Keep the belief that you can change the world. It’s instrumental for the success of your tech startup, with Jon Smith
As a part of our quest to champion purpose-driven entrepreneurs across the world here is the story of Jon Smith, the sixth of our Humans of Happy Startups Series.
The Happy Startup School first met Jon at our Summercamp 2014. Jon pitched the concept of Pobble, his tech company, to campers who loved it, and ever since we’ve seen him and the business grow to incredible heights.
Jon Smith
Founder of Pobble
Based in London, UK
Welcome, Jon! Begin by telling us what your driving force was behind setting up Pobble, and a little bit about what Pobble does.
I founded Pobble 4 years ago with 3 teachers, one of which was my brother.
He asked for my help to build the first prototype of a website to share photos of handwritten work which could be used as lesson ideas and model texts for teachers. It would also be a place for children to get an audience for their writing (children love having their work ‘published’ online).
Initially, we worked in our spare time, but we ‘launched’ on day one, building a simple WordPress blog, then sharing this with teachers in the founders’ networks.
It took off immediately, as teachers loved seeing model texts from other classrooms and very quickly wanted to contribute to the community and share their own work.
I remember the moment when I realised the power of Pobble and became encapsulated by the project.
I was living in Abu Dhabi and happened to sing in a choral group with a number of teachers.
I told them about the concept for Pobble and one of them invited my brother and I into their school to run a writing workshop and show the class the website.
There was this moment, right after showing and discussing some pieces of writing from Pobble when Henry (my brother) asked how many people normally read the children’s writing.
Some answered 1, some 2, up to around 4.
Then Henry showed the Pobble world map to the class and said:
“Imagine if your work could be shared on Pobble and viewed by children from all over the world. Each of these little dots on the world map is a person looking at work at the moment.”
The looks on the children’s faces were absolutely priceless and there were little gasps from all around the room.
“All of you will have whatever you write today shared on Pobble…”
The teachers told me that many of the children had never written so much, or to such a high standard than that day.
That was when I realised how powerful Pobble could be — it was only a few months more before my fiancé (at the time) and I gave up our well paid comfortable jobs in the construction industry in the Middle East and returned to London to make it happen!
I’ve always been interested in education, but the thing that drives me is the impact we can have on people’s lives at such an early stage. Can you imagine the impact on someone’s life if you can change their trajectory at age 5–6 by increasing their interest and engagement in writing?
What a fascinating moment on the Pobble journey, and brave steps to give up your career to make it happen. So, how was it you first got the idea off the ground?
4 guys, a wordpress manual and the belief that we could change the world!
Looking back it was insane! I don’t think any of us would have had the balls to take this path had we known how hard the journey would be!
We worked in our spare time at first, building the first version of the platform (on wordpress), figuring out how things worked as we went along.
We got some part time help from some university student interns but we quickly knew that to take this forward we needed to dedicate more time to it. The problem was, we all had full time jobs and no spare cash to just stop them and not get paid.
Being teachers, we thought about how we could provide value to schools that they would pay for, and the obvious thing was to run writing workshops. We knew schools would pay for them and they’d give us an ideal way to showcase Pobble in schools, whilst earning some cash that could be used to build the company further.
I remember the day we received our first booking and cheque — it was amazing and it was the moment we realised that writing was a real issue in schools that they would pay to solve — and even better, they were willing to give us money to help them solve it!
From there, we were a true bootstrapped company, building out products that schools would pay for and iterating everything on the back of customer feedback. We’d use the money to improve the website and bring on some other teachers who could help with delivering more workshops, spreading the word.
We progressively moved to working full time on Pobble, some with PT roles (where possible), and I went to business school to do an MBA which allowed me to make the transition to entrepreneurship. It was a real period of uncertainty, and we relied a lot on each other for the strength and resolve to continue, but looking back, we learnt so much by putting everything on the line in that way — we really didn’t give ourselves an option, but to succeed.
What’s your favourite story since you started working on Pobble?
Fred Potts is a 6-year-old, left handed, dyslexic, reluctant boy writer. Sharing his work on Pobble changed his life and took him from the bottom of writing class to the top.
His teacher was looking for ways to engage her reluctant boy writers and came across Pobble. Inspired by the idea of having his work shared with a global audience on Pobble, Fred was persuaded to put pen to paper and his teacher entered his work in our winter writing competition.
