Justine Roberts is CEO-owner of Mumsnet. She founded the UK parents’ digital site in 2000 after having quit investment banking to become a freelance sports reporter. She experienced a holiday from hell, her first with one-year-old twin daughters. Everything about the family’s choice of luggage, flights, hotel and resort seemed wrong: “As new parents, we knew nothing and ended up choosing the wrong destination, with a terribly long flight. We were sitting around the pool, with other families, all moaning, saying, ‘if only we had known’.” The whole experience spurred Roberts into action.
Together with a TV producer friend, she launched Mumsnet as an online forum with the co-founders, friends and family initially creating multiple nicknames, spelling out their problems and answering their own questions. They had tried and failed to raise £4mn for the venture but the first dotcom crash intervened. They were forced to bootstrap Mumsnet from a bedroom in Roberts’ family home. That is where the business stayed for eight years before renting its first office in 2008. By then, Facebook (launched in 2004) and Twitter (in 2006) were winning advertisers over to the idea of user-generated content. Mumsnet has since become identified closely with the founder’s interviews with politicians (including the last few UK prime ministers) seeking to influence a key group of voters – her audience.
In 2022, the company made operating profit of £2.3mn on revenue of £7.5mn. Roberts graduated from Oxford University in philosophy, politics and economics. She is a fervent soccer-football fan (of Liverpool in the Premier League) and is a non-executive director of the English Football League.
What were your earliest career ambitions?
I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted to do growing up (other than be a professional footballer which, given my gender, wasn’t a possibility back then). So, post-university I ended up in investment banking where I spent 10 years trying everything from being an economist to market strategist to financial market trader. As soon as I got pregnant, I was certain I wanted out – in those days UK banking was about as family-friendly as an Iron Maiden concert. So I left and followed my passions – football and cricket – and started writing match reports for UK news brands The Times and Telegraph. I grew up thinking I was pretty organised and canny but convinced I wasn’t terribly creative. It took me a while to realise that there’s more to creativity than drawing!
What was your first job?
My very first job was a Saturday job in a sports shop. I learned that even a relatively tedious, repetitive job could be made interesting once a competitive element was introduced (and that I was quite competitive!)
How would you describe Mumsnet?
Mumsnet is an online community of parents that has around 9mn monthly uniques. 90% of our active users are women, and around half of all mums in the UK use it at one time or another. It’s a place people come for practical and emotional advice and support on every aspect of life, from sleepless nights, to meddling mothers-in-law to feckless husbands – and everything in between. Our most popular forum is called “Am I Being Unreasonable” and, despite what popular opinion might contend about mothers, our contributors are very funny: so many people hang out there just for the laughs.
Why did you launch it?
The idea for Mumsnet came from my first family holiday as a parent way back in 1999. Everything about the trip was disastrous and all the parents there bemoaned their choice; ‘if only we’d known before we left’. It turned out to be the lightbulb moment, because I realised that the web would be a great place to tap into the wisdom of others who’d been there and done that – and not just for holiday ideas of course but for all the stuff that I, as a new parent, didn’t have a clue about.
I failed to raise any investment – pretty much everyone turned me down except one guy who generously offered to put his money in if he could run the company instead of me. Before I knew it, the dot-com bubble had burst and we had no choice but to bootstrap our way through the first six years or so. But that turned out to be the right model for growing Mumsnet because we would not have been able to sustain a high-cost business – advertisers were pretty sceptical about the social web back then. It meant we could focus on building the community from the bottom up and it gave the world time to catch on to the idea of web 2.0.
Back in the early days of Mumsnet, I had many aliases and I would go on forums to ask and answer the numerous questions I had as a parent. I remember one moment when a pregnant friend asked me about her pregnancy palpitations and I ruthlessly told her I’d only answer her if she asked on Mumsnet. By the time I’d logged on to reply, she’d already gotten not one but two answers from other users and I vividly remember thinking this might just catch on. I also regularly received emails from members telling me that being part of Mumsnet had, quite literally, saved their lives – users would send us cheques for £250 to keep the servers on. So it was clear, from pretty early on, that people found the site super-valuable. Usage was also growing exponentially even with a zero marketing budget. That was a pretty good sign we were onto something.
What’s special about Mumsnet?
What makes Mumsnet special is that our users are at the heart of the site. Not only do they generate much of the content, but they are a 24-7 focus group and genuine stakeholders in how we run things – who we partner with, what features we develop etc.
Mumsnetters tend to remain anonymous which means that Mumsnet is a uniquely honest place where people speak candidly without feeling the need to perform for their friends and acquaintances on social media. As a result, the advice is genuinely useful and our forums are a good barometer for what the women of the UK are thinking about any given topic at any given time.
We’ve always invested in professional moderation – our average response time to reported posts is under one hour, way faster than the larger platforms. We work hard to keep the conversation civil and to facilitate discussion, and we actively avoid features that lead to filter bubbles – unlike pretty much all other social platforms. Because of this, I think people can genuinely have their minds changed about issues on Mumsnet.
Mumsnet is a place of connection and support and friendship that can materially change people’s lives for the better. Conversational analysis shows that every year, around 1,000 women escape domestic abuse because of the support they receive from other users. Maybe because we didn’t raise capital and user donations kept us going in the early days, we’ve always stayed true to our purpose to make parents’ lives easier – which means we often make decisions that, in the short term at least, aren’t helpful for the bottom line, though I’d contend that the trust that engenders with our audience has helped us grow and thrive over the long-term.
