START-UP NATION/Cleverbug:Kealan Lennon is keenly ambitious for his online print business, but along with many others he is finding a lack of IT knowhow in Ireland is a hindrance, writes JOANNE HUNT
BUTCHER, BAKER, candlestick maker? Whatever you do for a crust, Irish start-up Cleverbug wants you to use its website to design your business cards, which it will then deliver to your door.
Cleverbug chief executive Kealan Lennon, a chartered accountant, had seen the potential for profit in paper long before founding the venture. Buying out a business that designed leaflets and cartons for the pharmaceutical industry at the age of 25, five years later he sold it to US packaging company MeadWestvaco for $17 million. The company asked him to join its board of directors in Europe.
“As much as I was confident, I was overawed in many respects by the invitation, and then I thought, I’ve loads of cash, I don’t need to work, if I cock it up, I cock it up, so basically I said ‘Yes’.”
Heading up mergers and acquisitions for MeadWestvaco in Europe, the inspiration for Cleverbug came. Purchasing a company that was using the web to design DVD sleeves for the entertainment sector, Lennon saw its turnover grow from $4 million to $32 million in 18 months.
“It always stuck with me that there was a nugget of an idea in there to do something with the whole area of design and print online that had never been exploited,” says Lennon.
Leaving MeadWestvaco in 2006, Lennon busied himself purchasing education publisher CJ Fallon and becoming chairman of consortium iRadio. Last year, Cleverbug took shape.
“At the back of my mind there was this big opportunity all the way through to basically change the way small businesses and sole traders get access to highly cost-effective alternatives to what traditional designers and supply chains are offering. That’s where Cleverbug came out of.”
Raising $2.5 million to fund development, with $1.8 million coming from the Irish venture capitalists Delta Partners and the rest from Lennon and angel investors, the company’s target market is everyone from hairdressers to hackney drivers.
“There are 50 million micro-businesses between North America and Europe alone that have need for our services,” says Lennon. “DJs, dentists, the guitar lesson guy, tennis coaches – it’s any self-employed sole trader type. It’s a market worth $25 billion.”
Unlike some printers who accept a minimum order for business cards that's often far more than needed, with Cleverbug.co.ukyou can toy with thousands of pre-made templates tailored to your sector and then get your first 10 cards for free, delivered to you. If you like them, you can get another 100 for less than £20.
“We’ve got 10 cards for free but, from a business perspective, I know if you go to the effort of creating the card online and if you like your cards, you’re going to come back and order more,” says Lennon.
If you are a sole trader or small business that’s really stuck for ideas, the Cleverbug site allows you to choose from a range a snappy marketing slogans to give your business card that extra punch.“We want to help small businesses play with the big boys,” says Lennon, adding he wants the Cleverbug brand to stand for simplicity, customer service and quality.
Starting with business cards, Lennon says the company will ultimately move into designing promotional materials for small businesses. He says with the design market moving increasingly online, the company already has a strong wind at its back and he expects it to raise a further $10 million (€7.88 million) in investment in the next 12 months.
Travelling between the company’s Ranelagh headquarters and Silicon Valley in recent weeks, Lennon hints strongly at the company’s launch by September of a new “unique social product”, a “print product in the business to consumer space”.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time on the west coast for the past few weeks and to say we are getting a lot of attention is putting it mildly. We’re getting serious amount of attention for this product.”
Already employing 10 staff in Dublin, four in Romania and two in the US, with five new jobs advertised, Lennon says he expects Cleverbug to have well beyond 50 staff in the next three years.
A hindrance, however, is the lack of IT talent in Ireland, which the firm needs to develop the backend wizards on its site.
“We struggle so hard to get developers, they are just not there. The problem is in the university structure,” he says.
But with a background in buying and selling companies, is the plan to ultimately sell Cleverbug?
“I think we’ve got a long way to go on this. I’ve got plans for this to be somewhere between a billion and half a billion dollars.
“There’s nothing stopping us from reaching half a billion in revenue. It’s a big marketplace and we’ve got a strong team.
“I really want this company to be very large. The market is there. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do it.”
