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 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. 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. 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 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.