Building a Global Startup From £180 With Go Swag

Speaker A: Your agents aren't producing accurate answers because they don't have a complete semantic understanding of your data. And denodo is solving this and solving it through semantic consistency. Through semantic consistency, your agents can start making accurate predictions in real time. So see what else Denodo can do by visiting denodo.com to learn more. But now let me introduce you to today's guest. Every startup begins with an idea, but very few begin with just 180 pounds and then go on to win customers like Meta, Apple, Netflix. So what separates the founders who make it from those who never get beyond the idea? Well, in this episode I'm joined by Conor McKenna, co founder and CEO of GoSwag. And he's going to be talking about building a global business from Glasgow, thinking internationally from day one. And why solving difficult problems consistently matters far more than just chasing startup shortcuts. But I don't want to reveal any spoilers on this one. It's a cracking episode and a really nice guy and he's achieved so much. A real inspiration for startup founders. So enough from me, let me introduce you to him right now. So thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you, Neil. It's good to be here. My name is Connor. I'm the co founder and Chief Exec of GoSwag. So we are a corporate gifting partner for high growth startups, um, and enterprise companies. So we handle everything from onboarding packs to client giveaways to event giveaways and sort of everything in between in that space. Myself and Ben, prior to starting goswag, uh, Ben's my co founder, spent our career in software before moving into this space. And uh, since 2019 we have been trying to fix this industry to make it a bit better on the planet and better for its customers.

Speaker A: It's such an incredibly cool story and I'd love to go back and learn more about that origin story. So let's start right at the beginning because I was doing a little research on you and I read that you launched go swag with the less than £200. So tell me about that and, uh, what was the original problem that you wanted to solve way back then? And at what point did you realize it had potential to become the global business that it is now?

Speaker B: Our grand seed investment was about £180 between Ben and I, which is how we started the company. So that was mainly to fund. We got a few items, branded, some hosting for our Website really. Um, but at the time we still. So Ben and I met in uh, a software agency. So Ben was the head of design, I was the head of design research. And at the time we were recruiting ah, a design team. Um, and for one of our first hires, who actually turned out to now be our chief product officer, a chap called Marco, he was a Roman guy from Italy and he was coming over to be hired in the east end of Glasgow. We thought God, this suave guy is coming over from Italy. We're going to have to impress him. He's coming to this kind of rough area of Glasgow. We're going to have to give him a decent first day else no chance he's staying. Um, so we pulled together a gift for him and basically long story short, when we pulled together this gift that had great impact, it uh, shared on socials and it landed really well. And we went to our team, the kind of people behind to organize things like merchandise, uh, and employee onboarding and said we did this thing, you should do it for everyone. And they were just like this is, do you know how difficult this is? There's no way we could do this for everyone in the company. And there's a classic case of we thought well there must be a challenge or service out, uh there, there must be a company that does this for you sort of end to end. And there just wasn't. There was no one in the space. And we decided to build, build that solution really coming into the industry with, with honestly no experience in the space but we kind of looked at it, realized how gigantic the space was and how broken it was and thought well, with our sort uh, of software, know how we could probably do something interesting. And at the time, to be honest we didn't realize this as we were doing it, but our experience in software in the later part of our career was perfect set up for building GO swag. So what we did is we went into big slow moving industries, so industries like banking or pharmaceuticals and build software solutions for them to try and uh, capture market space. So it was perfect training ground ultimately to then build GO in terms of when we realized we had proper traction or product, uh, market fit. I think really early we started to acquire big companies. So we worked with Spotify really early, um, worked with a company called Branch that did deep linking technology and they were bending their procurement rules to work with us. We were tiny, we were a two person company, three person company and they were bending their procurement rules to work with us because we were just like nothing else. In the industry. So they wanted the solution that we were offering. And that's when we realized, okay, there's something to this. If these kind of companies are willing to work with such a small team, we should try and scale this properly.

Speaker A: Wow, it's just such an inspiring story. And if we were to look at the startup guidebook, founders have traditionally been told to, hey, let's just dominate your home market first before even thinking about expanding internationally. But you decided to tear up that rule book. You chose to think globally right from day one. So why did you take that approach, uh, and what advantage did it give you?

Speaker B: Yeah, good question. I mean, I think there's a few parts to this. The. You can talk about it from a strategic point of view. Part of our service is global delivery, right? So we historically, in this space, if you happen to reside in India, uh, or South America, uh, you would get a completely different experience or no experience at all in comparison to your colleagues in the Bay Area in, uh, San Francisco or London in the uk. And we can have rejected that and said, well, we want to work with truly global companies with distributed teams and customers, and if we are gifting to those people, it shouldn't matter where you live, we will create the same service. So it was, uh, a pillar of our service to work out how to do that and service a truly global market. There is also an aspect that we are based in Scotland. It's not exactly the biggest booming economy in the world, so it's a fairly small country. So we were kind of forced into thinking, well, if we want this company to be big, we need to work out how to service regions outside of Scotland and outside of the uk. And both Ben and I also have a kind of way of working which is leaning into the hardest problems on the table. Um, I truly believe that most good startups are built by just pure grit and resilience into the hardest problem. I think avoiding it. It's easy to avoid these kind of problems to start with because it's like, well, I don't know how to scale a company globally, or I don't know how to incorporate in the US or will I get sued and end up in jail or something in the test. But you just have to face these problems head on. And by doing that, you build kind of muscle of facing these problems because it's good having the option to face difficult problems. You kind of want to build up that muscle before you have to face difficult problems. Uh, when you don't intend to face them as such, they come out of customer crisis or for whatever reason. If you've got kind of um, acumen in that area, it serves you well in the future.

Speaker A: And um, from launching with just 180 pounds just to bring to life what we're talking about here, you've built a business that now serves companies like Meta, Apple and Netflix, to name but a few. There some massive names from a team of around 30 people in Glasgow. So what were the key decisions that allowed you to scale but without consistently or constantly adding more and more headcount? How did you get around that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean ultimately that gets to the root of why we've been successful. So yeah, there's a few points I guess to break it down. I would cover three main areas. So the first is what we refer to internally as dry. So this is um, stolen from uh, a programming or software engineering principle of don't repeat yourself, which is um, abbreviated to dry. We believed from the start that admin should be handled by algorithms and computers and relationships should be handled by people. That is not being how the industry traditionally operates. The problem with scaling companies in this industry is admin scales pretty much in lock step with revenue. So if you want more revenue, you need more people to handle the more. Uh, the increase in admin. What we said is when looking at it, it's complex but it's very, we can automate most of it and that's honestly what we've been doing for the last five to six years is trying to work out how to free up smart people to build relationships with other people. And all the heavy lifting from an admin and quoting and logistics point of view is all handled by proprietary software. The second is as hard as it is ignoring revenue that doesn't scale. It's really easy in the early days to get locked into servicing small contracts or tickets because it's revenue in front of you. It looks easy, right? The small company, they need something by two weeks time. It's easy to service those kind of businesses. Uh, but what we found, and we did it to start with, um, we worked this out over time. But what we found is selling to an SME or small team quite often is more, at least if not the same amount of work as selling to enterprise. Um, it takes more guts to sell to enterprise. Um, it's scarier but if you work out how to do it and kind of get in those rooms, often that work has a much higher ROI in general. But to do that you need the bandwidth so you need to turn away from those small ticket items. To allow your team to go after the big ticket. And then finally I would say is not chasing what I would refer to as like vanity initiatives or projects. It's really easy as a founder. You know, when you start a business, you have to have a bit of delusion as a founder. Right. You start off thinking, you know, I've cracked this big idea. Especially if you're going into, you know, the promo or gifting industry. Corporate gifting industry has been around for 100 plus years at this point.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So it's a bit ludicrous on paper to say we've worked out we're going to solve it. And that could be applied to most industries. So it's easy to try and find like proof points, invest into things that publicly look good so you can post on LinkedIn, oh, we've opened in the United States, or we've taken on this massive warehouse. It, it strokes the ego, but it doesn't do much for, for the actual company scale. And what we focused on is only putting capital or investing into areas that are truly required by customers and holding capital back until we knew it was definitely, definitely needed by customers. Um, and then what that does is it means that you're hyper focused on your customer and their problems versus what makes you look good as a founder.

Speaker A: On the surface level, corporate gifting, it sounds incredibly straightforward, but I would imagine as soon as you start operating in multiple countries, uh, things like customs regulations and legitimate logistics networks, it can quickly make things challenging and quite complex. So what are some of the toughest operational challenges that you've had to solve? And uh, what did they teach you about building a resilient business in so many different countries?

Speaker B: We incorporated in 2019 and if you think about what happened post that point, it honestly was like the bingo card of UK economic disasters, really. Like we went through Covid, Brexit, the many budget tariffs, energy shock prices, we went through it all. But there's that old saying that pressure creates diamonds and we ship to every country imaginable every day, uh, tariffs and geopolitics, et cetera, is always changing. What that does is creates an immense amount of pressure. And what it forces you to do is become unbelievably skilled and um, pressure tested at solving these problems. And to me that builds a really good business because you become resilient. And that's over time what we focused more on. We can never predict what's going to happen next. Right. And when it comes to logistics, definitely, but across the board, when you're running a company there's so much of it you can't control ultimately. So the only bit you can control is building a team and a sort of ethos and culture of solving problems when they come up really quickly, um, and not letting them sort of burn you and sort of slow you down

Speaker A: and winning your first enterprise customer, that's one thing, but keeping them, that's a whole other ball game right there. And on behalf of other startup founders that could be listening today, what do large global organizations expect from you as a young company and how did you earn their trust? I mean, to begin with it sounds like they were bending over backwards to want to work with you, but how did you eventually earn, uh, their trust and ensure that they stay customers?

Speaker B: Big companies, I would argue, don't really care. Your small company most of the time, I guess that's the first piece of advice. Don't, don't give yourself away. Don't come in being, you know, uh, being so grateful and you know, I can't believe you want to work with us, uh, we are tiny, etc. Etc. Act like you should be in the room and you've been in this room 15 times before, even if you never have because it's not a big deal to them. So don't, don't let it be, don't, don't make it one. I think it doesn't matter if you're small or, you know, massive. Most companies, especially enterprises, I would argue, want consistency. They want ownership, they want not to care about whatever the service it is that you're delivering and they want no surprises. If you can do that, it doesn't matter what, what skill you are really. Um, and we, we since the early days, Ben and I have always kind of had this ethos of, of go above and beyond is what you refer to internally. And you business have this massive unfair advantage of how small you are, how flexible you are and you can do things. There's the famous Paul Graham essay of do, do things that don't scale, right? And it's like if you can, because of your scale and size, you can do things that big companies could never do because they would have to go through loads of red tape and um, bureaucracy to be able to go out and visit the customer and bring them out to dinner and do all sorts of fancy stuff if you wanted to, or deliver a service that's completely outside, uh, the normal sort offering that you have. But you should do these things. You should show what working with you looks like. And what it should look like is the ethos of above and beyond that you will go above and beyond to solve all of their problems and make their life easier. Then the fact that you are a 10 person team or a 5 person team is irrelevant at that point because you've fixed uh, a problem that they have.

Speaker A: Uh, it's a strategy that's certainly paying off. I mean looking when ah, I was doing a little research on you, you've achieved five consecutive years of triple digit growth. I mean growth is incredibly exciting but with that becomes a certain amount of pressure. So again for founders listening, what are some of the hardest lessons you've learned as the business scaled so quickly?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, most of it is about people. Right. Like I think building a company is really hard. Never m you're trying to do something abnormal. You know, you could say what market you look at. Most markets grow what, 7 to 8% max a year. To be a successful high growth company, you're looking at minimum to be growing 50, 60% year on year, ideally closer to 100. That's a really abnormal thing to achieve and do. And with abnormality comes stress and difficult days and equally really high days. But you need to partner with people that can ride that journey with you. Um, and I think to do that you got to look for a few things. One, ideally people who are smarter than you and can operate in areas have skills that you don't have that complement you really well. Um, like my co founder, Ben's a perfect example of that. We complement each other really well. Um, he's the best salesperson that I've ever worked with. Um, I call him like a social SES soldier. He just flies into any situation and everyone's his friend all of a sudden, whereas I'm much more analytical and technical. So we complement each other brilliantly. Um, and he's also one of my best friends so he going through the journey of building a business, it takes one thing to be skilled and experienced in certain areas, but also a lot of the time it's just really hard. You have to be open to be to talking with the person or people that you're working with at 11, uh, o' clock at night or 2:00am when you know everything's hitting the fan. So yeah, find people that you're, you're willing to be in the trenches with for three to four to six years, you know, to come. And also I think a lot of your job is to find people who are best suited for high growth companies. It's, it's most people aren't, I would argue and they won't know that, um, to start with, but as I said with that, uh, or not abnormal growth, it's a very stressful experience and not everyone, everyone wants that, uh, if they're the working life and that's totally fine. But is that your, your job to identify that early and sort of select those people out or in to your company? And if you get that right, that pressure becomes a lot easier because you're essentially building a collective of people who are excited by that pressure and are motivated by it.

Speaker A: And uh, there'll also be many entrepreneurs and founders listening that assume technology is only part of the solution. So from your side and your experiences here, how important is having your own platform been in helping go swag compete against so much larger and better funded competitors?

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, I mean everything really ultimately, as I mentioned near the, the start, Neil, it's where we come from as the software world. So I'm sure we are biased, I guess in thinking that, but ultimately it's, it's what's allowed us to scale at the rate we've had, we have done so far. And also we are introducing software that this industry's never seen. And that's truly why we believe we're kind of creating a new category in this space. We are truly solving for the customer in this and building tooling and software that makes their life easier and the end recipient of the gift easier. And it's what blows enterprises away because when they come to interact with us and meet with us and realize what we can offer from a software point of view, it's night and day in comparison to your big incumbents. Um, so yeah, it's truly at the core of kind of why we've scaled at the rate we have.

Speaker A: And if we look back one more time to that day when you started with 180 pound, what's one piece of advice you would give to startup founders who are trying to build an international business, but they feel like they, they don't quite have the resources, the connections or the confidence. They have imposter syndrome and all those things that uh, prevent them from taking the first step. Any advice for that startup founder?

Speaker B: Yeah, I've got loads. I think get started and don't stop would be the easiest way to summarize it. The thing is, the imposter syndrome, the feeling out your depth, etcetera, get comfortable that it's never going away. Um, if you're doing your job right, if you're scaling quickly, you should never feel comfortable. Every six months, you're essentially Operating and running a new business because you're operating at a different scale than you have before. So you just have to get comfortable with being really uncomfortable ultimately and sort of seek out that discomfort almost. Because if you're comfortable, you're doing something wrong. I would argue. Um, and in terms of like network and resources, look, there's always going to be people with a better network, more money than you, better connections than you. I'd say the only thing you, you can do is work harder than anyone else. That's the only true thing that you can, you can influence or you're likely to be able to, to do more of ultimately than anyone else if you really, if you really go for it. Most, um, people I find give up when the problem gets boring or particularly hard. I think there is like, uh, within Hollywood or literature, etc. The reality of being a founder and starting a business is quite different from how it's portrayed. Often people don't see the bet where you're working out international vat or the reality of how to calculate square footage of a warehouse. These problems are super dull. No one wants to interact, no one wants to work these things out. But you have to. And your job as a founder is to be the person that dives into the hardest problem in the room. Right. And often those things are really dull and boring. So keep going through that. I believe businesses are built by compounding resilience, ultimately, not overnight success or connections. So the key is just keep going and don't give up.

Speaker A: And, uh, I'm curious, looking back to when you started to now, and over the last three years, AI has taken over everything. Have you had any real impacts and benefits from AI? Have you embraced it? Has it improved things, made your life easier at all?

