Anyone can start on a shoe string (long read)

I’ve had roughly 2 businesses that by most metrics could be considered successful. Both were started with very little money. My first cost me under £50, the second £600. I thought I’d write about these to potentially provide others with some inspiration or to show that even when you’re stuck at home - even if you have to move back with your parents aged 31 having left home at 17 like I did - you can create amazing things.

My first successful business was while I was at university. I was ents rep at Edinburgh Uni in the early 2000s. I booked a lot of bands there and through meeting bands I set up a business that supplied live music to local venues. I bought the smallest possible mail box on South Bridge in an attempt to look legitimate (Suite 101 cost me £20 a month), and remarkably my business took off. I charged bars and pubs £150 for 3 hours of live music. I paid the artist £75 if they were a solo acoustic or £100 if it was a band, and I kept the rest.

Once I’d got a venue signed up - which often took no more than randomly turning up, having a drink, and mentioning I could organise bands if they were interested - it took me roughly 5 minutes of calls to arrange a booking. At it’s peek I was booking 20-50 gigs a week which was a lot of money for me at the time. As I felt like I was learning more doing this I left university after 3rd year with an ordinary degree instead of staying for 4th year and getting an honours degree (I remain the only person I know to have an ordinary degree (in Scotland honours degrees are 4 years)).

My second business was importing tea. Since uni I had always drunk loose leaf tea and always imported small amounts for myself (eBay really opened up the world’s markets). In the 2008 economic downturn I was the head of media and communications at one of the UK’s biggest commercial architects in London. Nearly overnight I was made redundant and couldn’t get another job. I stayed in London for a few years until I ran out of money and, aged 31, I moved back home with my parents. (You can just imagine how happy they were to have 31 year old Jamie turn up as they were retiring!)

While living there I aggravated a school boy injury on my knee and had to have an operation. Knowing I was going to be in bed for a few months I borrowed £600 from my mum, bought 13KG of artisan tea from China and Taiwan and started a company called driftwood tea (driftwood was sold in 2016, there is a garbage driftwood tea in the US but, this is nothing to do with me).

I had zero money for websites or advertising so I started by selling on eBay while learning to build my own website on something called Rapid Weaver. While driftwood was critically very well received - it got great reviews - good sales were roughly £1,000 a month with profit being roughly half of that. It certainly wasn’t enough to leave my parents house and I ended up staying with my parents for nearly 3 years. (While I could have moved out sooner, I invested everything I made back into the companies to help grow them faster as I was certain eventually this would pay off.)

At that time I was approached a lot by journalists asking if green tea helped with weight loss and, seeing a new trend develop (new detox tea trends surface a couple of times a decade), I decided to launch a company called skinny tea. The Skinny Tea Co launched in the summer of 2013 and within its first week it had sold more than driftwood did in its best month. Sales then doubled, month on month, for the first 6 months and then more slowly after that.

The Skinny Tea Co went on to become a category defining brand. Unlike the majority of other ’detox teas’ that launched we had: a really high quality pure tea product (camellia sinensis); it was NOT a laxative; we made very few claims or promises of efficacy; we never used before and after photos (and never stole pictures off Instagram); and we never paid celebrities for promotions (we launched before this became a huge thing but were regularly approached).

Despite our products selling for 2-4x more than anyone else (our best selling box was £70), we built up a large and loyal following.

I sold the Skinny Tea brand 4 years ago. The company who bought it completely failed to understand why the brand was popular and essentially turned it into an MLM style product. They took a premium brand and started to sell cheaper off shoots while offering huge discounts (not discounting was one reason people liked us). The company quickly failed. No matter what became of that brand, I remain proud of what I created.

Those two businesses started roughly 10 years apart. I find myself another 10 years on and, after a couple of false starts, think I’ve got something new to work on. While I’m really lucky to be in a slightly more comfortable position these days, I intend to launch this new project in a similarly low budget way.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far, wow, thanks. I hope it maybe gives you some inspiration as to what you can achieve if you’re stuck at home. I also kind of wrote it to remind myself what is possible as, now I’m starting something new, I remember how difficult and overwhelming it feels trying to figure out everything that needs to be done.

Jamie

tl;dr not having a lot of money need not be a barrier to starting your own business if you’ve got a good idea and are prepared to work.