Startup Interview with Abbie Shone, Founde and COO of RPAIR

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Our team is innovative and hardworking, we all come from different backgrounds, where we are able to combine our transferable skills to make RPAIR successful. This means that we all see things slightly differently but we come together with our skills and expertise to drive this company forward.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Our company, RPAIR, has developed an online comparison marketplace for watch and jewellery owners in the UK to get easier access to repairs for their watches and jewelry items by matching them with qualified and reviewed repair shops across the UK.

What is the origin story?

Like many ideas, RPAIR was born from real-world frustrations. While working in the watch and jewelry industry for over 15 years, I experienced many problems keeping customers updated on their watch and jewelry repairs whilst working at my family’s jewelry shop. In 2019 I thought "Could technology be used to simplify communication between the repair shop and customer, and repair this broken process?" When discussing this idea with my partner Michael one evening, the real lightbulb moment happened. Together, we quickly realised a solution that would solve many more of the problems experienced in this industry. One platform that could help customers easily find and compare watch and jewelry repair quotes whilst simultaneously helping jewelry and repair shops win and manage more jobs.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We love working together, we have fun and make this more than a job and a business. We are a passionate group of people that are constantly challenging each other to get the best out of each other and to keep pushing our business forward. We are a group of forward thinkers on a mission to make watch and jewelry repairs fair and easy for all. We have a balanced blend of backgrounds and we believe this helps guide our market understanding and inform our product decisions. These backgrounds include the watch and jewelry industry, design, tech product development, software engineering, and sales. Together, we want to solve old school problems with new-age tools.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

We would be figuring out something else to start working on. To be honest I can’t think of much else to do. The four of us have met, individually and with each other at times to work together and build something, so if it wasn’t this it would be something else.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

At the moment we believe success is measured in different ways. Every week is a different level of success. We have set milestones to hit, and as we are growing we are hitting them and measuring our success by them. Our goal currently is to make the repairs process easier for customers, so they bother to get their repairs completed, but our goal is also to on-board more businesses so we can drive customers to them and increase their repairs business. As long as we are working towards both of these goals and making this process easier for customers and businesses then we are successful.

• CPA – Advertising cost per completed customer repair form
• Average no. of quotes received for a customer before a customer accepts one Repair Partners Response rate (How often they are quoting to show engagement)
• Win rate (How often they are winning jobs)

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We’ve seen a huge volume of repair jobs come through ranging from Rolex watch servicing to diamond ring resizing. It’s amazing to see people trusting the platform with their most precious items. We also had one repair partner make back their subscription fee in their first week by being really engaged with the platform and going above and beyond for the customer.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Excited: We are excited about AI technology, specifically, with everything that has happened in the world recently. The combination of AI and vaccine development being able to significantly speed up this process could mean we do not have to suffer another pandemic in this way at all.

Worried: We are not worried about any particular type of technology, but the addiction that we have to social media and technology. Technology is amazing, but how we choose to use it and how our behavior changes in a negative way are what is worrying. With the rise of technology and social media addiction, we sometimes worry about how to educate our children on how to use it responsibly.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Interesting and varied articles across lots of interesting tech topics. 8-Bit branding is cool and the whole platform doesn’t take itself too seriously.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

We have learned so much, and so much of this is new to all of us. The key is to have the right people around you, make sure you are agile when an opportunity presents itself, or when a mistake is made. Just because you built a roadmap does not mean you cannot pivot and change direction.

For example, within 2 weeks of our BETA launch, we saw significant issues with the customer journey and had to rearrange our priorities and work hard to get it sorted. Also we learned to not live in fear of putting out a product that isn’t perfect. What you can learn from being live and getting real-life feedback is invaluable. Don’t be scared of failing, just keep moving forward.

VOTE for RPAIR as Startup of the Year in Waltham Abbey!