Meet Xavier Parker : COO and Co-Founder of ZapHub
Xavier is a serial entrepreneur, working primarily in the marketing space and started his first company at 15. Xavier has led a number of startups, one of which was sold while he was still at Southampton University. Xavier was president of an entrepreneurship non-profit and was awarded NACUE's National Entrepreneur of the year award for 2016.
Q1.What is your project about?
ZapHub is the digital marketing assistant with the power to grow small businesses online. In short, we help small businesses build a successful, growth-focused online brand through a blend of exciting technology and high-quality human interactions.
We believe in building strong relationships with our customers by really understanding their business to ensure that they can grow and reach new customers. We take the away the time and high costs associated with marketing and replace them with results.
At Zaphub we focus on visual and video marketing, as well as email and online advertising because we know that's the best way to grow businesses online.
We're passionate about helping small businesses, who after all are the most important in society reach their customers. With Zaphub our members get a regular bundle of tailored digital marketing services for one flat monthly fee.
We simply help small businesses take off with ZapHub.
Q2.Where did the original idea stem from?
As a team, we've spent many years helping small businesses to build online reputations, develop their brands and grow. As founder's we have all ran small businesses and startups; we've experienced first hand how hard it can be to build a company and market it at the same time.
We decided to create ZapHub when our marketing for a different business (Recommendable.com) kept seeing the same results: "Small businesses want better marketing" but the available options are too time-consuming and too expensive. So we decided to solve that problem, so far it's incredibly exciting.
Q3. What challenges have you experienced in your journey so far?
There is always a humungous challenge when working with people who by definition don't have much time, "It's hard to get and keep their attention". We're still pretty early in our journey but as we grow, we know this going to become a bigger and bigger challenge.
This is a fun challenge for us as our offering revolves around high-quality marketing, so ZapHubs marketing has to be equally innovative and exciting. Overcoming challenges such as this build successful businesses.
ZapHub's product is an incredible human service augmented by ingenious technology. To provide we need to always have a world-class team of A-players and a big challenge we will have is finding, training and maintaining the best talent. We've raised our seed round, which means we can hire great people, but we know as we grow to manage this will become harder and harder.
On the flip side to this, we don't want to grow too quickly (and run out of money) and right now our team is small, so everyone is working in many different areas of the businesses to ensure ZapHub's success.
Q4. What is that you are trying to achieve by the end of the year?
Our aim by the end of 2018 is to be helping over 100 businesses to grow. Growth is our driver, both for our clients and for us and everything we do is focused on growing and building businesses.
I would personally love to see some incredible success stories from our clients. It would be incredible to see a business double or triple their revenue through ZapHub's marketing. Every success will be amazing and exciting, many of our clients have practically no digital visibility so just building their online presence will be a fantastic result.
Q5. What do you want the legacy of ZapHub to be known for?
We want to provide small businesses with affordable, quality marketing. We want to make the lives of founders and small business owners easier and better. We want to build a legacy where no small business ever has to struggle with marketing.
Q6. Where can people find you?
Site: www.ZapHub.co.uk
Email: Xav@ZapHub.co.uk
Twitter: @XavierParker116