Entrepreneurial Journey: Andy Callaghan

Entrepreneur Andy Callaghan is the founder of Jammed, based at York Science Park.

Jammed is an online booking platform powering creative spaces like rehearsal rooms, recording studios and photography studios. Studio owners can take bookings in their sleep, get paid instantly and rent more rooms. Jammed not only makes life easier for the thousands of independent recording studios that struggle with keeping up with telephone enquiries, now-shows and making the most of their space, it’s also a top choice for their customers who can now book rooms with greater convenience, choice and flexibility.

Andy's Journey

Having graduated from the University of Reading with a BSc in Computer Science in 2009, Andy was overwhelmed with three job offers but ultimately decided to accept an offer with an early-stage events listing start-up in London.

“Through this time though, my dad was seriously unwell before dying in 2010. He was a mentor to me in so many ways, but I also worked with him before and during university as an IT guy/programmer at his company. He was an entrepreneur, coming from being a chartered surveyor, so I think I owe a lot of my drive and ambition to him. My dad died in 2010, but I kept working in small companies like his.”

“I then worked as a Ruby on Rails programmer in London for ‘Spoonfed’ for 3 years, and then moved to live with my now wife in Liverpool in 2012, working remotely for the same company but then becoming a freelance contract ruby programmer. I worked as a freelancer for different startups companies in Liverpool, London and Leeds selling my time for increasing amounts of money as I improved my programming skill and became more senior.”

“Key to this was working at a vast range of companies –an online events company, a multinational delivery company, online photography SaaS (Software as a Service) product, and then a women’s fashion marketplace during lockdown. This range of small and medium sized companies helped me hone what I did and didn’t want to do myself, meet some amazing people and save enough money in my business account to allow me to have a runway for my current business.”

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Jammed

“At Jammed, we are primarily selling to rehearsal rooms and music rooms of all descriptions, but have many other creative spaces subscribed like photography studios, dance studios and musician development schools."

"We decided on this niche as it was being underserved by the current generic booking software, and thought that this would be a good niche to start. We operate on a subscription model selling Jammed as a SaaS, and offer customers to pay us in pound sterling, US dollar and Euro.”

“We were profitable in 2021, and we’re in a growth phase now, the basic software feature set is ready and working well by now over 30 studios in 8 countries across the world. We’re expanding our community of studios and improving our bottom line – hoping to reach 200 studios by the end of 2023. We also plan to expand our software packages by offering more services at a higher price for enterprise and chain studios who we could be taking more money from.”

Challenges

“Our initial customer in York closed down before we could deliver the prototype (mid 2019) so then we had to go and find a new first customer. We did find one in Leeds who were instrumental in guiding how Jammed should look and work.”

“But then in 2020 global lockdowns and coronavirus restrictions saw our customers close their doors to customers – for the most part they received grants and government help, but our customer base disappeared globally overnight pretty much. During this time, we gave free trials to two UK companies, and sold Jammed to a company in New Zealand (they had much less trouble with Covid) and they all helped us plot and create a feature set that would work for rehearsal spaces. We then developed a first product that worked well enough for our studios to sell space to their customers.”

Words of advice

“Automate as much as possible, and delegate away what you can’t automate – we now automate social media posting, marketing emails, profit calculations, subscription retentions, support emails and then have delegated help with copywriting, accountancy, lead generation and qualification.”

“It’s possible and perhaps necessary to do all these yourself when you’re first starting out, and money is usually a constraint, but automating social media posts is easy and took a day of work but now builds content across 4 different platforms without me needing to do any work day-to-day. Automating all these activities releases time for me to work on and in the business, and building relationships with customers.”

“Finally, the mental health aspects of entrepreneurship should not be ignored or dismissed. It was very hard to keep going early on, and having support of friends, family and mentors helped immeasurably here. Talk to someone about what you’re doing, share ideas and be prepared to be wrong and fail.”

“I wrote myself a note in a workbook in 2020: “don’t give up”. I was really struggling to keep going at the time, and this was me mentally checking myself and I’m really glad I did keep going. What I’m doing is important to me, but can soon feel overwhelming. Failure is normal and in fact the default - expect many failures before you start getting it right and hit a winner. It’s hard to sell something that people use, buy or enjoy using, and getting anything sold or used by someone else is already a huge achievement so keep going and keep getting better.”

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