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Nick Jenkins

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2021-09-13
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2021-09-13
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  1. “And there are people who are good at that. So interesting, when I'm looking at hiring people, I will often, although academic results aren't everything, that you always need someone who has got straight A's at A-level because they're very good at understanding the question and delivering it, delivering the answer. So they understand what's expected of them and they delivered it in a very predictable way. Whereas CEOs can often be quite maverick and you ask them one question and they will answer something else completely different but much more interesting. And that's fine. You can afford to have one or two of those mavericks, but somebody in the company has to be a good, complete a finisher. They understand the question and they deliver it.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I think I'm good at short-term detail. I can sprint on real fine detail. So I can sit on a spreadsheet for six hours overnight and come up with a beautiful bit of financial modeling. But I've got a million and one things going on. And so I don't know that I'm necessarily a complete finisher.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I've always tried to. My general approach to this is try to focus on the things that only you can do. And when you really narrow it down and you become a bigger company, you realize that actually that really does narrow it down a lot because I was trying to hire people, replace the things that I was doing with people who could do it better than I could do it. And then once they're doing it better than I could do it, you think, gosh, well, I'm not going to interfere with that anymore. So lead them to it. And then eventually then comes down to... To a role, my role eventually became that of executive chairman. So I brought in a CEO and I became executive chairman. And I suppose then my role was that strategic role of making sure that we're pointing in the right direction and also that we take those big decisions.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “But fundamentally, it was a better product. And on day one, right from the very beginning, the business plan I came up with when I was doing my MBA was I want to make it possible for a customer to buy a single personalized birthday card, which technology has suddenly made possible, whereas previously that would have been 200 quids worth of graphic design time, a bit of lithop. I mean, just... Not possible. But core to that is that the person who's receiving it has got to think that's a really cool card.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “So, all we've got is a pile of cardboard in the corner of the room and a pile of envelopes. That's the only stock, which I think represented about a quarter of a percent of turnover. So compared to the digital camera business, where you might have a whole load of digital cameras on the water coming in from wherever you buy them from, load in the warehouse and so on. It was a very efficient business model. I got to confess, I probably slightly stumbled on it rather than it being, I look at it now and think, wow, that accidentally was a really good business model. You get paid up front, you pay supplies of 60 days, there's no stock. I mean, it was great.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “And equally, journalist friends of mine would, whenever anyone left the office, they'd be given a spoof magazine front cover, which would take a day and a half of graphic design time to put together. And I figured, well, we've got, digital printing was beginning to develop at the time, and you got the internet, and it made it possible to combine those two to make it possible for someone to order a single personalized greeting card, which has hands down got to be better than the unpersonalized thing. And then I could charge more for the product online than for the product in the shop. But more to the point, there's no stock.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Then I looked at physical goods, and if you take, say, a digital camera, one of those things I looked at, if I took my sort of Satsuma Fujitsu 32DB, I figured that somebody at some point would write an algorithm that would merely compare the price of my Fujitsu three two D with someone else's, and they'd buy the cheapest one, and that ultimately would end up squeezing all the margin out of that game. So you'd end up with a lot of physical stock sitting in warehouses and minimal margins. So I looked at what are the things that are the things that I can sell on the internet where I can actually improve the product, make it better. And personalization is one of those things. It's very difficult to do personalization in store because it takes up floor space and equipment and so on. And I thought of a number of different things, including personalized CDs. Well, I'm really glad I didn't do that one. And cards occurred to me because I used to type my cards and tippex out the caption and write something a bit funnier and more relevant on the front.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “It was very simple, actually. I thought through the different ideas and I realized, right, this internet thing is going to happen. So I don't know much about it, but no one else knows anything about it either. But I did at least understand how to build a team. So I'd spent 10 years in Russia building a team of people and building a successful business. And I went through this thing of what things, how can I use the internet to make a business. And digital products were all being given away for free. So everyone had this idea that if you could download it, it ought to be free. Well, that's a hard one to make money in. The advertising business back in those days was incredibly tough because there wasn't much of a market, not much spend was going online. And you were spending more money to get people to come to your site to look at the adverts and people are going to pay you for the adverts. That was tough too.