Early Career in Digital Marketing

Speaker 1 0:00

So we've dived in a bit technical . I want to hear a bit more about your history , then . And what ? Because we're going to get to your fuck-ups , let's get into . So where have you come from ? You started in digital marketing , right ? Is that right , Josh ?

Speaker 2 0:13

Yeah , I started off first ever job was SEO and content writing inside a PR agency . Yeah , so I got my job . I was doing kind of bits of copywriting and writing like about tech for like a few blogs and stuff like that . So I I originally wanted to be a journalist . That was the first thing I wanted to be when I was , you know , 18 and realized there was basically no jobs in journalism and so started copywriting , fell in . I was always a nerd so I always , like you know , I built my first computer when I was 10 and I've just been a nerd ever since and so digital marketing seems like gel this , like nerdy techie stuff with this writing stuff together . And that was the job at hotwire . Was really learning about seo , um , you know , learning analytics and ga and all that data and stuff like that . Uh , did that for a few years .

Speaker 2 1:05

Got a taste for startup life because I really enjoyed kind of the startup culture of some of the companies I was working with . Went to Pact Coffee , which was just before they raised their series , a Small team , so

Journey to Startup Founder

Speaker 2 1:18

went from an agency of 200 down to a team of 12 . Did print marketing there ? So , like a completely different channel print marketing inserts , magazine advertising stuff like that then went to a comms and kind of producty role inside an education group , which is a completely different shift again . Uh , did that for a few years , kind of took a , basically built a website for this business , started selling these online courses which was years before covid they probably would have done much better later on and then went to join thriver , which is a health tech where I joined as their first employee and head of growth , and that was 2017 and that was probably the real kind of start of that period of my career when over the three years I was there kind of learned more in three years and you probably do in 10 years in most businesses .

Speaker 2 2:11

Yeah , they , when I joined , it was just the founders and myself and they had about 500 customers and by the time they left it was a 55 person team . 100,000 customers acquired , um , which myself and the team the team I'd kind of put together had been responsible for that . So I learned lots there . Ben went and launched my own startup . So , had the bug wanted to be a founder , had always enjoyed wine , had done a wine course , thought the way that wine courses were taught was backwards

WineList's Pandemic Success Story

Speaker 2 2:40

. I wanted to bring it online and set up WineList , which started as a podcast , then turned into a newsletter , then turned into video content plus wine as a subscription . That was 2019 .

Speaker 2 2:53

I went full- full time on it march 1st of 2020 . Yeah , but I went full time first of march 2020 .

Speaker 1 3:00

Two two weeks later , lockdown started okay , that said , was that not a good thing ? That's not a good thing , yeah , because wine .

Speaker 2 3:05

Everybody sat at home drinking wine our numbers did the kind of hockey stick thing we went from . We were doing . I think we did three thousand pounds of revenue in february 2020 and in april we did like 25 000 pounds .

Speaker 1 3:17

It was 50 000 two months later that was basically the ochendons , so they're just ordering all their wine for the for the summer so yeah , it was absolutely brilliant amazing , so okay , um , why aren't you still running it now ? Yeah , what happened then ? Come , come on wait .

Speaker 2 3:36

Don't mean to trigger you , no , no , it's a good thing , but it was also a real . There was a curse to that side of that growth , because it was unusual behaviour for the market , like that kind of gave this completely different buying behaviour , where what we were selling selling which was online video courses , group tasting sessions and wine sent to you in the post was like the perfect lockdown thing , because everyone was at home , everyone was like wanting to learn more , everyone was drinking a lot more than they were historically , and so it looks like we were doing brilliantly .

When the Bubble Burst

Speaker 2 4:12

We went out and raised a load more money , went and hired you know , three more people on the team , rented a warehouse , increased all of our cost base , like absolutely massively . Uh , and then pandemic started to to filter out and every month restrictions came down , like our core retention was just just going down and down and down at the same time , and we spent 2021 essentially trying to find , realizing we didn't have what in startup world is called product market fit . Um , which is the kind of notion that you've got your . You've got a product which is solving a very large problem for a market which can sustain that business in it . Um , and you know they say that when you have it it feels like gravity . It's kind of , you know , you can't help but feel you've got it , and it felt like we had it in covid .

Speaker 2 5:04

And then , as the world returned to normal , it became immediately clear we didn't have it . And so that year we tried loads of different things . We changed the product round . We launched a kind of a single serve type portion , rather like a bottle which went through your letterbox , so like packed coffee . But for wine , right , um , we launched like an event series , seeing if we can make events work as a thing . We went to a more strict , like econ model of just selling wine , see whether that could sustain itself . And then we tried just selling the courses , for digital courses as well , and basically all of these things just didn't didn't end up working . And you know we we were running out of money and tried going to raise some more money , but when your numbers have been flat for five months after hockey stick the year before , it's not a great investor story . Um , so yeah , with the business shut down september 21 , we were in the middle of a fundraise

Lessons on Knowing When to Quit

Speaker 2 6:00

and just didn't get enough money together to make the business work .

Speaker 1 6:02

So I mean there's a lot to unpack there . That that feels like fair play to you for sharing that . I really . I mean that is a really honest assessment . And then that sounds tough , because running a company is tough . I feel your pain there . So at what point did you think , fuck , this is it . We're going to have to shut the doors ?

Speaker 2 6:21

Properly far too late , to be honest , than I should have done . The real turning point for me was about two weeks before we actually kind of shut the doors , and that was we'd had some money kind of committed , or I'd been in my head was committed . What I understood to be committed , yeah , um , which would have been about 200 000 or so towards the round we're trying to raise half a million . And when it got to kind of mid-september and I looked into that portion of money , there was a lot of kind of umming and ahhing about when it would be ready and if it would be ready and stuff like that . And that was the moment I thought , okay , I think I think this might be , this might be it .

Speaker 2 7:02

Um , and I was at a friend's wedding when I had that call . There's like the morning of a friend's wedding , um , so I drank a lot of wine at that wedding and , um , get your money's worth . And , uh , wedding , get your money's worth . Yeah , got my money's worth . And then the following week , yeah , just sat down with all the investors who we had initially and these new investors and said , look , where are we ? And that following week it was , you know , they didn't have the money , and so that was by that point we were in a lot of debt because we were kind of going on the assumption that at the end of September we were going to have this money in the bank .

Speaker 1 7:37

And there just wasn't the reserves there .

Speaker 2 7:39

Yeah , they went so that's when it actually happened . But just to add in what I think I probably should have done , would you know ? I think in hindsight I probably could have . I think we were probably signs earlier on . It's a really , really hard thing to know , to choose when to stop , and to a certain extent I I took the decision out my hands and just let the money run out . And I think , actually , you know , I think , if you're being , if I see that again , there would have been signs going right . Actually , you know , we've tried these five things . None of them worked . This business either needs to be restructured quite a lot , and I probably would have known that three or four months earlier . Um , but , but you're at the time . I kind of .

Speaker 1 8:17

You're an entrepreneur , you're fighting to keep the company going right . That's that's what we do as business owners . We keep , we keep going . We've got to fight the merry fat . I get it .