Steve McCormick
To find out more about ShopHub visit: www. tryshophub. com
IN PROFILE
Steve McCormick
Co-Founder & CEO, ShopHub
Last year, ShopHub was crowned winner of the Techies Awards Swindon & Wiltshire 2021 Best Tech Start-Up category.
Founded in Cricklade in 2020, ShopHub is a loyalty app that enables e-commerce stores to easily create their own loyalty programme directly to their store.
Steve Co-Founded the business straight out of university. He graduated in 2020 with a First- Class Honours from Cardiff University in Management. After graduating, Steve was offered his dream job working as a technology consultant in London but declined the offer to follow his ShopHub dream and the chance to impact hundreds of millions of people.
We met with Steve to find out more about him, ShopHub and how the business is evolving since its big Techies Award win.
How did you come up with the ShopHub idea? ShopHub was born after running my own e-commerce store. I noticed how few loyalty solutions were available for small online businesses. After doing some market research with my co-founders Josh Sparkes and Tom Poynor, we found that only 1 per cent of the 10 million online businesses available today have a loyalty program. There ' s a huge gap in the market, especially when you see the popularity of loyalty systems in brick-and-mortar businesses, with 90 per cent choosing to include one.
How does the app help retailers? ShopHub enables online retailers to reward their customers in their own way. Whether they offer rewards through purchases, sharing their experience on social media, or referring friends, businesses can tailor custom rewards like discounts to maintain brand engagement and create a following like never before.
It must have been a difficult decision turning down your dream job to pursue ShopHub. Did you have much support? While this was a hugely difficult decision to make, I have had support the whole way. I receive close support from Cardiff University which has helped me substantially during this journey. I actually met my co-founder Josh Sparkes who was assigned as my mentor when I was due to start my job at Deloitte; his mentoring, support, and commitment to our vision was a major reason why I was able to make the decision.
How did you prove the ShopHub idea was viable? I saw the scarcity of customer retention tools first-hand whilst running my own online business. After identifying the issue, we interviewed dozens of small online business owners, trying to understand the scale of the issue and whether our solution was viable. The feedback we got was overwhelmingly strong, and it continues to drive every decision we make on the ground. Our customer-oriented philosophy is a core approach to our work.
How did it feel to win Best Tech Start-up at the Techies 2021? Winning the Best Tech Start-up Award was such an honour. The consideration alone was an achievement in itself when you look at the other fantastic nominees. Creating a new business is a difficult and uncertain road, as I’ m sure many founders can appreciate, but to win an award like Best Tech Start-up is a wonderful indicator that we’ re on the right track.
Has winning a Techies Award opened up new doors for you? Winning a Techies Award was a great opportunity to expand our network. For example, we were introduced to CEO of the Swindon and Wiltshire LEP Paddy Bradley who kindly offered support for our organisation.
What have you been up to in the last six months and how is the business developing? We have gained fantastic growth over the last six months – including the app ' s release, and have grown our team with four incredibly talented people, Naomi, Amelia, Lucy, and Abbie, through the Kickstart Scheme. They have already blown us away with their skills, and they will be fundamental to the rapid growth we expect this year.
How does ESG fit into your business plan? Sustainability and social responsibility are core to ShopHub. After speaking to our customers, we found that small businesses strive to be more sustainable but are limited by the tools and support that is available. This is why we are planning to release sustainable and socially focused rewards to our app, which lets small businesses reward their customers with planting trees and charity donations to ensure that their business is making a net positive impact on the environment and society.
What are your aspirations for ShopHub? We have big aspirations for ShopHub. Our vision is to make ShopHub a global loyalty platform for independent online retailers, connecting hundreds of thousands of businesses with billions of shoppers worldwide. It’ s incredibly hard for small online businesses to get discovered. Unlike brick-and-mortar businesses, online stores get no natural traffic and are forced to spend huge amounts of money and time on advertising. This is why we aim to build ShopHub to counteract the sting of online advertising and find a new solution to establishing their customer base.
What are your biggest challenges? Our biggest challenge is reaching online stores that benefit the most from our product. We decided to bootstrap our business as we knew this would help us understand our customers by ensuring that every decision we make creates the most value for them. However, with such a low budget, we need to find alternative ways to grow that don’ t require significant funds. This is why things like the Kickstart Scheme has been hugely impactful for us, enabling us to work with talented individuals who can help us create our vision, whilst benefiting from experience in the working world.
Do you think there is enough support out there for start-ups? While there is a lot of support around for start-ups, support grants are incredibly rare. As we work in software, we are not a capital-intensive business; we have no raw materials and require no physical premises or equipment. However, it has been a huge challenge to bootstrap our company, and I cannot imagine how it would even be possible to bootstrap a start-up that isn’ t software-based. The only realistic options of acquiring capital for a start-up is through private equity investment or debt-financing, both of which are difficult to acquire and have lots of strings attached. Of the grants available, they are either reserved for large organisations, are extremely specific in scope, or are match-funded where the founders need to have the cash available in the first place.
What advice would you give to anyone else looking to set up their own business? Read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and apply this methodology to everything you do. This is effectively a cheat code on how to build a successful start-up, and it has been the biggest factor in how we have gotten as far as we have.
The most important thing we have learnt from this book is that customer engagement is paramount. You need to understand your customer’ s problems so that your concept will provide them value, ensuring your success. I cannot stress this point enough – you must speak to customers!
What advice would you give anyone thinking of entering the Techies Awards 2022? I would say be sure to clearly demonstrate your motivations behind the business. One of the biggest reasons for our nomination is because we have a story that many of those who are just starting out in a competitive industry like our own sympathise with. It ' s not easy to go out on a limb with nothing but a concept and indicative research, but leaps like that are why businesses work, and we took that leap.
To find out more about ShopHub visit: www. tryshophub. com
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