The Pioneer interview with... Justine Roberts

In 1999, Justine Roberts was working in investment banking, unaware that a coming family holiday would lead her to create the UK’s biggest community network for parents, Mumsnet. 

Justine has guided Mumsnet’s growth for over two decades, always in ways we would describe as outside-in. Today the Mumsnet forum has 9 million unique visitors clocking up around 100 million page views every month.  

Q. Setting up Mumsnet, you weren’t changing an organisation, you were creating a new solution. What gave you the determination to take the leap, your version of what we call Burningness – the pain, fear or ambition behind what followed? 

When I went on my first family holiday, when my children were about nine-months old, I made some very, very poor choices – about where to go, what time zone, how far the flight was…And the resort, as it turned out, wasn’t at all family-friendly even though it was supposed to be. 

The other parents and I were sitting around the hotel pool thinking what a mistake we’d made. And I sort of had a lightbulb moment, we could use the internet to connect people who had already taken holidays with children. 

And of course, it’s not just about holidays. It’s about everything. We’re doing a job [being a parent] that none of us trained for.  

I came back from holiday and gave it a go. Luckily, I had a friend who could code and was able to get the bare bones of a website together. We didn’t initially have any plans to have a forum as part of the website, it was going to be reviews but Steve, who was coding the site, asked if we wanted a forum. I had an idea that this could be quite a good thing because then people could communicate with each other.  

Q. As a founder you still have doubts about whether an idea really can work, for customers initially and then in a way that’s sustainable as a business. What was the first Moment of Belief that gave you encouragement that it might succeed?  

It rapidly became clear that the forum was the thing, really. I started off by using it myself. I would ask lots of questions in the early days. I encouraged my friends who were pregnant to ask questions. I rushed to answer them and found that two other people had already answered. It was at that point that I thought it’s going to be all right. 

Once I knew there were more people than me asking and answering questions it picked up quite quickly, growing by word of mouth. Apart from getting a few pieces in the press, there was no marketing budget. 

Q. Chasing funding can move entrepreneurs to focus on the needs of investors. How did you maintain focus on your customers while also growing belief that Mumsnet could be sustainable as a business?  

We weren’t the owners with an idea. We were living it. We were on the site genuinely making friends with the people posting. And I think that meant it was much more authentic, it had a more authentic feel.  

The dot.com bubble had burst and people had started losing a bit of faith in the internet. At that time we were still on dial-ups and it was all quite a painful process. But the value of the forum for people using it became clear when we asked the community for money. People would send in cheques for £250 because they were finding the forum so useful. People would write and tell me how Mumsnet had been a lifesaver, sometimes in very practical ways. 

It is a genuine community, and they are genuine stakeholders – producing the content, shaping the business, guiding who we would advertise with and who we wouldn’t. There was a lot of intrinsic value but no real way of making any money until around 2006-2007 when people started getting excited about Web 2.0 and social media – engaging with people as opposed to broadcasting. 

Until that point, people were telling me it was never going to work but I was saying ‘yes, but look at how much people love it. It’s got to work, we’ve got to find a way.’ 

Q. How have you stayed connected to your audience now you have quite a large team of people managing Mumsnet and as your own children have grown up?  

We have a mission. We want to make parents’ lives easier. We believe that by allowing parents to connect, particularly mums, it makes their lives easier. And we don’t work with anyone (any commercial partners for example) who doesn’t make their lives easier. 

I think we’re lucky, we have a 24/7 focus group. If people are upset about anything we’re doing, they have a very easy route to tell us, and we will listen. 

There’s no point in doing something that people think is fake, that they don’t trust or is cheesy. That doesn’t serve the business well. We do tell advertisers if it isn’t going to work. This is why brands are on Mumsnet, because it is a trusted place.  

The community has on many occasions educated us too. We were doing a partnership with the Baby Show and it was our users who pointed out that Clarion Events that run the Baby Show also run arms fairs. And that didn’t feel in keeping with supporting parents, so we stopped doing it.  

What I’m trying to say, in a long-winded way, is that we try, and we listen. We admit our mistakes and we rely on the community to keep us honest. 

