Navigating the Wild Blue: How Drones are Transforming Marine Conservation

Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Now, if you've got a passion, something that maybe you've enjoyed since your childhood years, and you're trying to build a business around it, then my guest today is going to be someone that you really want to listen to. And also, if you're building a business that really struggles because it has maybe some compliance issues, it's in a, in a sensitive industry, Then again, my guest today is going to be someone you really want to listen to because he is building drones that are helping to monitor marine environments. And we're talking to an entrepreneur who's normally based near me here in the west of England, but today is in an unknown location in Latin America. It's quite secret, so we can't say where he is exactly. Matt Johnson, I hope that doesn't make it sound too much like James Bond is calling.

Thanks, Jim, for that very exciting introduction.

You're welcome. We're going to have you discuss Marble, which is this amazing company which is building drones. Matt, tell us about the foundation of this business and the passion that you've got for the problem that you're trying to solve.

Yeah. Well, so yeah, I mean, I've been passionate about planes since I was very young. I usually say like, yeah, I have pictures of me when I was 2 years old sitting on top of a stack of pillows next to my dad flying a general aviation plane. And yeah, ended up doing a career in aerospace engineering, got pretty bored with it because large planes haven't changed much in the past like 50 years. And interestingly, there's lots of things happening in unmanned aviation now, drones. So I started the company because in the UK, there weren't many companies you could work for in that space and pretty quickly just turned that passion for drones into drones specifically for monitoring marine environments. Because you see, the big issue with monitoring the sea is it's the hardest problem because it's a very, very large area and you need to monitor it constantly. Because right now it's still a complete wild west. So that's why you have, you know, protecting, you have marine protected area that the UN wants to protect 30% of the planet with this. by 2030. And there's currently nowhere to monitor them because there's no data. So what we're trying to do really is take that technology and massively improve it so you can deploy it at a very large scale to monitor the seas.

Matt, just for those of us that are uninitiated, what would a drone be monitoring at sea? And what would be the challenge, as it were, of running a drone out at sea?

Well, I mean, the thing that typically drones monitor today at sea, and that's kind of a solved problem for those types of customers, monitoring borders, for example. So you have, for example, the boats that are crossing between France and the UK right now, the small boats, Home Office spends $200 million a year on monitoring those just with drones. But you can imagine that's ridiculously expensive and only people doing border control or the military are going to be able to afford this. And that's only going to be in the wealthiest countries. The issue is going to be for like, say, businesses. So you're going to have, for example, there are regulations now if you want to set up a wind farm that you need to do an environmental assessment before you install the farm and after it's been done so that you can see you haven't had much of an impact on the environment. Or you might have countries in the Caribbean that have issues with border control, like drug trafficking, weapon trafficking. Don't know if you've seen what's happening in Haiti at the minute. where it's basically the state is failing. So you have countries around that that are wayward and they don't have $200 million a year to spend on drones. And so what we're doing is basically bringing down the cost massively so that we can empower, again, environmental protection, smaller countries to protect their maritime resources, all these types of use cases.

It sounds a whole new area and you've been building this out of the UK, but you've gone global. But, you know, this is a show about how you get noticed, Matt. And how do you build the brand of Marble? Because plainly you're selling to governments there rather than consumers. These are like B2B or, you know, government purchases. How do you overcome the problem of selling to a community who by definition are risk-averse? They normally go with the big companies like Airbus or Boeing. or Inmarsat, for example, which is a former client of mine, because they've got regulatory approval, they've got government connections. How did you and Marble break through that network of established connections?

Well, I guess we kept going. That's how we made it happen, because there were plenty of mistakes along the way. Originally, we thought, oh, it's going to be very hard to get that, say, £200 million contract at the UK does for monitoring the channel. Like, you know, we're not going to do that as a startup. So we joined some framework you have with defense to get R&D money. And that's kind of like how the UK might fund you at an early stage. So we did a little bit of this, but you don't want to become dependent on that R&D money because that usually doesn't lead to actually any procurement. And often as well, that money is funded for a specific problem that the customer identifies, but it might not actually be the right one to work on because they, like defense might be, oh, this is very exciting. And it's actually not, you as an expert in the field, that's not what you should be doing. So we did a bit of this, but then we thought, okay, let's actually sell to smaller governments, the one that can't afford that level of cost for their marine monitoring. And that didn't work because at an early stage with a prototype, you can't really sell to those people either. So ultimately, through trial and error, mostly we ended up selling to nonprofits. Which was an ideal starting point because we could provide, even with a prototype, something that was of very, very high value to them because they couldn't get, as you said, a drone from Boeing, for example. And so we did operation in a few different countries with an NGO. And those relationships were built, as you said, without marketing because we're not trying to reach the general public. So it was mostly us trying to figure out, okay, who are the people that could use this? And then going to trade shows, going to events. And through their sheer volume, managing to hit those people ultimately.

