With over 15 years at the helm of startups and scaleups alike, I’ve developed and scaled e-commerce ventures, enabling me to form a deeper understanding of entrepreneurship and the grand adventures it can take you on.

Drawing from insights garnered from my own experience, I’ve honed three key learnings that prove instrumental in shaping my own trajectory towards success.

Lesson 1: Market Mastery

Market mastery is about gaining a profound insight of your niche and its unique challenges. At the emergence of startups, we often have grand visions, and unwavering faith in our ideas. While belief is essential, it must be tempered with a deep understanding of the market we serve.

My entrepreneurial journey began in 2009 with Fits.me, where we aimed to enhance the way consumers shop online, pulling from traditional in-person shopping experiences. We developed the idea of shapeshifting mannequins - making it our tool that could adapted to any individual body shape, size and preferred fit – providing customers with the visual incentive to purchase a garment, while overcoming the challenges of fashion retail – a fitting room. 

These mannequins were our first business model – conceived as a solution for pre-production in garment manufacturing, aimed at perfecting sample size and supporting the design and manufacturing process. However, in response to valuable customer feedback, we adapted our vision to create a second business plan - a fitting room tool that used these mannequins and integrated them within product listing pages. This revelation created an opportunity which allowed us to display clothing items which matched consumers body profiles, while fulfilling our core intentions.

This taught me that believing in your product is essential, but not enough to rely on. Never underestimate the value of market research; assumptions and gut feelings can only take you so far, instead, prioritise research and validation. By incorporating data-driven decisions alongside engagement across business strategies, you establish the fundamental aspect of fostering sustainable growth and navigating entrepreneurial success.

Lesson 2. Agility amplified

Embracing agility means being open to change and embracing it, listening to feedback, actively pivoting when necessary, and understanding that this isn't a sign of failure - but a demonstration of growth through adaptation. By sharpening this ability to transform based on feedback, you ensure your company remains responsive to these shifting trends.

This mindset helped us to make a discovery after selling Fits.me to Rakuten in 2015. We recognised a prevalent issue in the e-commerce industry: online shoppers often struggle to find what they're looking for, especially when it comes to visually complex products that prove hard to describe using words and filtering categories.

This newfound awareness prompted us to tackle this challenge head-on with our new venture, Miros, where we aid e-commerce retailers show the items their customers want, using AI-generative technology,  enhancing this digital experience with our ‘wordless search’. Our intention was to optimise the user journey, displaying not what they think they need, but what they want. We also found that our product discovery defeats the statistic that only 99 out of 100 shoppers never see the full catalogue due to manual product tagging.

Lesson 3: Team triumphs

At the core of any triumph in product development resides a powerhouse team.

At Miros, we recognise the key role of team dynamics, and elevated it to equal importance as perfecting and refining our product– and it proved to be a game-changer. Particularly by identifying our members’ strengths, and then allocating them to the roles where they will best prosper.