Tradesman

Ironies can be cruel. Despite the relative economic buoyancy in 2005, Paul Meachen sensed conditions were going to turn, and conceived his bartering website, Trade to Save, as a business that could thrive in a depressed environment. When money was tight, people would look for alternatives to the cash economy and flock to his site, where instead they could barter their goods and services.

In the gloom of 2009 it’s an idea, you’d think, whose time had come.

“The problem,” says Meachen today, “is times have got tougher and I’ve got no money to market.”

When Unlimited featured Trade to Save in August 2006, the website had been live since Christmas and had 300 members — from truck drivers to solicitors. Meachen projected membership would grow to between 3000 and 4000 within 18 months.

But actual growth has been slower. Membership today is well below projections, totalling around 2600, and Meachen reports between 50 and 100 users do business on the website daily and three or four new members sign up.

The business isn’t making money: Meachen now offers full membership for free (it cost $8.75 a month at launch) and — walking the talk — has traded the display advertisements on his website for goods and services.

The website, however, is fairly self-managing and costs only about $7000 a year to maintain. Meachen, whose background is in corporate telecommunications and IT, was working on the site full time when interviewed in 2006 and had spent $60,000 on development. A few months later, however, he picked up consultancy work to pay the bills and has continued running Trade to Save as a sideline ever since.

People love the idea behind Trade to Save, says the Auckland entrepreneur, but converting them into users of the site has been a tougher sell. Today’s internet browsers scan new sites in seconds, and Meachen reckons the Trade to Save concept takes more time to communicate. In an effort to counter this, he’s uploaded a video on the homepage explaining how Trade to Save works.

The concept also requires users to think about doing business in a way that’s unfamiliar to many Kiwis, as well as a habitual change that may be too much of a stretch, Meachen muses.

“Quite often I’ll get despondent because good ideas don’t sell themselves … I’ll sit back and think, ‘Maybe it’s just something I see the value in and maybe it just isn’t right for the market.’ … But then customers say to me how fantastic it is. That’s when my inspiration and my faith in it come back.

“I still wonder if I was to turn around and chuck a couple of hundred thousand into marketing — do the saturation thing, drive the key messages, bring it into the culture of doing business — it would take off. But I don’t have that sort of money and I’m not prepared to put my house on the market to do it.”

In the absence of a marketing budget, the site’s only profile has been gained through a few media stories. In another cruel twist, an item on TV3’s Campbell Live last year drew so many hits to the website it crashed.

Meachen is planning a few marketing tactics in the next month to see if he can garner more numbers. He is also investigating the idea of launching the site in the UK, a country he believes has a more established bartering culture. But he admits the challenges of marketing the concept would still remain.

He doesn’t dwell, however, on whether or not the enterprise has been a worthwhile investment thus far.

“You go into these things with great expectations on a good idea. The thing is, so many people fail when they’re a short way from success.”