Mumpreneur Profile: Mags of Kids in Sussex

Name of Business: Kids in Sussex, On-line event listings

Your Name and Age: Mags Bradley, 37

Tell us about your family: My husband Stephen is a Web Developer so perfectly suited to creating the site for me. Our children are Holly, Age 9 and Tom, Age 4. We live in Worthing, West Sussex in a lovely house a stones throw from a nice quiet beach. 

What did you do before coming up with your business idea and how was it making the transition?

Before setting up the site I had various jobs all in one way or another related to event promotion and working with children. Pre-parenthood I worked for National Magazines and Newspapers such as Good Housekeeping and The Sunday Times compiling family listings pages. Post parenthood I’ve worked in local radio and a local pre-school as well as co-hosting the Brighton branch of the international event Baby Loves Disco.( See baby loves disco ~ united kingdom – brighton)

When did you launch? Easter 2009

How did you get started? 

I sketched designs of how I felt the site should look, feel and work and presented them to my husband/developer who questioned my choices and made suggestions of what technically would work and what wouldn’t. Next I needed to compile the information I would need to feature and so joined lots of relevant venue mailing lists and made contacts with press officers and anyone promoting interesting family events I came across and continue to do so.

What research did you do before launching? 

I searched for other people doing similar things and found a gap was there. Other people were listing places to go and some were listing events but the majority seemed to all be compiled nationally and only list a few very obvious attractions, not the little local things someone on the ground needs to find. Most importantly none of them feature the unique search facilities we have where users can look for events on specific days or relevant to their age of child and have them displayed in order of nearest to where they live.

How have you funded the business?

We’ve worked lots of unpaid hours late into the night and gradually started to sell advertising spaces. 

How do you promote your business? What has worked best?

Flyers in venues and distributed at festivals, links on other sites and word of mouth. Now our youngest is at school full time I’ll have a bit more time to devote to promotion. My main priority is keeping the site up to date and full of good information.

What has worked well about your business?

The feedback from the venues we promote and the users of the site has been fantastic which is what makes it all worthwhile. To know that you are providing information that will give families some great experiences and fun days out.

What has been your biggest challenge so far? How have you dealt with it?

Working long hours for little pay has been a challenge as to keep going requires lots of self belief.

How do you fit in work with the family?

I work in the evenings a lot and now the youngest is at school I have mornings too which is great. I may even have time to try some other ventures which can run alongside Kids in Sussex too which is very exciting. 

Your website link: www.kidsinsussex.co.uk

Family Friendly Working readers are welcome to apply to be one of our child reviewers and go to lots of great shows for free! Ideally the child would need to be between 4 and 14 years old and be an articulate communicator at expressing their opinions whether they type and submit it themselves or dictate it to their parent. They can contact me via the About Us page and I can send them more info. Kids in Sussex – Home

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 9:13 am and is filed under Mumpreneur Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.