The Stubborn Entrepreneur

The following is a talk I was due to give to students on an Entrepreneurship Pathway at Warwick Business School. Due to family sickness, it didn't happen. If you're one of those students reading this, feel free to send me a direct message and Ask Me Anything like we'd planned to do at the end of my talk.

All the best, Simon.

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A journey of learning

Hi, I’m Simon Tomes. Thanks for the privilege of sharing with you today. I’m very grateful to be here and thank you Jenny for the opportunity. From the chats I’ve had with Jenny, it sounds like you’re on an excellent pathway. And something I wish was available when I did my business degree about 20 years ago!?

Talking of privilege, I have plenty. I’m a straight white cisgender male in my 40s from a stable home with a decent education. I say this as my story is simple to share because I’ve had many advantages throughout my life.

The most I want you to get out of this is the opportunity to ask questions. I tell my story so you have a rough idea of who I am and what my journey has been like. It’s hard to summarise it all and I’ve decided to not use Slides today. So please do what you can to listen and make a note of anything that’s on your mind and ask any question you like after my talk.

So let’s get stuck in.

Someone once said entrepreneurship is like building a plane after you’ve jumped off a cliff. And that sounds incredibly scary! Yet I don’t think that’s all entirely true.?

I think it’s up to you how far you jump and what you need to build before you might hit the ground if indeed hitting the ground is a bad thing.

For my entrepreneurial journey, I jumped in small enough stages and the ground was soft so it didn’t matter too much if I fell. And I fell lots of times. I eventually gave it all up and got back to working for a company on their payroll. I’m now a Community Advocate for a community-focused business called Ministry of Testing. And I’ve never been happier at work. I love my job.??

Throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I could be pretty stubborn. My business partner and I would stick to our guns, ignore advice and do our own thing. That came with many pros and cons.?

With it came freedom and failure. With it came determination and missed opportunity. With it came exploration and lack of focus. And looking back at it all I wouldn’t change a thing. It was quite something. To create many things from absolute nothingness that people would pay for and get value from … was utterly mind-blowing.?

This is a cautionary tale for those who choose to bootstrap and not go down the Venture Capital, Accelerator or Angel Investor route. At no point did we take any outside funding.?

It’s a story of exploration, to discover what was possible when you experiment. And what happens when you’re a stubborn entrepreneur throughout the process. Thanks for letting me share this with you today.

Shutting it all down

By November 2021, my 3rd company and product had a monthly recurring revenue of about ￡200 and a monthly recurring cost of about ￡750. Total revenue, minus fees, since we started charging for the product in June 2020, was ￡2,358.93.

So why did we make relatively little just over a year of charging for a SaaS product?

I was stubborn.?

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product was called TestBuddy and served people like me, and that’s someone who had been a software tester for the majority of his career. A person who liked to take notes using a technique called Exploratory Testing. It helped to build something I knew a lot about and was passionate to live and breathe day in and day out. I don’t think I would’ve had the motivation had it not been for my passion for the particular area. The product was super niche.

And every book and video I watched about entrepreneurship continued to tell me that you gotta find your niche. I agree to some extent. Yet you’ve got to be willing to explore your audience which might mean ignoring a niche for quite some time.

Whom are you serving? What problem are you solving? And for a SaaS product, how will your service remove some of those problems and pain points on a day-to-day basis? And who's going to pay for it?

When it came to paying for the service, it often came down to someone other than the user to pay for it. We tended to focus on the end-user with our marketing efforts to connect with potential customers. We never once directly targeted the majority of those with the purse strings. Maybe we should’ve done more of that.

How come we went micro-niche? We were determined to revolutionise the software testing industry and bring teams together over a shared understanding of what they'd just tested. Yet the market wasn't going in that direction, there was a counterwave moving away from the problems our product solved. The market didn't appear ready for the product. Or perhaps the state the product it was in when it closed down was too niche for us to ever make it profitable and sustainable on our terms. Maybe with time, the features would've expanded to appeal to a wider market. Or it would've pivoted substantially to something a good enough sized market desired.

Yet our stubbornness paid off for our paying customers because they loved it. Time and time again they raved about how it revolutionised their day-to-day efforts. It was always lovely to hear that. It helped during those moments of despair when I’d wonder what the heck I’m doing with my life with all the money I wasn't using in my life outside my business. Positive feedback was like an out of body experience. "Did we do that, we went from absolutely nothing to something?" I’d often say this to my business partner.

Bootstrapped and cash strapped?

