One Year On: Angus Elphinstsone, Founder of Anyvan.com

Last year, delivery auction website, Anyvan.com beat over 1800 others to scoop our Website of the Year Award 2010.

A totally free to use delivery service that gives users instant access to thousands of transport companies and courier services who are already making the journey and who have space in their vehicles for your items, Anyvan.com helps users save money when moving anything from large items to small boxes or suitcases while helping reduce unnecessary fuel wastage.

So how has the business progressed in the last year? What have been the greatest challenges of the last year? And what hurdles lie ahead? We caught up with Anyvan's founder, Angus Elphinstone to find out more.

Since winning the Website of the Year... it's been a very exciting few months not only due to the sheer increase in users we are seeing but the additional functionality we have bolted on to our existing platform. With increased users, brings new findings so we have paid special attention to developing our listing process and the delivery company's platform.

It's a never ending road with development... but we have literally just launched our ‘Recommend and Reward' campaign, which, in effect, is a ‘peer to peer' affiliate marketing scheme. Every user we have on the site has the ability to recommend Anyvan to their friends and family by giving them £5 free started credit. If they then successfully use Anyvan, we will reward them with £10 Anyvan credit which can be cashed at a 50% value. We've seen an encouraging start.

Our greatest challenge... will always be the need to change the way people go about delivering goods around the UK. As our service is relatively new, we have to educate consumers that there is such a service like ours while converting their traditional ways of thinking - calling a man and van or courier company. We are endlessly tweaking aspects of the site in order to assuage our greatest challenge as all websites have very little time to convince the user.

The strength of an internet company is... predominantly down to its users and our greatest achievement is hitting the targets we set out to reach by June 2011. We won two Internet Business Awards this year which, along with The Good Web Guide Website of the Year, has given us a great platform to work from and helped us to achieve the numbers we are seeing now. Within the last week, we have also passed the 50,000 user mark - a landmark we're pleased to see the back of!

Winning Website of the Year 2010... was a fantastic moment for us and gave us a great sense of achievement for what had at that point been over 2 years worth of work. The recognition we earned from winning was, has been and continues to be huge for us, not to mention the national recognition that we received. As you will see we proudly 'fly' the award prominently on our homepage.

Rapid growth lies in listening to your customers... We started with a vision for where this would go and, while that remains unchanged, we have come to realise that the provision of a great product does not guarantee success and that the route to achieving what we set out to achieve is to a great degree dictated through understanding our users' wants/needs.l

25 May 2011