Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did your friend put in?

Jonny Grubin: He put in £45,000, which for me felt like a huge amount of money.

Sramana Mitra: What exactly where you able to prove in that MVP? I’m so used to constantly working with people’s pitches. As you were speaking, one thing that struck me is you almost have two ideas in there. One is this idea that for people in urban areas where theft is higher and there’s no safe space to leave something. That is a real delivery problem.

Then you talked about tying a delivery address to all these social media profiles. Those are two different problems. Did you solve for both of them?

Jonny Grubin: I was trying to solve both. They’re very interlinked. For me, it was very much focused on convenience not only for the receiver but also the sender. The convenience comes from linking it to an identifier that doesn’t change. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a social media profile. In the MVP, we never had a demonstrable use case.

What the MVP allowed me to prove was that there was demand for that. Consumers loved it. We had a lot of interest from retailers. A number of delivery companies were interested to the point where one of them flew me to visit them for a week because they wanted to invest in it. The purpose of the MVP wasn’t to have a fully-functioning product.

Sramana Mitra: You proved the MVP. What happens next?

Jonny Grubin: I didn’t know what to do. I say that because the MVP achieved what I wanted it to. There was no doubt in my mind that the concept was strong. It wasn’t just me who felt like it was strong. I had this proof.

The biggest issue in implementing this on the global scale wasn’t on the technology side. Yes, there were technical challenges. The biggest issue was on the data side. Until I had tens of millions of people who had signed up with me, it didn’t matter what technology I had because no delivery company would integrate with me. No retailer would take me seriously. It was a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.

Without having a huge amount of West Coast VC funding, I couldn’t see how I can build that audience. I was really stuck trying to figure out what to do. A couple of months prior to that, somebody who I was leaning on for a lot of advice told me that I should take the path of least resistance in what I was doing. That was a statement that began to resonate with me.

I’ve been trying to solve this problem, in one form or another, for about three years by this point. I really wasn’t getting far. The reason what he said to me really clicked was that it allowed me to think about what I was trying to do differently. There was no reason why I had to take this route. Maybe there was another way.

What had happened which I haven’t touched on yet is that around the time we launched the MVP, I met somebody who was looking for the digital marketing for quite a well-known British band. We got talking. The band’s been touring. If I could sell more DVDs and build something cool, they’ll promote it. This is an amazing way to build that audience. This band had millions of followers.

My friend was still working for me for free. He built a website where you could gift the DVD to a friend. Instead of entering your friend’s shipping information on the checkout, you just type them on Facebook. The friend had a personal timeline. They could tell us where the DVD was to be sent to. That went well.

The reason I bring that up is because it was the catalyst. I sat there in January 2013 scratching my head trying to figure out how to take this forward. A few weeks later, I got this email from somebody very high up from Avon who had seen the work that we have done. They wanted to do the same thing I did for the band.

I knew nothing about the beauty industry at that time. I didn’t understand what she wanted. I went to visit her and I met this woman who was at the top of her game. I could tell that she was excited. She essentially said, “If you can do this for us, we’ll be your first customer.” Without really knowing why but recognizing that she probably knew something that I didn’t, we began to pivot.

Over the months that followed, I was able to recruit a couple of people to join me who are still with me today. Over the months, we put our egos to one side and said, “We’re going to make this thing work one way or another. We’re going to get to that destination somehow.” We essentially built a new product that was focused on allowing Avon to go to their existing customers and make it easy for them to gift product samples for their friends.

The real value for the brand was in two things. The first was personal recommendations. The second one was product sampling. What she had seen in the work that we had done with that band was a clever combination of sampling and personal recommendations. We set off in this journey.

We launched a product with them in October 2013. We took things from there and moved away from the original vision of trying to reinvent the entire postal system to be the most powerful product sampling platform in the world.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin
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