I went into business with my second (and last) business partner in 2014 and we’d already had many chats about building a company that would embrace experimentation. A company that would see what’s possible to build anything from scratch without investment and one that would eventually grow into a profitable business where we would hire permanent employees. Then invest in their ideas and help them grow on their entrepreneurial journies. Sadly that never happened.

Before becoming entrepreneurs, we’d both worked for corporates. We’d been answering to a lot of people during our careers and we were done with it. The office and business politics were no longer anything we were interested in. Our goal was to answer to ourselves — and later our customers?and colleagues.

How did we finance our business?

We would do consulting work. We'd typically each take a 6-month contract and then take 6 months to burn through earned money to focus on moving a product or business idea forward. It was liberating and frustrating at the same time. And during contract stints, it was tricky not to feel compelled to work on your product in the evening. Particularly later on at the point when we had paying customers.

I had a young daughter at that time and a very supportive wife. Financially we made it work. And it taught me a lot about the value of things. I was moderately materialistic beforehand on my “safe” corporate salaries, with pensions and bonuses. I didn’t know how good I had it.

When I gave it all up it changed my relationship with money. And absolutely for the good. Yet I was able to use a lot of that corporate experience to help me on my entrepreneurial journey. So I’m entirely grateful for my Pre-entrepreneur life. I think it was important I got at least 10 years of experience working in bigger companies. I didn’t have a chance to work for a startup yet now work for a company with eight employees. There's no doubt I tacitly lean on what I learned during my time as an entrepreneur on a day-to-day basis.

You might be wondering why we didn’t bother going down the Venture Capital or Angel Investor route.

Well, for those folks it was always about the exit. We didn’t want to “exit” in the traditional sense. We wanted full control of a business, without answering to anyone.

I was stubborn about exploring what was possible there. My values and ethics took priority. I couldn’t and didn’t want to dig deeper. I wouldn’t trust where that money had come from no matter what story I’d be spun.?I didn't want to lose control.

I had to go bootstrapped. I wanted to prove you could bootstrap a SaaS. I was wrong. Well, at least wrong with the two SaaS products we developed. At one point I did have someone offer a good amount of money to help. Don’t know why I didn’t take it. Again, I was probably stubborn.

In hindsight I probably should’ve paused any work on the last product we worked on and just spent 6 months exploring the VC world, to question my biases and see what leads I could find for investment that matched my ethics. During the final year of TestBuddy, we did aim to get to a point of revenue to put us in a good position to explore the outside investment route. We never made it. ?

At this point, I should mention, that being a co-founder helped. We’d question each other all the time. Sometimes emotions got in the way yet they taught both of us to be better people. I had to improve my empathy, communication skills, self-awareness, and writing style.?I'll be forever grateful to my business partner for helping me improve in all those areas.

Experiment for merriment

Believing in capability beyond the norm was something that guided us. So we ran product development related workshops. That’s where we made our most money. In hindsight, we probably should’ve invested more time in the workshop business instead of the SaaS business. They were super rewarding to co-create and deliver with our clients. We just couldn’t market ourselves properly and struggled to find new business outside of our network.

I reflect now that we could’ve partnered with professional training companies that would do most of the marketing for us. Oh well. Partnerships were something we just didn’t explore and should’ve done. There were also plenty of other traction opportunities we learned about later whilst building the SaaS product which we could've applied had we switched focus back to training and workshops.

We took a lean approach to developing our second SaaS product, TestBuddy. Prior to that we just built the previous product without much real market research or testing of market demand. We assumed it was good and useful. That product was called Qeek.

So for TestBuddy, we decided to be a bit more scientific. We created a landing page for the product even though the product didn’t exist. We hypothesised that enough people would be interested to sign up for the product. We’d message those who signed up and say sorry that it’s not quite ready and ask why they signed up. It was a good use of bought ads on Google. Our conversion was 10%, way more than the average of about 1-2% for that particular type of product.?

We prototyped wireframes and user flows and put them in front of the community of people I already happen to know. It was amazing. We had a load of people rally around us willing us to make the product a success.?

As we were both excited to build and test software we chose to build it ourselves. Too scared to let go of that cos we were comfortable in the domain of building. I perhaps should’ve pushed harder for us to outsource how it was built so we could focus more on ways to get traction, find our market and potential customers and get better at sales. There was always this friction between a desire to build and a desire to market. Like when is the right time to start marketing if the thing is missing key features? Does that hinder growth? If we could just build the next feature it could make all the difference! And given I’m a software tester it was hard not to always endeavour to deliver high-quality software for every feature release – which likely slowed how quickly we could learn about our market.

