Madinks’ Donal Ryan and Thomas Bullman (Credit: Irish Independent)
Madinks, launched last year, is said to be “changing the way Irish people shop” for cartridges and printers.
Irish Independent reported on Madinks, founded by Donal Ryan and Thomas Bullman last year, which has already won an Eircom Spider award for “creativity and innovation in digital media”. The news site states that the company is “changing the way Irish people shop” for cartridges, and Ryan spoke at length about the business.
He stated that printer cartridges “are one of the top three products bought online globally”, and that printer equipment is one sector which has “totally fallen behind in terms of e-commerce”. In Ireland, the big suppliers “have very clunky websites”, he added, “or are still selling via catalogues”, and so Madinks “realised there was a big opportunity for an innovative company selling these products online”.
Ryan and Bullman met at university while studying business and law, and “left behind comfortable jobs in mulitnationals” to start up Madinks. The company sells alternative printer cartridges and the site “makes it easy and cost-effective” for consumers, with cheap delivery and a three year guarantee on products. Ryan noted that the two “spent about a year developing the website [and] building most of it ourselves”, with “one of the most time-consuming parts” being search engine optimisation (SEO).
This was a challenge, he commented, “because we don’t sell in physical stores, our website is our shop floor” and “it is so important that people can reach it easily. Being on page one of Google is like buying a shop on the busiest street in town, rather than on a little alley on the outskirts”. SEO “requires much more than just using the right keywords”, and the company blogs “every day” as well as being “active on multiple social media platforms”.
The work on SEO “has paid off”, as Madinks’ site “has just reached page one of Google when you search for terms relevant to what we do”. Ryan points out they both still “spend[s] about three hours a day working on SEO”, but the website receives “between 300 and 400 visitors” each day, with 1,000 customers signed up from “a wide variety of industries as well as individuals”.
He concluded: “We don’t have to sell directly even to big corporate clients; they are finding us online just by searching. Though we have funded the business ourselves until now, we are starting to look at grants and other forms of finance. Government funding via Enterprise Ireland doesn’t look like an option; it seems geared towards manufacturing and food businesses rather than e-commerce.”