Entrepreneur Saskia Nelson - How I created a new genre of photography in 30 days [#4] The Ideas Lab Podcast

Entrepreneur Saskia Nelson – How I created a new genre of photography in 30 days

Saskia Nelson had just lost her job when she took a course with The Ideas Lab 5 years ago. She had only a vague idea of the business she wanted to start but decided over the next 30 days to offer photography for people’s dating profiles.

Saskia ended up creating an entirely new genre of business: Dating Photography. Today her business has over a dozen photographers working under her in 5 cities around the UK and now New York and LA as well. And her business has been profiled on the front page of BBC News and in numerous newspapers and magazines.

Here’s the story from her first ever client to the international business she runs now. Listen in to learn how you too can start from scratch and create something incredible.

Highlights from this episode:

“[John] You created an entire new category. You did that by zooming in….

[Saskia] I’m just doing something different, but the one thing I’m doing, I’m doing it quite well.”

“If you said to somebody on your dating profile, ‘I’ll date anybody of any kind, I don’t care, please just take me,’ how many dates would you get?”

“People don’t realize, you can start something without having a website…without having a social media presence.”

“You created an entire new category. You did that by zooming in. That’s often how you do it, because pretty much every kind of business is being done. But if you narrow your focus, then the dating profile photographer, which is a new thing, whereas being a portrait photographer is not.” [John Williams]

“I felt like I changed his life, just through this act of taking his photos. He’s had such an adventure with them since. Getting messages like that, it’s like, “Oh, this is why I do it.””

“It was pretty terrifying, I mean I can laugh now five years later but yeah, I was like, oh my god someone’s paying me to do this now.”

“A lot of people have these ideas for a business, particularly something that’s quite cool like this, that sounds fun, and then they just sit on it or they research. So they spend their whole time Googling.”

“I said I was going to be a portrait photographer, I just hadn’t figured out what I was going to do. And what I had noticed was, all the photographers that I was looking at their websites, their businesses, they were all the same. So they all offered the same thing, they all offered events, weddings, portraits, family and everyone’s website I see is the same and I was like, I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. And I kind of figured that I wanted to do one thing and just do that one thing really really well because I was reading marketing books as well and they say that when you read marketing books. Especially back then, rewind five years, it was all about doing one thing and doing it really well. So I thought, right, I’m going to do that.”

Bio:

Saskia Nelson is the talent behind the award-winning and internationally acclaimed Hey Saturday, the UK’s coolest dating photography business, specialising in creating dating photos that win dates for 100’s of single people. She is also the co-founder of Irresistible Dating.

She’s been credited for creating the genre of dating photography and is recognised as the leading industry expert in the UK & US on all things dating photo related. She also puts her extensive online dating experiences to good use by sharing her experiences and wisdom on her blog.