@DazRave asked:
Perhaps one question would be to ask him how well the doggy vending machine and printed petal ideas did in the end?
@MarkPearson: “I started off the business 7 years ago, started it in my bedroom. I had £300 to outsource the idea. [pauses] Wow, doggie vending machine!? Wow!I forgot all about that! I might do that one actually!
I believe that I once asked the question on the forums "Has anyone got a business idea that I could do?". I feel a little bit naive about that looking back so it's interesting. No-ones gonna go, oh yeah here you go Mark, [a business idea] on a plate, you can build it you can launch it. But, I was young, I was looking for opportunity
The printed petal business, I actually did launch and it was my first online business. The history goes something along the lines of, I moved down to London when I was 18 got a job in Claridge's as a chef.
I worked there a little while, then left and worked at a little start up in south London I got offered an opportunity from someone else who had their own pubs and I ended up running my own restaurants at the age of 21-22 and I ended up with 3 little restaurants in South London in Clapham. So I was making money as a businessman but I struggled to scale those businesses when it was a part time job for the waiters and waitresses and chefs. It was very hard to run these 3 different venues and I came to a crunch point where I was struggling to scale it, the chef wouldn’t turn up, the waitress wouldn’t turn up and the business would have to close, the venue would close and it was very frustrating.
I think one of the things that I ended up doing was actually thinking how do I scale? I've got the energy, I've got the passion, I've got the drive. I want to be successful and I want to scale and for me the answer was 'The Internet'.
So the first idea that I picked from all those ideas, maybe, thank God I picked that one and not others! I picked the roses and actually, the business was called ‘Roses by Design’.
It was a small retail business we outsourced it using platforms such as freelancer. I remember an Australian lady built it for me for around $600 she built the retail website from end to end, took the product pictures, everything.
The bravest decision I made was I think that the product was $3000 when I bought it from China so there was no such thing as Ali Baba, well, there probably was but it was no where as big as it is today. So I essentially outreached to some website supplier that I found online I think I emailed them, I didn't even speak to them.
They sent me their details, I wired some money over to them. I was waiting patiently for them for my package to arrive, which was my petal laser printer. [Eventually] it did arrive, I had the website, I had the product and I was in business.
I did grow that business and literally I was a one man machine of; producing the product, marketing the product, running the site, being the customer service, running the product down daily to the post office!
It wasn't that big a business, just a small business but what it was valuable for in a stepping journey was for me understanding different areas of marketing so I knew the product and the online marketing taught me a real hands on approach.
I was doing SEO, I was doing paid search, I was dabbling in social media, I built an email list email user base, I started dabbling in affiliate marketing. So I then launched an affiliate programme for retailers; I was dabbling in coupon codes, voucher codes - which funnily enough was what got us to where we are today! So there's a story that happened essentially.
That business was doing well, I discovered a whole new area of business, which was affiliate marketing. From that business I realised that a good place to be, a good place to scale that business was to be a publisher. Where at first I was being the retailer of the product, and remember it was a fresh product - flowers? how long do they last?"! (shelf life, wastage etc) I realised that I was in a very seasonal business which was really challenging.
Valentine's day, massive orders. Mothers day, massive orders. The rest of the year, not so busy. It was hard to grow and shrink like that, so what i ended up doing simply, was dabbling, literally dabbling in the publishing side. I spotted an opportunity in America, Coupons were massive in America. There were websites dedicated to coupons. I looked round and literally no one was doing it in the UK.
I launched a pretty basic proposition called ‘My Voucher Codes’ in 2006 it caught on quite quickly, I launched it in November, Christmas it got viral. I initially promoted it to my flower customers saying, "here you go, all these discounts for you to save money online" they did really well, and could scale really well, and quickly. It was making more money and actually a bigger margin that my flowers business - so the flower business very quietly disappeared as I put more and more energy into the voucher business.”