Q. As well as a desire to connect people and share knowledge, you had a desire to create a new culture where being a parent wasn’t something to hide. How has Mumsnet given power to mums' voices and the things that matter to them?  

I think it still has a long way to go. I still think people pigeonhole mums and think mums can be a little bit dull and insular. One of the things that I always find about Mumsnet is that it’s really funny. I think because none of us find our own mother funny, or very few of us do, we all have a kind of prejudice about the word ‘mum’. It’s the most common prejudice. But when you read Mumsnet you realise it’s genuinely funny. 

We raise women’s voices by providing a platform for them to connect. There are about 9 million people on Mumsnet. There’s a very wide range of opinion but what gets me is how witty it is. I think if we’ve done anything, we’ve raised the fact that women of this age don’t stop being women. They don’t stop being funny. If people realise this then I’m very happy, very happy to think we might have contributed a little to change how women are seen. But there’s still a lot more to do. 

Q. How do you stay alert to the ways parents solve the issues you’ve always helped them with, aware of the potential for new and better solutions to emerge that might take over from Mumsnet? 

Mumsnet is a platform and that platform is agnostic. We were a website for desktops when we started. We’ve changed as we know 89% of our users are now accessing on mobile. We’ve done podcasts and TV shows. We will be user-led and take Mumsnet to wherever it makes sense for it to go. 

You could argue, and I’ve had a lot of people say, it looks so old-fashioned. But you can’t argue with the numbers. We still get 50% of new mums coming onto Mumsnet to this day and that hasn’t really changed from when it started.  

Anonymity is really important. It allows mums to be themselves, to ask really honest questions. Talk about their mother-in-law. Talk about their partner. So I think being text-based is how people want it to be. I’m not wedded to it and I’m not saying it will be forever. If we end up living in a virtual reality world, we’ll need to have a Mumsnet meeting place, but I don’t see that.  

AI obviously brings a whole new different challenge. It is a fantastic tool that we can use to make the business more efficient but the human-ness of mums is what makes it special. So we’re going to work very hard to make sure the content on Mumsnet remains written by humans and not AI. 

Q. Why do you think organisations find it so hard to be, and to keep on being, customer-led?  

We happen to run a forum so it’s easy for us to stay in touch with the customer. We’ve always managed to be self-funding so don’t have this competing set of goals focused on meeting growth metrics. This has been a massive help in terms of being able to focus fully on what the customer wants and not what shareholders want. 

I had to do Radio 4’s Great Lives once and I did Bill Shankly, the Liverpool manager. He just wanted to make people happy and had a very strong sense that it was all about the fans, not about the owners. There’s a part of me that is naturally that way inclined – to engage, to listen. It does get harder because I’m not the target audience anymore. I need a lot of people of the right demographic to make sure I’m not missing anything. You have to work harder when you’re not the target audience. You have to make sure you’re not sticking to old ideas that worked in your day but aren’t appropriate anymore. You need to realise you’re no longer the expert in this but still stick true to the core values of listening and learning. 

Q. Are there any examples of organisations that you particularly admire as customer pioneers in other sectors?  

There are a few actually, though they are new entrants and have an advantage where their tech is so much better so they can be much more focused on the user experience. The first is Monzo. It doesn’t complicate things. I feel sorry for the incumbents, but you know, Monzo makes it a very simple experience and they have a very high level of trust amongst their consumers, most banks don’t. They’ve done amazingly really. But they did have the advantage of being a new entrant. 

It's similar for Octopus Energy. Based on having great tech, they’ve been able to find a voice, to keep things simple and to talk in an authentic way.  

An example of a long-established company that I think does well, I do have to declare an interest because I’m on the board, is Admiral Insurance. They will say they’re customer-led but actually what they really are is people-led.  

They have devolved a lot of autonomy to the front line and that’s how they’ve stayed customer-focused. They treat their staff amazingly well. 

The motto of the founder was ‘happy staff, happy customer’ and that’s how they do it. They are the only British company to have been in the Best Place to Work rankings for the last 25 years. It really works. It is a happy innovative environment because they’ve focused on the team. In many ways, it’s like a start-up just with 6,000 employees.