In hindsight, I think we could’ve started charging earlier for the product, without the need for self-service payment flows. We could’ve set up a concierge payment system where we’d manually send out invoices from our accounting platform instead of hooking up Stripe. And put more effort into marketing to help us find a market fit sooner or indeed pivot sooner before we ran out of money and energy. Still, that’s all easy to say in hindsight, who knows what the right approach would’ve been.

Communities are cool

It helped me to grow as an entrepreneur with a community of practice related to the product we were building and also with a community of entrepreneurs. My time embedding myself with communities taught me to lift people, connect people, spot opportunities for people to work together, and use an experimental and co-creation approach. And such connections led to ideas and feedback.

Embed yourself in a community related to the thing you’d like to build. Like I did with communities such as Croydon Tech City and Ministry of Testing. Build a community-focused business. You’ll have evangelists on tap who help shape your product/service.

Yet beware of cheerleaders telling you your product is good. They essentially become your mates so they’re always going to root for you. Yet they are likely not part of your market or indeed will ever become paying customers. The market might not be big enough when there are just cheerleaders cheering you on.

Also, get comfortable asking for help. I was pretty stubborn about that. I’d always worry I would annoy too many people by doing so. Yet in hindsight, I’d ask more cos I’d always help someone if they asked me, so why wouldn’t I expect the same from others. I tended to give a lot more than I took. Plus I should’ve got involved with more online indie like communities, like Indiehackers.

Without the beginning, there’d never be the end

One final little story stems back to 2014, this was the point I’d quit the corporate world and created my first business with my first business partner. We’d worked with big companies like eBay, Gumtree and Rightmove.

We had a list of 40 or so business ideas we could explore. Stubborn bias kicked in and we picked one because the technology seemed interesting. The product idea was called Travatar, we gate-crashed a very corporate business travel industry and blagged our way into setting up meetings with airlines. So naive. Yet fun all the same. Burnt through my savings, Ouch!?

If it wasn’t for this particular failure and the space I gave my brain, in post-corporate life, then I wouldn’t have got to business number 2. Which expanded to workshops, Qeek and TestBuddy which I’ve already mentioned.

I think a lot of societal systems have pre-conditioned us to view failure as a bad thing. So it’s important to celebrate failure as success, no matter how big or small. We used to celebrate our successes yet probably not enough as there’s always the next feature to work on or the next customer to go find. Be kind to yourself on your entrepreneurial journey.?

Take a ride and experience the possible

Success for me was not to become mega-rich or sell a business. Success for me was freedom. Freedom to create. Freedom to explore what happens when you get a couple of motivated people together to build. Freedom to live my life how I wanted.

Yet the reality of not being profitable or sustainable meant I couldn’t continue to live this dream. It became mentally exhausting to keep it up and running. Particularly towards the end, we’d both had to take full-time jobs to cover our living costs and the business costs.

And to not give the product the attention it deserved was hard. To not give our customers the best service and product they deserved was frustrating. And we probably missed an opportunity to pivot to something else which would tap into a slightly more common and therefore wider niche market. Ironically, I think the product called Qeek would’ve done well if we’d not gotten caught up in attempting to push the industry forward too much with TestBuddy. Or maybe that workshop business would've thrived had it all pivoted online during the global pandemic. Who knows! ?

I’ve never worked out how much time and money I’ve put into my businesses and quite frankly I never want to run that exercise.?

Entrepreneurship isn’t like the movies, Dragon’s Den, The Apprentice or those “grow a business in 30 days” videos on YouTube. Those stories are such a teeny tiny part of what happens. And they are very much glamorised for views. Of course, feel free to seek inspiration from them – soak up everything and reflect on what that might mean for your journey. There’s a lot of entrepreneurship that isn’t sexy. It’s hard graft and everything typically takes ten times longer than you expect.

Yet entrepreneurship is an incredible journey. You’ll push yourself into places you never thought possible. You’ll speak and collaborate with people beyond your current world. You’ll make a difference in someone’s life, and quite possibly way more than just one person. Embrace that opportunity if you so wish to do so. See what’s possible. Take a bite from the cakes of stubborn entrepreneurship. Experiment with the ingredients, bake it however and see what it all tastes like. You can always prepare another one until you no longer want to bake.

Thanks so much for listening, and for your time. I very much look forward to your questions. What would you like to ask?