For this month’s local business pitch, BuBul’s managing director Nigel Greenwood tells us about their state-of-the arts software package which provides cost-effective business advice for SMEs and their advisers.
Tell us about your business – sell yourselves!
I’m Nigel Greenwood, the founder of BuBul. After years of mapping and improving customer journeys for large corporates, I got fed up with how slow they were to change despite the great results we saw when they changed, so I set up Simply Customer in 2013 to help SMEs improve their customer journeys. When I worked with SMEs, I used journey mapping to increase leads, conversion, retention and profits for every customer I had.
Where did the inspiration to set up Bubul come from?
In 2015, I realised that many SMEs were too small to be able to afford my services, so I looked at how I could help them. When I saw that three out of four micro businesses don’t get any advice and fail as a result, I wanted to know why. Once I knew that it was because they don’t qualify for government-funded schemes and can’t afford a business adviser, I decided to build something that they could afford that would act like a business adviser for them.
It took six years to develop with many setbacks on the way, but we launched BuBul in March 2021 – the world’s first software that can work out what advice a micro business owner needs and provide advice.
A key part of what your offer is ease and accessibility. How do you ensure that the software is user-friendly?
We believe strongly in getting and using customer feedback, so we’re constantly asking what we can do better and what else we can do.
Before we launched we had over 40 prototypes and for each one I asked micro business owners to test it and give me their feedback. It was painful at times to see what we were getting wrong, but it’s become a way of life for us and the feedback has been pure gold in helping us continually improve.
How can people get involved?
Someone starting or running their own micro business can get BuBul at bubulexpert.com. We also have a free version for not for profit organisations who help people setting up their own business and they can get it at bubulexpert.com/social-enterprise-charity. We also offer white labelled versions for accountants as BuBul is a great tool to help them act as a business adviser to their micro clients and they can get a free trial at bubulexpert.com/accountants.
