Joe Ogden is the co-founder at Discoveroo. He’s worked in enterprise sales for the past few years, before which he worked as a music agent in London.
Co-founder Matt Roberts is a No-code consultant and has a background in systems and tools implementation within small tech teams.
They launched Discoveroo in October 2020.
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what Discoveroo all about?
Discoveroo provides an outsourced B2B sales development service for small businesses.
Our mission is to help startups and agencies who are looking to grow, but who don’t have a designated sales development rep to find more new customers and sales opportunities.
The idea was borne out of the belief that small businesses without in-house sales teams should still have access to experienced and professional salespeople.
Please tell us a little bit about your background and how/why you started your company?
Both I and my co-founder, Matt Roberts, are from near Manchester in the UK, although we met in Barcelona, which is where we both live.
I have worked in technology sales over the past few years, working for the likes of Autodesk, Snow Software, and on behalf of Dell Boomi at an outsourced sales agency.
I grew pretty tired of corporate life and found myself becoming more and more eager to branch out on my own.
Matt has worked previously as a business analyst and product manager within small tech teams. He’s also a bit of a No-code whizz.
We felt that we had a good mix of skills between us, and we both shared a passion for wanting to build a business. So, it made sense to try and set something up together.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
I’d say the 3 skills we’ve needed the most so far have been perseverance, communication, and adaptability.
Perseverance
We’ve needed to be pretty single-minded to get things off the ground. There’ll be days when Matt is pushing things forward, and other days when I am.
But collectively, our shared perseverance – from the inception of the original idea, through to getting our first few clients – has been the backbone of our business so far.
Communication
Understanding what each of us is focusing on each week, and when we aim to have finished a particular task, has really helped us to predict delivery dates, and to implement realistic timelines for ourselves.
Communication has played a major part in managing this process and has kept us both accountable to each other.
Adaptability
During the first few conversations we had with prospective clients, we realized that certain aspects of our service weren’t really required, whereas other things (that we hadn’t initially built into our service) were required.
Being adaptable has been crucial for us to build something based on our target clients’ actual needs.
What were the top 3 mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
We originally gave ourselves unrealistic deadlines to launch the business and to have clients on board. The psychological effect of not hitting those target dates could be distracting and affected motivation.
It can also be easy to get lost in the weeds if you don’t give yourself a break. By that I mean it can sometimes be hard to have a balanced perspective on the progress you’re making when you’re constantly grinding away.
This is a mistake I’ve made numerous times throughout this process.
Having time off really helps you to reflect on how far you’ve come, and also what your next steps should be.
Lastly, I’d say a mistake we made before we even launched our business was questioning whether it was definitely the kind of business service and model we wanted to go with.
We’d researched and discussed so many different ideas, and the analysis paralysis that came with that also led us to sometimes second-guess ourselves once we’d actually made a decision, which would feel like we were taking a step backward and would again affect our motivation and enthusiasm.
Overcoming that was essential for us, but it was difficult at the very start.
What is the biggest challenge you’re facing right now in your business?
We need to create more awareness about what we’re doing, and we need to reach the types of clients we want to serve. We’re completely bootstrapped as a business, and therefore don’t have huge budgets for advertising and marketing, etc.
Word of mouth and some basic online promotion has worked well for us so far, but we need to step things up now.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
- We’re using Slack at Discoveroo to reinforce and grow the network with our clients, and to keep ourselves available on-demand.
- We use LinkedIn to help us find and reach new prospective clients.
- And we use Hubspot as our CRM.
What are three books or courses you recommend for entrepreneurs?
- This is Marketing by Seth Godin is an excellent book and has been a go-to resource for me over the past few months.
- CXL offers some amazing marketing courses. I highly recommend the content marketing strategy course with Andy Crestodina.
- I’d also recommend the front-end web development ‘Techdegree’ by Treehouse. I didn’t actually complete the course but it provided me with some excellent foundations for building websites.
How can we contact you?
- Website: Discoveroo.co
- You can contact us both at hello@discoveroo.co
- Or you can contact us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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