could tell, there wasn’t a website that I could find that would fit that bill. Sure there were one or two sites out there, but they were localised. It didn’t have what I was looking for. My aim was to set up a platform for businesses to list their site(s) and their products.
A day or two after the post, BuyLocal.irish was made live with some basic functionality (You could enter your business name and upload images but it wasn’t enough). I was rushing to get it live and fix problems later. Suffice it to say after a few weeks of trying to resolve issues and implement some basic features, it was becoming a pain in the tooth. I gave up and the site was closed down.
I didn’t want to give up the idea of a website and so I changed it to become a discussion platform where all entrepreneurs could come together to share their ideas, ask questions, etc.
At this time, the Instagram page started taking off.
I opted for a name change in April of 2021 as “BuyLocal.irish” didn’t reflect what it should have been, so I managed to snag the smallbusinessireland.ie domain name and rebranded everything to that. It was probably the best decision I made.
With very little activity coming from the website and an explosion in activity from Instagram, I decided to close the websites as well as Twitter and Facebook as they were not attracting users in comparison to Instagram.
The purpose of the site (as of now) is an elaborate Call-To-Action to go to the Instagram page. And in the future, look at possibly adding some long-form written content with tips/tricks/news about e-commerce. We’ll see how things go.
What about the future?!
I have a lot of big ideas and dreams for the future. Some may happen, and some may not.
- Stories about Small Businesses from Entrepreneurs.
- Like this post, talk about how the business started, the first few months/year. What did they do to get up and running? What were the struggles? What about the future? Etc.
This aims to help potential entrepreneurs see what other businesses have done and learn from it so that they don’t encounter the same pitfalls.
- Like this post, talk about how the business started, the first few months/year. What did they do to get up and running? What were the struggles? What about the future? Etc.
- SmallBusinessIreland Expo.
- I know this sounds crazy, but what if we had a large location (like the RDS) and all the small businesses would have a stand showcasing their business and products? A trade show, but for small businesses across the country from different industries. Kids’ Toys, Jewellery, Fashion, Homeware. Services like web hosting or SEO, perhaps attendance from LEOs with advice.
- And perhaps ‘Mini’ SmallBusinessIreland Expo’s across the country with the same idea as above but targeting local businesses.
- Tips & Tricks to be posted on Instagram about Businesses.
- Whether that is SEO, e-commerce software, social media, etc with more long-form content being made available here.
- Bring someone on to help out with the page. Whether that is reposting posts or creating ‘original content’.
- As I mentioned above, SBI is a one-man band. So someone else helping out would be cool. [This would be voluntary]
The last part I want to touch on is a query that I have got from a few people over the last couple of years and it’s to do with the monetization of SBI. Let me be very very clear:
SBI is free. And always will be.
SBI makes no money (We aren’t selling a product or a service). This is just a hobby that I enjoy doing. I don’t accept donations or free products.
Thank you to everyone for being a part of SBI. I hope this community becomes bigger in 2023. If you have any questions, please message me on the Instagram page and I will do my best to respond.
Padraig