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Well, I think I probably did have a good understanding of what people wanted in a card. And if you get down to the simplest version of that is that a card is about showing someone that you've relevant, you've thought about them, so you've chosen something which is relevant to them that they're interested in or that's something you both find funny. And you can weave their name into that as well to show that you've made an effort. And then the double whammy, I would always...”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “We were spending all of our money on customer retention and just polishing that luge run of the customer coming in through the front door and getting into the shopping masket.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Yeah, the main focus was do people like what we're selling? And we knew that. We knew it was a very, very popular product. We could see that in the viral effect with people not only do people who bought it liked it, but the people who received it liked it. So the main focus was always on create a really, really good product. And then, of course, on top of that, you then got to make sure that you've got your production right so that your gross margins are right and tweaking all of those little knobs within that engine. And the key thing also is understanding every metric. And we looked at it like it's like a luge run that you're polishing every day looking at, is there anywhere where anyone's getting stuck along this journey? And are they not understanding what we're, you know, the button that they're supposed to press next? Are they getting confused? In which case, polish that one out. So there was a constant process. That time when we weren't spending any money on customer acquisition.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Just goes to zero And that's one of the things I'm always really aware of now when I'm investing is I say, well, what's going to happen when you turn that tap off? Because when we did turn that tap off, it just kept on growing. And that's what I see is the real quality of a business is when you're adding layer upon layer of customers. Now, not all businesses are as good at repeat business as Moonpig was, but that was the thing that I recognized that kept me going through all of that and stopped me from throwing the towel in.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “No, no, no, because I could see where the numbers were going. And I did have a firm belief that the repeat rate was there. The viral effect was there, and I could see how we went through a year. We spent no money on marketing whatsoever, no money on customer acquisition. And our sales grew by 30%. So that's now I appreciate having invested in lots of other e commerce businesses. I appreciate how unusual that is. It was my first business, so I didn't know quite how unusual it was. But I knew that actually, look, it's not as if there's so many businesses I see now that at the moment you turn the marketing tap off.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I was pretty much already at zero Anyway, so and that's when it finally it started to turn. And I could see the stats. I could see where it was going. It's just that, you know, after four years of I've three or four different business plans. I know the last business plan wasn't as accurate, but this one, this one's better. Oh, and I know the previous two weren't that accurate, but this one, this one, this one works. It's tough.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Well, I mean, I put in, I'd gone off and worked in Russia for a while, and I'd probably made about a million. And by the time... By the time, and I put about 150,000 pounds into Mubik at the beginning to get the idea off the ground. By the time I'd got to the end of it, I was pretty much down to zero. I think I'd taken all the equity out of the flat, which previously had no mortgage. I'd taken all my savings and all that. So I'd pretty much got down to zero”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And if only we could survive that long that we'd make it through. But I was the only person who believed that. All of my shareholders, I mean, one point, my shareholders all said, look, Nick, you know, it's not going to work. This is never going to work. It's never going to make money. And we're not going to put any more money in. And we really recommend that you don't put any more money in too, because when this all goes wrong, you're going to have to have some money to pay the rent. And it was that bad.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Because everything that we threw money at was too expensive. And the only thing that was really working in all of this was the viral effect that we knew that we got very, very good at measuring everything. And we could see that if we brought 100 customers in, and those 100 customers, we knew exactly how many of them would buy cards. We knew how many of them wouldn't come back again. But of the ones that bought cards, we knew that they would attract about for every customer that we had, they'd attract a third of a customer just because I send you a birthday card, you think it's funny, you look on the back of it, moonpig.com. And so that viral effect was the thing that kept us going for five years. And it was only really because I understood the statistics behind that and I could understand the model and think, right, although everything else appears to be failing, although this online campaign doesn't appear to be too expensive, that appears to be too expensive, and we can't, I couldn't tell you if someone would give me 10 million pounds, I couldn't have told you what we could have thrown it at to make it work. I could see that just the customers alone were driving the sales growth.