I see. So you did mention there as well about costs. Is it possible for you to just share with us, you know, what sort of price point are you marketing at compared to those big companies? Or if you don't want to give it an exact number, maybe percentages in terms of the positioning that you've taken with Marble vis-à-vis the big companies.

So it's because it's a new market that is quite complex. There is no clear cost values and people will pay vastly different amounts for the same thing. As I said, for a politicized problem, like small boats crossing the channel, the UK is going to pay a ridiculous amount. But long-term, I think the metric is going to be the same as for satellite data. It's going to be the dollar per square kilometer at a given resolution. And it's going to be a higher dollar per square kilometer if you want more resolution. And then every time you want that image, you will have to repay. So if you want monitoring every 30 minutes, then you'll pay every 30 minutes. If you want it once a day, you'll just pay once. Today it doesn't work like that. So it's much harder to explain, but broadly, we're broadly 50 times cheaper per dollar, I mean, dollar per square kilometer. But that's what you need to do that because if you want, again, like to monitor for a wind farm, nobody's going to pay $200 million a year to monitor your wind farm. So.

Yeah, presumably the wind farms don't move that fast either, do they, compared to the—

Yeah, they don't need a—

Immigrant.

Exactly.

But when you were going out to trade shows, were you doing that globally or did you find the strategy was to sort of just stay close to home?

We've done both, definitely a larger volume in the UK just because or in Europe, just because it being easier. We've done some, we did some trade shows in Southeast Asia. We, some of our leads came from like trade shows in France as well. But yeah, the largest volume definitely in the UK. But, and to be fair as well, a large amount of those leads came from initiating conversation online without having to necessarily travel. Because people tend to be responsive when you reach out directly with a compelling story as to why you want to talk to them. So I think it's a combination of those face-to-face, mostly around where we are, and then reaching out online.

Well, Matt, you talk about a compelling story. I am interested in the backstory of the name Marble because it's not the most obvious to have a company name basically of stone for a drone. One would think it might be called, you know, Drones Are Us or, you know, Aqua Drones or something to do with drones in the water. Where does the name name come from? Because that origin story sounds as though it's played a part as well in your success.

Yeah, it's interesting with that name is we do get quite a lot of requests for people wanting to sell us marble. So if you want good marble, I have plenty of recommendations. But so the name came from like this. One thing I wanted to avoid was a reference to drones or UAVs or RPAS or UAS, because there's the vocabulary in our industry, like it's constantly changing. And when I started the company in 2016, I don't know if you remember back then, if you were to say drones, people weren't saying the toy quadcopters, they were thinking the drones that are used in the Middle East to fire weapons. And so I thought, I don't want vocabulary to be tied to the company because I don't know what that might, you might end up being attached to based on how the vocabulary changes in the future. So that was like number one, I didn't want anything with drones or something. And then the second element was I started this company early on, I said, out of passion for aerospace. And one of the things that drives me is building sustainable aviation. And the big airplanes and Airbus are really hard to decarbonize because it's really hard to make them electric. It's probably going to be hydrogen driven and, you know, very expensive projects. And so I thought if I want to work on electrification of aerospace, working on that at a smaller scale with drones, it's like an easier thing. So there was like that drive of having a simple name with no drones in it and want something that resonates with— environmental protection, like decarbonization. And so the name Marble came because the official name of the first picture, or one of the first pictures that was taken of the Earth from space is called the Blue Marble. That's the actual name of the photo. And that was at a time when there weren't many. And so that picture that illustrated how small the Earth is relative to the vastness of space, that picture ended up used a lot for early discussion about sustainability. So kind of like, yeah, Marble, simple name, no drones in it. And there is that tying it back up to sustainability. So that's why.