Before Mumsnet, the image of the average mother in the UK was that she was a bit thick, terribly insular, not that funny, and only ever really worried about getting her whites whiter and whether her children were eating their greens (as per TV commercials). She seemingly didn’t care about the broader world – economics, politics – and she couldn’t properly hold an argument together. But this was pure prejudice, and one I’m really pleased that Mumsnet refutes on a daily basis.
In fact, our users are a smart crowd, engaged with the wider world and discussing everything from the Middle East to climate change. We can be an incredible force for change-driving campaigns on things like better maternity services, childcare and flexible working. We didn’t set out to change the world, but the size of our audience gives us access to some powerful people and it would be remiss not to raise the issues our members care about – and try to change things for the better.
Getting to 1mn users was a milestone (achieved around 2008), as was turning a profit soon after (which we’ve maintained ever since). Then, the 2010 General election was christened “the Mumsnet election” by UK daily newspapers. More recently, in 2022, our Q&A with then Prime Minister Boris Johnson went truly viral, kicking off with a bold user question: “Why should we believe anything you say when you have been proven to be a serial liar?”. Just a few months later, he resigned.
Away from the high profile campaigning, I’m most proud of the everyday acts of kindness on the Mumsnet forums. People go out of their way every day to help others – staying up late at night to guide users through the first hours and weeks of trying to breastfeed, swapping advice to deal with postnatal depression or sending a child’s lost favourite toy to a complete stranger. We see things like that all the time.
What are the special challenges faced by Mumsnet?
In an increasingly polarised world, promoting civil discussion isn’t easy but we’re committed to allowing diverse and differing opinions on the site, so long as it’s legal and civil – because it’s the only way to reach any kind of understanding and compromise. We have been sued quite a few times, most notably by Gina Ford – a best-selling author and parenting guru who took exception to some things said about her methods: she tried to get our site shut down.
As the only top-10 social media site in the UK managed, aimed at, and used almost entirely by women, we face more than our fair share of misogyny and stereotyping. We’ve been hacked, swatted and even faced a bomb threat at some point from ‘justice for dads’ types.
What’s your own primary role?
I try to focus on the things where, as CEO, I’m uniquely placed to add the most value (and let others get on with things in the areas where they can do a better job than me). For me, that means Strategy, People & Culture and Comms.
I’ve had to train myself over the years to be more hands-off because, instinctively, I’d probably still be making all the decisions about everything minor thing to do with the site – which isn’t either a good use of my time, or a good model for growing people and scaling a business.
What’s your longer-term vision for your company?
We’re in a pretty fortunate position that our users are creating thousands of posts every single day. In fact, well over 13 average-sized novels worth of content every single day! That volume, combined with the fact that, on Mumsnet, we think you’re more likely to get the unvarnished truth, is a powerful source of data and insight. In the next five years, I’d like those data insights to empower more decision makers – whether in government, business or indeed the large language models – to make sure that women’s needs and voices are prioritised as much as men’s.
And while our USP is human connection and insight, I see no reason not to use AI and automation to help our team be more productive and efficient: we’ve already started down that road and I’m excited by productivity gains we can make. Ultimately, though, we’ll stay true to our mission to make parents’ lives easier by helping mothers to tap into the wisdom of others and I’m agnostic about how we deliver that service. We’ll be led by our audience on that. It’s the advice and the community that matters, not the medium.
Which companies do you most admire?
I have a respect for publications and media that have a very clear sight of what they stand for and who their audience is – and aren’t tempted to veer away from that. The Economist springs to mind. And I can’t help but be blown away by the magnificent pivot that Neflix did from its original incarnation as a DVD-by-mail rental service to a streaming service. That takes unbelievable courage and single-mindedness.
Of course, there’s lots not to admire about big tech, but I’m always impressed by Amazon’s relentless focus on the customer.
And then there’s Admiral Insurance, the UK’s largest car insurer, which in many ways is a 25-year-old start up. It’s the only UK company which has been listed as one of the great places to work every single year for the last 23 years. I’d put that down to their culture which is embedded in the business by the founders. To be able to maintain that culture while scaling to an £8bn market cap and 11,000 employees is an extraordinary achievement – and one that I’m completely in awe of. (I should declare that I’m a board member but I haven’t drunk the kool-aid, honest!)
What are the best lessons you have learned?
I’ve learned tons of things about growing a business. First, starting small and growing organically is just as valid a growth path as raising loads of cash and catapulting to scale. Secondly, building a business really is about the people on the bus and so you need to put lots of effort into recruitment – there really are some 10xers out there and it’s worth trying to find them and doing everything you can to hold on to them. On the flipside to that, as we say in our culture deck, it’s always better to have a hole than an arsehole! I’ve learned that you need to understand your company’s values and over-communicate them – it’s the only way you can expect your team to take the decisions you’d want them to as you grow. And technology renewal and investment isn’t optional – it’s an annual cost of doing business – or you’ll slip into tech debt and that can hold you up for years.
Aside from all that, I’ve learned a couple of things that have genuinely surprised me, namely that ‘smelly washing machine’ is a really valuable search term and that lots of people are surprised that mothers have sex. And perhaps the most valuable life lesson of all: always wear trainers – it helps you get to appointments on time if you can run. Plus you won’t get bunions.
