Throwing Shade: Why Start a Start-up?

MOJO-CX© from birth to bootstrapping to £1m revenue

“I bootstrapped a start-up to £1m revenue in 3 years. Here’s what I learned… It’s really hard and I’ve aged terribly.” – MOJO-CX© Co-Founder & CEO, Jimmy Hosang

As furlough and redundancies rolled in over the COVID pandemic, the ambition to become self-sufficient was felt by people across the globe and we witnessed a surge in the number of new businesses. In the UK alone the creation of new businesses jumped 14% during the pandemic.

MOJO-CX© was founded back in 2018 but managed to grow significantly throughout the pandemic. Today our CEO looks back on the journey from the creation of “The Modular Analytics Cookbook” to The Modular Analytics Company to what we know as MOJO-CX© today, used internationally by leading retailers, utility providers and insurance firms just to name a few.

The following is a summary of Jimmy Hosang’s Throwing Shade Podcast. You can listen to the full episode ‘Why Start a Start-up?’ on Spotify, Apple, and Google (Contains some explicit language).

The Modular Analytics Cookbook

After years working in contact centres there was an expectation gap spotted between the hype around contact centre software and the reality of the products. It was something closer to “How can we fire out data as quickly as possible?”, rather than considering how actionable and truly valuable that data was.

The identification of this problem mixed with a skill for taking a modular approach to analytics in an industry where data was often too complex began to get the cogs turning and an idea was born. Not a business, but a book named “The Modular Analytics Cookbook”.

The idea was to showcase innovative approaches on how to take a modular approach to analytics and create repeatable processes that resulted in real action and provable results. However, after deciding on headings for each chapter the content of the book wasn’t flowing as easily as predicted. So, the idea was put to rest whilst contracting within various analytics roles continued.

Building the dream team

At this point in 2017 discussions had begun with long-term colleague and friend, Sean Northam, about starting a business. Not yet in the position to do so, the idea of “The Modular Analytics Company” was born and then quickly swept under the rug for the time being.

Advancing into Head of Analytics roles, Jimmy started to float the idea of creating modular analytics capabilities with a focus on outcomes to highly trusted individuals in senior management who turned out to be less than impressed with the idea and (in Jimmy’s words) actually thought it was “sh*t” – not the desired response.

But two people disagreed with senior management, MOJO-CX© Co-Founder & CRO Sean Northam and MOJO-CX© Managing Director Sam Phin. With other experts in the field seeing the vision, the ball started rolling with a contract to help a contact centre in their customer journey analytics.

With momentum behind the idea of MOJO-CX© starting to build, the first projects were rolling in with a focus on customer journey, analytics and coaching (all areas which still play a pivotal role within the company to this day).

Although still consultancy-focused at this point, a problem was identified in that the technology the team needed to perform their outcome-based projects was expensive and outdated. As a result, experts in speech analytics and data science (Roozbeh Jalali and George Hartshorn) were brought in to facilitate the building of MOJO-CX©’s conversation analytics software (now known as Listen) so customer conversations could be used to inform required coaching actions in contact centres.

From TMAC to MOJO-CX©

After three years of entirely self-funded growth and the addition of two other products (customer journey orchestration platform, Act, and coaching and performance management software, Learn), in 2021 MOJO-CX© hit the milestone of £1m revenue and began the first funding round.

“I'm nearly 40. My knees are knackered. I'm tired. I'm going greyer and greyer every day. Would I do it again? And my answer is actually "no", because I've got so much that I still want to achieve with MOJO-CX©.”

In November 2022 The Modular Analytics Company was officially rebranded and became MOJO-CX©. This was a pivotal move in bringing the three solutions, that were previously sold as separate products, into a single platform that provides everything a contact centre needs to unlock agent potential and boost the customer experience.

On reflection there are things that could have been done differently when it comes to the creation of MOJO-CX© and the journey so far, but it’s impossible to tell where we would be today without the additional challenges and bumps in the road.

With three contact centre solutions and even bigger plans for the future, MOJO-CX© continues to build the team and platform with a goal of becoming the market-leaders in contact centre software.