Bizz Buzz

BizzBuzz.com.au was launched in May this year by Marcus Layton, former owner and founder of dry cleaning business Pinstripe.

BizzBuzz describes itself as Australia’s only group buying site dedicated to small business, offering “unheard of” deals on goods and services.

“Although the number of sites out there offering cheap cupcakes and nail polishing services has become a bit ridiculous no one has addressed the needs of business owners,” Layton says.

Layton talks to StartupSmart about creating a point of difference in a saturated market.

What inspired the idea for BizzBuzz?

While tying up the exit sale of a dry cleaning franchise I’d founded in 2008 I’d spent around a year mulling over which business I would move onto next.

After looking at everything from the adoption of a successful mail order health food business model from the UK to a textbook rental service that would help university students save on costs I stumbled across Groupon’s group buying model.

After deeper research of the model I was surprised to see that no group buying contender had attempted to service small business owners (yet) and as group buying for small business appeared such a perfect fit I set about surveying a large number of business owners and was met with an overwhelmingly positive reception.

How did the name come about?

The BizzBuzz name came about much the same way as Pinstripe did.

I would scour through an online thesaurus and list the words I might like to use in my business name, only to find that I end up choosing a name that never showed up in the thesaurus.

I guess the process I used helped to spark the creative juices to reach the end result.

I’ll then get the opinion of a few people whose judgment I trust, have them confirm that they love the name as much as I do and move onto the next task.

How long did you work on the website before you launched it?

I’d spent a short period before the launch learning how to carry out onsite design changes and make minor edits to the layout of the site, but I only really set out to learn this after churning through a few developers and finding I wasn’t going to move quickly unless I knew how to do it myself.

So including the back and forth with developers, it took around two months to get the site ready.

Fortunately BizzBuzz now has Scott Middleton on board as a business partner, who has around 10 years of website development experience under his belt and can easily manage any development projects without any risk of my fly-by-night approach to coding potentially crashing the website.