Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: 2014 and 2015, more of the same?

Jonny Grubin: Our focus and what I had built this business around was gifting samples to a friend. We were doing well with that. There was nobody else in the space. Brands loved it. We were on a pretty exciting trajectory. We had a lot of brands come to us saying, “We want to be able to sample in other ways. We don’t do it through just a gifting experience.” It was only down to my stubbornness that we focused solely on gifting for so long.

Eventually, I realized that the gifting element was important, but it wasn’t where the real value was coming from. It was important because it qualified the individual. We had confidence that somebody who is receiving the sample that way was more engaged than somebody who would just receive it out of the blue.

Sramana Mitra: Quick clarification, where were you getting the list? Who were these 30,000 people?

Jonny Grubin: That was the clever bit. I was never confident in my own ability to recruit a consumer audience. What we did was we built these experiences for the brand. Then we said, “You already have an audience there. Why don’t you contact your customers?” It was the brand going to their customers who would then recruit their friends.

Sramana Mitra: Now that they say that they don’t want to do only gifting. What is your value proposition in that workflow?

Jonny Grubin: That was the question that I asked myself. What I eventually understood was that there was still a huge amount of value around it. What we were doing was much more qualified than traditional sampling. There were a ton of benefits on the data side.

Traditionally, brands would give away a sample and they wouldn’t know anything about the individual. In terms of measuring what happens afterward, everyone told me that their sampling was performing very well, but none of these brands had data to back up their claims. The proposition that we had was much stronger than some of the more conventional forms of marketing.

What we then began to recognize was unless you’ve got strong technology to back all of this stuff up, the internet can be a very easy way to waste a lot of samples. The value that we offer to brands today is on the scalability side. We are shipping millions of orders every month and we’re doing it in an efficient way. It’s very easy to give away samples. You might not need us to do that.

Where a lot of our value comes from is understanding what experience to deliver to each consumer. We are able to detect people who are just looking for free products and perhaps offer them a different experience. When a brand is working with us, they have confidence that their samples are going to the right people and are collecting the right data. They’ve got not only a strong technology platform but an incredible team of account managers and customer success individuals.

Sramana Mitra: Step me through 2014 to 2016. How was the business growing? Did you raise more money?

Jonny Grubin: We raised the seed round in 2014. In 2015, we had around £600,000 in revenue. On Christmas Eve of 2015, we closed another small round of investment which was the last time we raised money. Over the years that followed, we had pretty good growth. We set up an office in New York. We were consistently ranked as UK’s fastest-growing technology company. The team grew at a good pace as well.

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