It's been a while, but since I last wrote I've been developing the recommendations website idea further and researching similar models around the world. The more I think about it, the more excited I get about the potential for this idea. It'll be like word-of-mouth on steroids – helping good businesses that are battling away to get noticed, and exposing those that are ripping consumers off or providing bad service. I keep wishing that this service already existed - I would personally have used it many times by now. Recently I've needed to find a hairdresser, restaurants (several), gym, and physiotherapist and I’d love to get a recommendation.

I'm actually studying my MBA at Melbourne Business School at the moment and one of the subjects I've chosen for this semester is Entrepreneurship. The main assessment is a business plan so I've obviously decided to do mine on the recommendation website - which at the moment, I'm calling SmileFile. Still not 100% sure on this name but it’s a working title for the moment. For the purposes of the assignment, I've partnered with Dat - a guy from class - but I've discussed with him the fact that I intend to develop it solely going forward (which he is fine with as he has different ideas for a business).

So at the moment, I'm busy working through business models, financial spreadsheets, market research, value propositions, etc. It's interesting because in theory, I agree with all of this, but in practice I also believe that if I can develop something that people find useful, somehow or another it will make enough money to cover its expenses. I'm also struggling with the speed of growth question. In order to grow fast, it would take a lot of investment in marketing, which would probably require external funding (and the associated loss of control), but I'm not 100% sure that it needs to grow extremely fast. Really, I'm thinking of it more as a community service that, if done well, will grow organically without a huge marketing push. (A bit ironic given my background is in marketing!)

Anyway, the formal business planning process is definitely helping me to develop the idea further. Plus, the weekly Saturday lectures are usually pretty inspirational. When you're working on something and not seeing any tangible results, it's really useful to come along each week and hear about entrepreneurs who have gone through this lonely process and come out the other end successfully. The two lecturers (John Bailey and David Austin are great).