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Well, as you know better than anybody, starting a business is one thing and coming up with a product that people might want is one thing. Getting customers is probably the single most difficult thing about setting up any online business. And I think most people underestimate that. We tried all sorts of permutations. And bear in mind, this was 2000, so this was well before social media. So a lot of stuff was very manual. You know, you will laugh at this, but when I was doing affiliate deals, I would phone up a company and say, we'll put an advert on your thing. And if you send any traffic to us, we'll give you a bit of commission on this, and I'll send you a spreadsheet every week to tell you how much I owe you. Literally, it was that manual. And I would write up a contract for each separate contract for each individual company. I had a big filing cabinet of them. I mean, that sounds like very dinosaurish, but that's how it was. And now it's much, much easier. But we were struggling to find ways that we could throw money at driving traffic.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “That hard skin of this is actually incredibly hard. This is why this won't work. And I see that a lot now in me now that I look at as an investor. I look at a lot of things. I'm less wide-eyed than I was when I started Moonpig. And I can see the reasons why something won't work. And you can become too cynical about it. Whereas when I started Moonbig, if I'd known all of the problems that I was going to come up against, I may not have started. And believe me, there were plenty of times in the middle of that when I would have happily given it up. I mean, people often say, was there a difficult period? And there was just one, but it lasted from 2000 to two thousand five. That was difficult. It was tough. And I was wondering how to pay the salaries, and I talked to me about the details.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Well, funny, if there's something I've always believed, that an element Actually, when I finish my MV, I did have the opportunity to go and join a VC firm. I thought, if I go and work for a VC firm for three or four years, I'll get more experience before I start my own business. Anyway, I went for a job interview. Shock horror. They turned me down. So I had to go and start my own business. And I realize now that if I had gone through several years of investing in other people's businesses, I probably would have developed that kind of”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yeah, yeah. Because so often I will come up with a business idea and look at it. And it's only after I've gone through this sort of fourth iteration of the business plan that I think, And that is why no one has done this before”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Actually, when you read a report about the fact that the people who have, most people who've made money have made money doing something they were previously employed to do. Because they've spent 20 years learning how to do something, they know all the contacts and then they start up their own business. It's logical. When I'm looking at investing in people, I think, well, you know this industry really, really well. You're very convincing. And you know all the pitfalls in advance. So of course you're more likely to succeed.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “An idea that's already there. So, your chance of success, your chance of succeeding, your chance of surviving is considerably greater because you've answered most of the questions already before you've even invested any money. The chance of that becoming, the chance of that multiplying by a factor of a thousand and suddenly thinking, the guy in Shortage who's just invented a stuff called bread. It's amazing. Never had it before. So you don't get that. And I think that it's an important thing for entrepreneurs to think about is that you don't have to be unique. I think that's, you know, people always say, oh, what's unique about? You've just got to be, I agree with you. You've got to be better in some respect. And people tie themselves in knots trying to think, trying to invent things. So I think it's a really hard, it's the hardest possible way of making money.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Just say there's a thousand. I agree. But then if you look at the example of bread. People have been eating bread for thousands of years. You know people like bread. We know what people are prepared to pay for bread. That's half of your market research done already. You don't have to say, we've got this thing called bread. Do you like it? You can cut it in slices and just ham in the middle and call it a sandwich. All that's been done for you. So then you've then got to work out, right? Well, I know that there's a market for this. So how do I just make it a little bit better? Do I make seeds to it? Do I put cumin in it? Or do I have a shop that is in a location that isn't well served? So you only have to tweak.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Is that it was all about the content, it was about the quality of the cars, the quality of the design of the cars. Because actually the customer doesn't really care how the car was produced. They don't care about the technology at all. What they want is the end product. And we have the best end product.