Yeah, very, very interesting because you've, you've got a great narrative around a story around a name. And the reason I'm interested in that is because the origin story of a company name gives the founder and the sales team a great introduction piece when you're going to meet people, doesn't it? Gives you a shared story that the potential customer is interested in hearing. Because you get aligned, presumably your clients are aligned with your vision and purpose, Matt, as well. But when it comes to the regulatory side, and I want to raise this because, you know, I used to import cars to China, for example, and the regulatory side was as complex as the marketing because I was able to sell cars, but then getting them through the system In China was as challenging. How are you, if you like, getting compliance so that you can keep doing the marketing to get the sales at the same time knowing that where you sell the drones will be able to actually take delivery of the drones?

That's a very interesting question, especially in the drone space because the drone space is heavily constrained by regulation. And that's, I mean, there are probably some regulation about imports and like, you know, when Sometimes when your performance makes it almost like borderline to a defense system and there might be issues with this, but like that's almost second order to the main problem in the drone space, which is how do you operate the drone in a way that is safe and it doesn't impact other airspace users? So that's like, you know, other airplanes, paragliders, gliders, whatever. And that problem isn't solved today because you can imagine like the way when planes started flying 100 years ago, you didn't have robotic aircraft flying around. And so the way it was built, That infrastructure for people to fly in is just, it relies on people seeing each other. That's obviously just for a small plane. You can imagine the big one when you fly in clouds and stuff like those planes can fly without seeing anything by using electronic means. But for the low altitude where drones fly, it's not this, it's not based on this, it's people seeing each other. Because of this, drones need to be constantly monitored by a pilot on the ground. And that pilot needs to be able to see the drone and drones tend to be quite small. So that means you can't fly further away than 500 meters.

Okay.

And you can imagine if you want to do marine monitoring, flying 500 meters away from the shore, that's not going to get you very far. You want to go like tens or hundreds of kilometers away. So with that in mind, either you say, well, we'll just wait until the regulation changes, or you find a way to like get exemption permits, or even better, you find a market that isn't affected by those regulations. And that's what we did. So the reason we went, one of the reasons at least that we went for marine monitoring is that there are a lot less people flying above water. In general, you don't want to be flying with a small airplane, like far away from the shore at low level, because if you lose your engine, because most of these planes have single engine, you're not going to glide back to the shore. So typically people only fly small airplanes quite high if they go above water. And in general, they don't go above water because there's not much to see. It's not interesting. So yeah, basically in terms of regulation, what we said is like, you know, it's a hard enough problem technically. to build drones and to sell it to governments, let's find the market that doesn't have as much regulatory complexity to start with. Um, and that's why we did— one of the reasons we did maritime monitoring.

Yeah, that's a really, really smart strategy that I'm— the reason I'm calling that out is because I think the way that you've identified where the opportunity lies so that you can fulfill the, the dream and the passion that you've got, um, without being bogged down in, if you like, for example, urban airspace. I know a place like Singapore, for example, and Beijing as well, no drones allowed over the built-up areas as well, Matthias, right? So that's gonna be a real problem. Um, so now you've been building the company, um, is the distribution strategy going to be still through Marble, or are you looking for partners around the world? How, how does that roll out? Because if it's a Quite a niche that you're working in with drones and in maritime. What's your distribution and marketing strategy to scale the business?

So marine monitoring is, it might sound niche, but it's actually a pretty big market. So I think it's probably going to be like $35 billion or so by 2030. So that's plenty big enough. And even the, so I mentioned we started as nonprofit, that is very small. You'd want to grow out of this. But even if you look at just purely small governments or businesses that need monitoring, that's already in the billions. So we can build a really big business just in those markets. The question of scaling, it's an interesting one. I guess what we're selling is not actually the drone. We're selling the data. We want to be, if you imagine the way you purchase satellite imagery today is you don't go and buy your own satellite to put it in space and then connect to it and then play around and then get the data. You just go on a website from someone who operates the satellite on your behalf, and that person sells the data to you, but to everyone else as well. And that's how you get the cost down, actually. Drones, interestingly, today are not like that at all. Drones are like satellites 50 years ago, where if you wanted data, you had to buy your own satellite, put it in space, and obviously you had to be a government agency from like the US or like a wealthy country to be able to do that. Again, drones for marine monitoring or for large-scale application are still very much this way. What we're building is that version of drones, which looks a lot like satellite today, where we will be operating drones on behalf of everyone else, collecting the data, and then we'll sell it through a web interface. So the scaling for us is to right now win a few government contracts, but later on just install that infrastructure and then sell the data to multiple users. And I guess the big advantage we have of this is because we own the full stack of like the drone, the software, the sensors, We've built it up in a way that is actually very cheap to manufacture. So we use 3D printing, for example, for the drones. So I think it's going to be a very hard thing and very risky thing for us to be able to do that scaling. But we have a lot of fundamental elements that I think makes it possible. But obviously, like the execution and having the right people to be able to achieve this is going to be like an important element.

