Sramana Mitra: When you finished university, what point were you at? Ben Spring: I can’t remember now. It must have been 10,000 users. Sramana Mitra: All free still? Ben Spring: We introduced a pay-as-you-go model. You can pay per course. After talking to users, we found that it wasn’t the best model for us, so
Ben and his co-founder are two techies who started by bootstrapping with a paycheck. With zero marketing budget, they have scaled TryHackMe to a million users and significant revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in the second round? Jonny Grubin: Probably about £300,000. In total, we raised about £900,000. Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I love capital-efficient businesses.
Sramana Mitra: 2014 and 2015, more of the same? Jonny Grubin: Our focus and what I had built this business around was gifting samples to a friend. We were doing well with that. There was nobody else in the space. Brands loved it. We were on a pretty exciting trajectory. We had a lot of
Sramana Mitra: How much did Avon pay you? Jonny Grubin: They paid me £1,000 which seemed like a huge amount of money at that time. It was about validating it all. We were still very much bootstrapped. I didn’t want to be greedy. I need to charge them something. A thousand pounds seemed like a
Sramana Mitra: How much money did your friend put in? Jonny Grubin: He put in £45,000, which for me felt like a huge amount of money. Sramana Mitra: What exactly where you able to prove in that MVP? I’m so used to constantly working with people’s pitches. As you were speaking, one thing that struck
Jonny Grubin: I wrote to a couple of friends and we launched an MVP. People couldn’t do anything with SoPost, but it allowed me to test the concept. In December 2012, we launched a website where you could sign up with your email address. You could add some delivery addresses and create a schedule, but
Sramana Mitra: Did this come to a complete standstill or was there still a business? Kish Vasnani: In 2020, we did just under a million. Of that, about 70% came from the first three months of the year. The rest of the year was really tough. Sramana Mitra: Are you still in Bali? Kish Vasnani: