Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much did Avon pay you?

Jonny Grubin: They paid me £1,000 which seemed like a huge amount of money at that time. It was about validating it all. We were still very much bootstrapped. I didn’t want to be greedy. I need to charge them something. A thousand pounds seemed like a fair price and it seemed like I could map out how to get to breakeven in a short period of time.

Sramana Mitra: What happened after that? How did you go about building on that concept?

Jonny Grubin: We hustled. I’m not a programmer, but I can sell stuff. I cold-contacted people. Slowly but surely, we managed to win business from some pretty well-known brands.

Sramana Mitra: Were you going after particular kinds of brands?

Jonny Grubin: In the early days, it was anybody who would talk to me. Where we really began to see success was in the beauty industry. Looking back, it’s so obvious now. If you can build expertise or a reputation in a certain area, it’s much easier to grow there.

Sramana Mitra: Vertical alignment is really effective in marketing.

Jonny Grubin: At the start, it was very much a pray-and-spray approach. We began to get some good traction in beauty and focused on that. Beauty is at the heart of our business today.

Sramana Mitra: What was the end of 2012 like?

Jonny Grubin: I’ll give you 2013 because 2012 was when we were testing the MVP. Revenues were no more than a few thousand pounds. We would have been a team of two or three people.

Sramana Mitra: You had figured out that product sampling is the direction you were going to go at the end of 2013. What happened in 2014?

Jonny Grubin: We started to grow. 2014 was when we raised our first proper round of investment. Over the period before that, we had raised little chunks here and there.

Sramana Mitra: How much was raised?

Jonny Grubin: £350,000. That was from a number of angels and a UK-based VC fund. There were points where I wasn’t sure whether the business was going to make it. I had investment offers from people and I said, “You know what. I’d rather the business not succeed than have it structured like this.” In the end, we were able to pull together an incredible group of investors.

Sramana Mitra: These investors were investing in the sampling platform?

Jonny Grubin: They were. We had some revenues. I wouldn’t say we were established. There were some exciting sparks there.

Sramana Mitra: When you were raising the seed round, did you zero-in on the beauty industry yet?

Jonny Grubin: No. We probably had a hunch that there was a lot of opportunity there. The thing that was instrumental in 2014 was we won our first piece of business in the US. We had been focused on UK brands. Almost out of nowhere, we won a deal in New York which was six times larger than anything we had done in the UK. It almost came without trying.

Sramana Mitra: They found you?

Jonny Grubin: I had met somebody for coffee three months earlier who had then passed my details onto them. This is a huge multinational brand. They wanted to distribute 30,000 samples. It was huge. It was one of those moments where it made me realize how big this thing could be and how many opportunities there were.

My outlook was never just UK-focused. The way I was doing things, we were very much talking to brands in the UK and then this happened. We raised that round of seed investment and delivered this campaign in New York. Very quickly, I began to do much more frequent trips to the States to drum up more business.

We started to build out a commercial team in London. Prior to this, I had amazing people on the product and design side. On the commercial side, it was just me. Because there was nobody there supporting me, instead of selling out the next business, I’d be delivering for a few weeks. When I hired Elise, who was the first person to join the commercial team, it was incredible. I would sell and hand it over to her. It was that inflection point where we were not plateauing anymore.

Sramana Mitra: What was the average deal size for this now?

Jonny Grubin: I would need to check, but I would say it was in the low single-digit thousand pounds a deal.

Sramana Mitra: You had to sell them one by one.

Jonny Grubin: Exactly. What was proof that we were doing something right was that all these brands were coming back to us.

Sramana Mitra: The lifetime value was much bigger.

Jonny Grubin: Exactly. My approach even today is to make it really easy for the customer. Ultimately, if you’re confident in your product, you should allow them to test in a risk-free way. Never do it for free because it diminishes the value. If you can make it cost-effective for somebody to start with you, you’ll win the business much faster.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin
1 2 3 4 5 6 7