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Yeah, funny enough that there was. There was a very I came up with a business plan and I developed it and then I looked. The first thing I would do is I look around not just at what direct competitors I've got but how people trying to solve that problem in other ways. Because if you're trying to solve a problem, clearly that problem exists already and people are trying to solve it in one way or another. And I did come across a company that was doing personalized greeting cards and I broached them and said I've got a choice. I can either I've come up with this plan. I can either do it myself or I can invest in your business. And anyway the terms he offered were ridiculous and also the other problem was I could see that is we were going to fall out over the content of the cards because I just didn't think he had a very good eye for cards. That business I don't think ever turned over more than $300,000 a year and then it died about two years later and Moon Pig went so I went off and did my own thing and what it taught me actually looking back at it is that”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Yeah. Yeah What I would say to them, look, the day you go live with that, the moment you start advertising that idea, You're lifting your skirts for the whole world. So you're going to have to go live with us at some point. Otherwise, you're not going to sell anything. And if you don't sell anything, you're not going to raise any money from anybody. So at some point, you have to tell people what you're doing with MoonPig. There was no way that I could protect that idea. The only way you can protect it is be the best and be the biggest. Yeah. I mean, and then we had probably 20 competitors that followed after Moonpig, you know, during our time there, and they'd pop up and they'd flare up and then they'd die off again. And even now, Moonpig is 65% of the market.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “We're on the same page. Prove what you can prove on the least amount of money first. And evidence is evidence is always so important. And people miss that.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “You spend money to find out the answers to things. And when you've got those answers and you're then putting that in your business plan to raise money, I'm always more impressed when people say, right, I want to raise money for marketing. This is what we've done so far. This is what it cost us so far. So if we scale this up, that's what we can do, as opposed to just saying, please give us lots of money to spend on marketing. We don't know what we're going to do yet.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “You get people And then, and I was looking at that and I don't think I've wasted two and a half grand. I've spent two and a half grand. Some of that will have been, let's say I was aiming for a £10 cost of customer acquisition and actually it was £20. Well, then £1,250 of that was spent on acquiring customers at the right price and £1,250 was spent on finding out that I should never do that again. And that's the way I would look at that. But if I'd spent £25,000 on it, then it would have been a waste. And also, if you can, the more...”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “I ever went back to from my MBA years was a statistics textbook because what I wanted to work out is the least money I could spend to get a statistics.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Great philosophies on business is just keep everything as simple as you can possibly make it until you have to make it more.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “That comes into this. It was wanting to take that shortcut and think, well, actually, if I start my own business and that goes and it goes well, then...”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “I suppose I probably looked at that and thought if that goes well, I would I'll probably make more money per hour than if I go and work. There's an element of wanting. I mean, maybe there's an element of”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Gone through business failures, the ones They've dealt with that. And some of them have thought, well, I can't change that.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Making a mistake Then you won't do it. Much time is like if you ski and you're frightened to falling over, you're never going to be a great skier.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “And other people who are not. And then you have some people who are. Courageous, who will They're just not frightened of saying,”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Business, I had nothing else to do, to be honest at the time. I came back from Russia and I had a spare year, and I thought I couldn't think of”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “That's quite important So, I think those sort of things are innate. You can teach someone like that to be a better entrepreneur.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “And take a decision. And so I think decisiveness is a very, an attitude to risk is the other thing. I think I always took the view that I started with nothing. I could end up with nothing.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Times I ever had in my business were when my Against the one thing Bizarrely, I found that quite invigorating. At one point, my shout all said, look, Nick, this is never going to work. It's never going to make money. Time I'd got to the end of it, I was pretty much down to zero.”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “First, proper business was MoonBig, which although it's been a Course, it went through various ups and downs, like all overnight successes. It took 11 years. I Stumbled on it. I look at it now and think”

    2021-09-13 · The Diary of a CEO · Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT