"We couldn't grow like that today"

Serial entrepreneur George Burgess talks success, pivoting, and knowing when to walk away

I met George Burgess when he was director of innovation at the Telegraph, and I was head of growth at Thriva. I was on the hunt for good partnership opportunities, and we were eyeing up what a newspaper partnership could look like.

George joined the Telegraph having sold his first business, Gojimo, to them two years earlier. George is a prolific angel investor and became my joint first cheque I received when running Wine List.

Since his Telegraph days he raised money from Global Founders Capital to launch The Intro, a dating app that helped people to ‘skip the small talk and meet in person’.

Two years in George knew it wasn’t going to work.

He went to investors and after a discussion pivoted the business entirely to find a new problem to solve. The result was Basabu, an online marketplace for retreats. When I hear about people pivoting, it is almost never a true pivot. It’s usually a slight adjustment in direction: a matter of degrees nudged one way or the other. George’s change of direction here here remains one of the only time I’ve seen in UK startups do something like this – where the investors have invested in the individual over all else.

Today, George is the founder of Modern Day Talent, a business that helps you hire remote talent, his first not following a VC route.

I have always enjoyed discussions, advice, and time spent with George, and so it’s been a real treat to get to interview him for the blog.

George Burgess on seizing opportunities and knowing when to walk away

Let’s start with the Gojimo story. Tell me about that.

Throughout my last year of school, my gap year, and my first year at university, we licensed content and built educational apps for publishers like Oxford University Press, McGraw Hill, and BBC Active. I learned a huge amount during this time and saw the potential to amalgamate all the ideas and everything we’d created under a single brand. That’s how Gojimo emerged. 

The product was mostly quizzing for every topic of every exam board of every GCSE and A level you might take. You could never use it as your sole revision tool, but you could definitely use it as a way to reinforce learning, check your knowledge, or revise on the go. However, when we first released it, only six per cent of users actually got to the end of a quiz in their first session. Given that quizzing was pretty much its primary function, this was a bit shit. 

I remember discovering that data point. We probably weren’t looking at data as much as we should have been. Remember, I was a 20-year-old founder who knew very little. I was trawling through Mixpanel or Google Analytics when I came across the stat: “This is the one thing a user can do, and most users don’t even get that far!”

So we rallied the team – around six to eight people – around improving that one metric. We stripped out loads of functionality. We’d put a social network in there, for instance, and reporting for teachers. And we took it all out. By asking how we could get kids in there and doing quizzes, we increased the number tenfold within six months. It then took around another eighteen months before we had a product users seemed to love. 

What about growth?

We’d reached a point where we had a product that seemed to work. People were using it, the response was really good, retention was OK, and there was some organic growth – all the things you want to see in an early-stage B2C business. But we didn’t have a reliable growth channel. 

We were trying all sorts of things. Back then, 15 and 16-year-old kids were all using Facebook. Instagram was on the up, although nowhere near as prevalent as it is today, and that age group were early adopters. We were advertising across both channels, with decent CPIs. There was nothing special about what we were doing, but we could acquire customers that way. 

And then Meta announced a new format: video ads on Instagram. 

Frustrated with our cost of acquisition and relatively low growth given our budget, I decided to give this a go. We couldn’t afford to make a proper video, so I put together a couple of screenshots and some text in PowerPoint and saved it as a movie file. 

I was at an airport, about to get on a plane to an edtech conference in the US. I created it, uploaded it to the ad network, and just let it run. I wasn’t expecting much; the video was basically a slideshow. But when I landed and got to my hotel, I looked at the stats and the numbers were insane – we had loads of installs. I thought there was a bug in the ad network, that it wasn’t reporting properly. But when I checked Mixpanel, I saw a huge surge in users. It emerged that this new ad format was working – and it was very cheap.

So you jumped on the opportunity. Was it a conscious growth strategy?

Back then, most marketers wouldn’t touch video. They thought of almost TV ad-level production costs. So there was hardly any ad creative being put out in that format. And because it was all driven by auction, there was a huge amount of availability, with very little to fill it. 

As one of the few companies targeting an age range many advertisers weren’t bothering with, we got crazily cheap CPIs. This meant we could go viral each exam season. We could pump £50,000 into those ads during March and April, and we’d get enough UK students to use the app as early adopters and it’d then spread through word of mouth.  

It went nuts. At its peak, we had 48 per cent of GCSE and A Level students. We were trending on Twitter and the App Store. Teachers would promote it; exam boards would recommend it. It spread like wildfire. I remember trying to pitch our VC in the Bay Area, and the app didn’t work! Our servers were down because 300,000 kids were trying to access it at once.

We were just trying things; we were experimenting. We were prepared to make bold bets, like stripping out all the functionality except the quizzing, to see what happened. We saw this viral surge, but we weren’t scientific about it. There was very little sophisticated analysis. Numbers aren’t everything, especially in early-stage businesses. You know if your product’s working. Measuring and analysing every little detail can lead to data paralysis. 

With hundreds of thousands of kids coming in every year, especially in those early days, I wasn’t thinking about our viral co-efficient or measuring our K-factor. I didn’t even learn those terms until much later. We were just trying to keep the thing alive. 

I couldn’t replicate that growth today, even if you handed me the fully built Gojimo product. I don’t have the same levers to pull. You can’t replicate what someone’s done before; it will almost never work. That’s why experimenting and testing are key.

Were you able to generate revenue from this?

Despite this growth, we saw no revenue. 

The most reliable route into revenue would have been to sell performance insights into schools on half of their students. We could have told teachers which areas of the curriculum their students most struggled with. But there were a few reasons we didn’t. 

First, almost every business in Edtech Exchange was B2B, and their biggest complaint was how hard it was to sell into schools. Second, we had the student love. We were concerned that if teachers became involved and started dictating how students use the app, it would change the students’ relationship with the app. 

If we had sold into schools, our business would very quickly have been doing £1 or £2 million ARR. We could have broken even quite fast. That said, I don’t have many regrets about the eventual outcome. We’d already raised a couple of million, and we had liquidation prefs. Looking back, I still don’t believe there were actually that many big opportunities. 

Running Edtech Exchange must have been very useful, giving you insights a lot of founders wouldn’t have. 

There were advantages to running a trade body, of course. It’s where the acquisition of Gojimo came from, for one thing: I met the Telegraph at an Edtech Exchange drinks event. Plenty of partnerships came from it, too. To this day, many of my closest friends are from that group.

Probably the most powerful thing was the boost to my personal brand. It positioned me as a leader in edtech and was invaluable in terms of access and the people I could meet. 

It came about entirely organically. I’d regularly have lunch and compare notes on business with a friend of mine, Justin Smith, who runs a company called Educational App Store. It transpired he and I were also having similar lunches with three or four other founders, and we agreed it made more sense to have dinner together, rather than one on one. 

I booked a private room in a pub in Kings Cross, and everyone came along. It was an amazing experience. We all trusted each other. We’d lay out our biggest problems, and all try and help each other with them. It was almost emotional. 

I picked up the bill for the first dinner, and Justin got the next one. But as it grew and became more frequent, it became more complicated. So we set up a company through which members could contribute to cover the costs. And it continued to grow organically.

I had a relationship with the C-level execs at McGraw Hill. On a whim, I told them about the dinners, and they offered to sponsor them. Soon there were McGraw Hill-sponsored drinks parties and speaking streams at edtech conferences. Companies such as Pearson and Amazon also joined as sponsors, which allowed us to put on the sort of events we’d always wanted to. 

It wasn’t a big business, but it washed its face. And again, it was all entirely organic, with very little thought behind it. 

What have you taken from your experiences with Gojimo and Edtech Exchange into your current work?

I’ve talked about how unplanned so much of what we did was. Now I’ve done it a couple of times, I’m a lot more thoughtful about how I do things, particularly when I start. I’m big on opportunity cost, for example, and on the importance of the direction you start out in. 

I started out in edtech because I was a student at the time. It was what I was familiar with; it was all around me. I didn’t think about whether the sector had growth in it, or whether there’d be any structural challenges.  

But once you’ve picked your trajectory, it’s hard to sway from it to any degree. So I’m a lot more cautious about the direction I set out in. Last year, I thought strategically about what I wanted to achieve. I started three companies, to try to learn a bit about each before I made the final decision on which one to focus on. There’s only so much you can know when you start but that de-risked it slightly for me. 

Opportunity cost matters, too. We sold our dating app after only a year. There was clearly something there, but we’d learned enough to know we weren’t going to be the ones to build a huge success in this space. It just wasn’t for us; the opportunity cost was just too high. So we sold the business and offered the proceeds to our investors. But they told us to keep it, and to see what else we could do! It was a real vote of confidence. 

The fact is, I’d never have had the sophistication to take a step back and reassess the situation had I been younger and hadn’t been through it before.

That’s very rare. I don’t know of any other stories like that, certainly in the UK. 

It was rare because it was a failure. But I’d done it once and it worked out OK. Of course, it feels like shit at the time, but you know something positive is going to come out the other side.

My co-founder Patrick and I got quite good at being unemotional about things. When I make decisions now, I often ask myself what route I’d take if there was no emotion involved. I almost always know what the right answer is, but going through that exercise reaffirms it – I know I have to make a tricky decision.

Traditionally, you’d exhaust all the cash you’ve raised, and keep trying to the bitter end. But if you know it’s not going to work, why carry on? It’s about having the confidence to be sure it’s not going to work and moving on. 

I hear that a lot from founders – not knowing when it’s over, not knowing when to give up. It’s a really tough area. 

Our investors made it easier. We told them what we were going to do, and they were very supportive. The fact that they told us to keep the cash and try something else was a real incentive. When do you ever hear that? If they’d told us to keep trying, it would have been much harder. We might not have had the confidence to fight back. 

It helped that this was our second time, and we were less emotional, more thoughtful. We were aware of our strengths. Neither of us was strong on brand or marketing. We were never going to win against Bumble’s CEO at that game, so why try? There was a lot of self-reflection, but it wasn’t that hard a decision in the end. 

A lot of what you’ve said, about recognising opportunity and just going for it, and doubling down, might be useful for potential or early-stage founders. 

I’m doing that right now. We use an automated outreach programme as a marketing channel to get new leads. It’s clearly working, so I haven’t changed it or worked on it for six months. But I’ve recognised that we can quickly double the number of leads if I put some effort into optimising it. 

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you have to double down when you see an opportunity and be strict about abandoning something when you think you’ve exhausted your options. It’s worked well for me so far.