Speaker B: Yeah, massively. I mean, I'm a completely certified nerd. Right. And so when this, uh, boom and generative came along, we were all over was perfect timing. It locked right into what we were trying to do about scaling without scaling headcount and admin. So suddenly when you had these models that were able to do really impressive analysis or artwork generation, et cetera, I think various things that kind of tuned into what our service is. We adopted it as fast as humanly possible. So yeah, we're doing some really interesting stuff in that space. Um, we're building our own proprietary, uh, tooling, uh, in the space. So to cover that quickly, we believe we talk about the blank canvas problem. Right. So right now the industry says if you come, uh, looking to buy or create onboarding packs or Event giveaways. The industry's response to that is here's a catalog of thousands of items and tens of finishing options. Most of our buyers will have never done this before, yet the industry expects them to be experts like Neil. If I ask you the difference between submlation and digital printing, I assume you don't know the difference. Imagine you had half a million pounds of budget and you had to know the difference. And you're responsible for clothing your bosses and colleagues and highest value sales prospects. Quite anxiety provoking situation. Right. So what we see is we won't give you a catalog, we won't ask you these questions, we'll ask you what you're trying to do, your intent. You want to create a sales prospecting gift that lands big business. We'll say okay, we'll go away and we'll design a gift that does that and say this is what we think you should do. And what we are doing in Ah AI we're building models to make those connections. Right now there's hundreds of thousands of items you could pick and we rely on really smart consultants and people that work in our sales team to make those bridges and connections. And now we are automating that and pulling that into a model to delete that um, blank canvas problem so anyone can come onto our service and work out what they should gift based on what they're trying to do.

Speaker A: Love it. And finally looking ahead to the future. Only a few years away from a 10th anniversary, which probably scares you. That's how quickly that time has flown by. But I mean where do you go from here? Any big goals that you're aiming for before you hit that 10th anniversary way?

Speaker B: Yeah, it doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel like that. Um, if I'm honest. But yeah, I've got a lot older in that time. Um, yeah, uh, look, ultimately what we are trying to do is become the default player in this space. So the way I talk about it internally is if you think about CRMs right after a certain scale, you assume a company uses HubSpot or Salesforce, ERPS, you assume a company uses NetSuite or SAP. There's no default company in the gifting space that people assume you use at a certain scale of enterprise and that's what we are building towards. Um, and yeah, definitely we should do it before the 10 year anniversary has become the go to supplier of the biggest companies in the world.

Speaker A: Wow, what a powerful moment to end on and an inspiring note as well. And for anybody listening, that is much earlier in their journey or maybe want to find out more information about, about GoSwag work with you or connect with you, uh, or your founder there. Where would you like me to point everyone?

Speaker B: Yeah, so first of all, we're hiring everyone, it feels like right now. So go to goswag.com uh, and find our careers page and you can keep up to date with myself or GoSwag on LinkedIn by just searching my name and GoSwag or just checking our website.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, I will include links to everything. There's such an inspiring story from starting with, uh, 180 pound to everything that you've achieved and still marching forward there, uh, triple growth, uh, etc, for so many years now. And I'd love to stay in touch with you and see how your story evolves before that 10th anniversary man, and

Speaker B: get you back on.

Speaker A: Um, but thanks for joining me today.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you so much for Tanya. I appreciate it.

Speaker A: I think Connor's story is a powerful reminder that successful startups aren't built on perfect timing, huge investment, or having all the answers on day one. They're actually built by founders who keep learning, keep solving problems, and keep showing up when things get difficult. And from launching with less than 200 pounds to serving some of the world's biggest brands, my guest journey proves that determination and focus can take you much further than many people will imagine. But I'd love to hear your thoughts. What's the biggest lesson you've learned from building a business? Or what's the one thing holding you back from even getting started? Let me know techtalksnetwork.com I'd love to hear from you. And I will also hopefully speak with you on another episode of Startup Builders and Backers very soon. Look forward to it. Bye for now. Mhm.