London wasn't the centre of the universe.

Building the shop by hand

When I started Pod1 in London in 2001, there was no Shopify. There was barely a playbook. If a brand wanted to sell online, someone had to build the whole thing: the catalogue, the basket, the checkout, the payment integration, the emails that went out afterwards. In the early days that someone was me, writing PHP3 by hand, late into the night.

That turned out to be the best education I could have had. When you've built the checkout yourself, you understand why people abandon it. When you've written the stock logic, you understand why a website says something is available when the warehouse says it isn't. A lot of what I do with founders today still comes back to those foundations. The tools are better now, but the problems are the same ones.

As the platforms matured we moved onto the early versions of Magento, and the agency grew with them.

The clients everyone wanted

We were very early, and that meant we got to work with brands at the moment they first went online. We launched Matches Fashion's ecommerce. We put Mr & Mrs Smith on the web when they were selling hotel bookings online for the first time, which was a new idea then. We worked with Net-a-Porter, Links of London, Matthew Williamson, and a long list of luxury, high street and high-end fashion names.

Luxury clients teach you to care about detail. The weight of a font, the way an image loads, the tone of a confirmation email. They are right to care. When you sell a dress for two thousand pounds, the website is the shop floor, and nobody wants to buy from a scruffy shop.

One small story from that time still makes me smile. When one of our developers left to start on his own, I handed him one of our clients to take with him: Mr & Mrs Smith. He built his business around them. That business is D3R, and today I sit on its board of trustees, having helped him plan his own exit through an employee ownership trust. Generosity in business has a long tail.

Beautiful work, not much money

Here is the uncomfortable part. We were doing some of the best ecommerce work in London, for some of the best brands in the world, and we weren't making much money.

We were pricing for London. We looked at what other agencies charged, at what clients said their budgets were, and we priced to fit. We never asked whether the work was worth more. Plenty of founders I meet today are doing the same thing with their products.

New York, and the price list that changed everything

When we went to New York to open the agency there, we took everything we'd learned in London, and we made one small decision. We put the prices up. Not by ten per cent. By four or five times.

And we won. Pitch after pitch. Same people, same process, same quality of work. The European eye for design and detail that we'd taken for granted turned out to be worth a great deal to American clients. The market was simply much bigger, the funnel of potential customers was deeper, and clients were used to paying properly for good work.

It's the single most useful commercial lesson of my career, and I still see it everywhere. Brands that sell in one market at one price, without asking what the same product is worth somewhere else. Consultants who charge what their peers charge. Founders who discount because they're nervous, and then wonder why customers don't value what they've bought.

Buying out my partner, and selling

I built the business in New York with a business partner. Over time it became clear he didn't want to be involved any further, so I bought him out. It was the right call for both of us, and it meant the decisions from then on were mine.

A couple of years after we opened, I was lucky enough to sell the business while it was making a really good profit. It was acquired and became BORN. I say lucky, and timing always plays a part, but selling while profitable was also a choice. Too many founders wait until they have to sell. You get a very different conversation when you don't.

The rest of the New York story

New York was good to me in every way. My girlfriend came out to join me. We got a dog. We got married. We had two children. Five years that changed everything, at work and at home, and I came back to London in 2015 a different person to the one who left.

What I took from the agency years

• Price from the top of the market, not the bottom. Find out what the best customers in the biggest market pay before you set a number. Cost-plus pricing leaves money on the table.
• Where you sell matters as much as what you sell. The same product in a bigger, richer market can be worth multiples. It's why I spend so much time with founders on new markets and marketplaces.
• Confidence is a pricing tool. We won more pitches at the higher price, not fewer. A low price tells the customer you're not sure.
• Understand the machinery. Having built the early shops by hand, I still look under the bonnet first. Most growth problems have a plain technical or operational cause.
• Sell when you don't need to. The best exit conversations happen when the business is profitable and you can walk away from the table.
• Be generous. Handing a client to a departing developer felt like a loss at the time. It became a friendship, a board seat and one of the best stories I have.