Moonpig: A Greeting Card Company That Sold for £120 million
Steven Bartlett (from the Diary of a CEO podcast) had a fascinating interview with Nick Jenkins, the founder of the online greeting card company Moonpig.
Nick is from the UK and is completely different from the hustle club founder that has become popularized. He started Moonpig in 2000, grew it to £11 million in profit per year before selling it for £120 million in 2011.
Craziest part. He had a balanced life. Didn’t work 24/7 and still crushed it.
He had a great social life and didn’t think you needed to sacrifice yourself on the altar of business. His view was that people should work a proper days work and then recharge on evenings/weekends. He thought that creative businesses were too tough to do right if you were exhausted.
I highly recommend ignoring this post and just watching the interview, but here are my highlights:
Nick didn’t worry about failing
He had a great idea! Most people think ideas are worthless, but they’re multipliers and here you had a capital efficient business that was leveraging the tech of the day to create a custom product.
He thought it made sense to start a business, as if it worked he’d make more per hour than he could working for someone else
He said he’d hire people that were better than him and if they were better, then why would he do that job, so humility was key
“Keep everything as simple as you can possibly make it until you have to make it more complicated”
They never had a lot of money to experiment with
He noticed early on that for every three customers they had one of them would also send a card, so he knew if they stayed in business long enough it would work
Only textbook he ever went back to was a stats book so he could figure out what was statistically significant for advertising within a channel… Why spend $25k when you could spend $2.5K?
Only way you can protect your idea is to be the best and biggest, he had 20 competitors
Steven Bartlett had a great quote “you’re going to war on a thousand details”
You don’t have to be unique, you do have to be better
Inventing things is the hardest way to make money
He had just one difficult period, from 2000 to 2005…
Getting customers is the hardest part of business
“It’s like a luge run that you’re polishing” they spent a lot of time making the customer experience as smooth as possible
The business was actually well designed, they got paid up front, had little inventory and could create a personalized product due to new tech
Doing 10% of 10 things is 2x the amount of work as doing one thing 100%
He always got to 5pm wishing it was 2pm and loved Mondays
When Nick sold the company it was making £11-12 million profit (not EBITDA!) and he sold it for £120 million. Eight years later it was making £18 million in profit and today is worth approximately £1.6 billion.
But he said he wasn’t sure it would have done as well if he ran it as the people who took over are amazing. He’s amazingly balanced and humble.
Business Ideas of the Week
The New York Times Daily podcast had an alarming episode this week about how passenger planes nearly colliding is far more common than we think. Turns out there’s a demographic issue with air traffic controllers and a lot of them are retiring. This seems like a natural market for an AI assistant.
AI Influencers and ad agencies using them are going to be a thing
A newsletter covering expired/expiring patents could work
Business Success Stories of the Week
Hexclad, which makes hybrid cooking ware, is on track to sell $350 million this year (pro tip: Jason Panzer, Hexclad’s President, is on the operators podcast)
Interesting YouTube channel making an estimated $30k/month after two months with daily prayers
Dentist creates a new mouthwash… with the help of AI
Creatine gummy brand reaches $545k/month in sales
Interesting Stat: Podcast revenue in the U.S. expected to hit $2.3 billion this year, up 25% from 2022. Still a tiny piece of the $200 billion digital-ad market. (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 6, 2023: Interactive Advertising Bureau)