Fred’s writing gained over 5000 views and won the competition for his amazingly descriptive entry. He also gained many comments, including this wonderful one from his Dad:
“I am Fred’s dad. Which also makes me the proudest Dad on Planet Earth tonight. My lad is a wildly imaginative boy trapped in the body of a left handed dyslexic who suddenly goes into himself, becomes painfully shy, fiddles with his fingers and whispers to himself when writing or reading is required. This prize had him jumping up and down like a pogo stick when I arrived to pick him up from school tonight.
Teaching is LIFE CHANGING and I am seeing it happen in front of my eyes. Thank you Pobble, because you have played your part.
Maff Potts — or as I will now be known — “Fred Potts’s Dad””
That’s a heartwarming story. You’ve made a real impact on children’s lives bringing Pobble to existence.
In your experience, what are the most important things budding tech startups should be thinking about before they launch?
- You must be addressing a real need.
Do not work on anything that isn’t a need or your users/customers simply won’t use the product. It’s easy to waste a lot of time building something that’s a nice to have and you won’t be successful this way - Focus — just say no to everything that is not core.
Having said that, I appreciate there are times for gathering info, customer engagement, coffees, finding out things which you don’t yet know, but don’t fall into the trap of meeting with people just for the sake of it. Gather your information, make a judgement on how you need to execute, then execute! There is absolutely nothing more important than being able to execute and you will only do this by being 110% focussed on what needs to be done. - “Fuck it, ship it”
This was our favourite phrase at the beginning (and still is now). You need to get things out there quickly, learn from where things go wrong and iterate fast. You will never get it right first time (this applies to product, pitching, hiring, anything really!). You will only succeed through lots of failure and learning, so the quicker you start failing the better!
Great advice, Jon. Thanks for sharing. Have there been any pivotal hurdles thrown at you since you began, and what did you learn from it?
So many! Thinking about it though, most relate to people. I’ve had to fire my whole sales team (3 people) in one day, lost our CTO as he couldn’t deliver to the level and speed we needed, had to deal with employees that weren’t right for the startup culture… Many of these threw up complex and difficult scenarios and decisions, many of which had the potential to break the company.
I’m not naturally a ruthless person, but I had to cultivate that skill set. It’s really hard not to look too emotionally and personally at people decisions, but that’s what you have to do.
If you always put the company’s best interests first, you usually can find the way forward and you basically have to be really ruthless and decisive on these types of issues.
I read two books which were instrumental for me, the hard thing about hard things and the founders dilemmas. These both helped me at different points in the journey, but I would council any startup founder to read both.
Finally, I’d love to hear what an average day looks like for you as a family man and tech founder. How do you stay motivated, energised and connected with your family?
I wake early and try to have some exercise (a run normally) and a half hour of thinking time before my 2 year old daughter wakes at 7.
I then usually play with her for a while and we have breakfast together as a family. I’m lucky because our office (an awesome converted piano factory in North London), is only around 10 minute’s walk from our flat, so I generally set off at 8:45 to be in the office at 9.
I’m spending a lot of time on the road at the moment, visiting schools and introducing Pobble. I think that a key component of the CEO role is to sell, whether that’s to investors, potential team members, or customers, so I would highly recommend every potential founder CEO does a good year on the road selling to their customers, you learn so much.
We have good systems for prioritising strategic, tactical and operational tasks and keeping in mind my comment above about focus, I deliver operational tasks first (such as meetings with schools, or accounting management), followed by whatever is top of the priority list of tactical items for the day. We try to keep most strategic work in term ends, or at least out of normal working hours.
I try to get home for bath time (19:30) 2–3 times a week and on other days I work late. Being an entrepreneur isn’t a 9–5 job, and I’m lucky to have a family that completely understand and support me with that. Being so close, my wife and daughter regularly pop in to the office to say hi during the day, so that’s always a lovely break when we’re right down in the thick of things.
Motivation and engagement is never a problem for me. I love what we do, it’s incredibly interesting and challenging and our mission is to have a global impact on something that affects the future of society. Having a 2 year old daughter gives me an even stronger drive to help improve our troubled education industry. I also love working on something that brings out such positive conversations.
No one should work on anything that they are not absolutely passionate about — quite simply, you won’t have the drive and resilience required to keep going.
Thank you so much for sharing your story with us today Jon, and congratulations! Pobble is announced as one of the 10 Edtech UK Startups to watch
At The Happy Startup School we help people like Jon bring their tech business ideas to life. If you enjoyed this post, please click that little green heart and follow our Humans of Happy Startups publication.