Yeah, very, very interesting. So with the business, it sounds like you've been growing it over 8 years, you've made great progress because if you're already selling to governments in Latin America, for example. You know, that's, you've gone global brilliantly from Chippenham, which is just up the road in Wiltshire. If there's been something that hasn't gone quite as planned, Matt, that you'd share from a marketing point of view, what would that be? There's someone else pursuing this sort of B2B stroke government-focused business, What guidance would you give?

Well, I think the thing we ended up getting right ultimately is what I've said is like starting, like, I guess it's like starting from that niche of NGOs was really useful and being able to build your reputation progressively. I guess if we were a US company, we could have probably raised like, you know, tens of millions and then go straight away to sell to the big people. But I think it's quite difficult to do that in the UK. Just having a really good go-to-market strategy to be able to sell a prototype early on and then build that credibility with those early customers and then kind of like building your way up. I think that was a good thing for us to do. Maybe the thing that we didn't do is just general marketing, building the brand, because we discarded this on the basis that we were not selling to the general public. So we didn't need to do this. But the issue with this is it's when you get in front of high-level decision makers, inevitably they're going to look for like your online presence. And if you have very little, I think that can be detrimental. So I think looking back, that's probably something I would invest a bit more in, not like a ridiculous amount. Because I think for us, it might be easier, it's easy for this to become like a vanity thing where you just want to have a good presence, but I think doing more than what we've done would have been a good thing. So yeah, I would say that. And if we had known upfront to do that good go-to-market strategy, I would have started there. We needed a few mistakes on the way to to get that.

Yeah, interesting. Increasingly having a brand, especially for the founder as well. Presumably, Matt, you're doing more and more speaking engagements. So what are you doing to raise the profile of you as the CEO?

This literally just got started. I haven't done enough, nearly enough recently for the same reason I said, like I wasn't doing marketing because I thought it wasn't important. So I think I'd need to come on the podcast again in the future and tell you how impactful it's been. that change we've made. But yeah, I haven't done enough speaking of— I mean, I've just been talking directly to individuals that I thought were the right one to talk to, but I haven't tried to raise the company brand or my brand personally.

Okay, well, that sounds like every company goes through those different stages, don't they? And founders do as well. If there's one piece of advice that you'd give, because you have weathered the storm, I mean, you've Managed to build the business of Marble over 8 years. You've managed to get through COVID, for example, not to mention we've had the war in Ukraine, which presumably has made some impact on drone availability and drone parts. What would be a tip, if you like, that you'd give a fellow entrepreneur on how to succeed?

I mean, I think most things would be very industry-specific, so I don't know how general it would be. But I guess for me, the main thing has been being able to keep going. And I mean, for example, I mean, I went through an accelerator in London called Entrepreneur First. I don't know if you've heard of them, EF. And most companies that come out of this either go very big very quickly or they die out. And that's kind of like the VC market. That's what people want companies to do. Either like, you know, you generate return very quickly, but they don't want someone who's going to take like 10 years to actually get somewhere. But for us, we needed that because our problem is very difficult. We're constrained by regulation. And so, but the only way for this to be true is to have someone who's going to be relentless about keeping going. And the only way you do that is if you really, really care about the problem. Otherwise, you're going to like, I don't think I have a particular, like, it's my discipline to just keep going. I mean, I'm sure I have some, you know, good habits and things. But the main thing is like, I'm really passionate about it. building. And so I guess the advice would be, you know, pick something that you're really going to care about and you really want whatever you're building to happen in the world. And that's going to keep you going when it's tough. So yeah, that would be the main advice.

Matt Johnson, that's a beautiful piece of advice. You're plainly spending a little bit of time on planes as well, the manned ones. When you're flying, what would you read? What would you take with a book?

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't read enough, I think. But the one that I've frequently advised friends to read is a book called More Than My Share of It All. It's the biography from Kelly Johnson, Clarence Kelly Johnson, who was the person who created the Skunk Works. So the Skunk Works that you might have heard of, it was started, I think, during World War II as a department of Lockheed Martin. that was working on like the very fast-moving projects and ultimately was responsible for a lot of very famous airplanes, secretive airplanes in the 20th century. And I really like this book because if you come from an aerospace background, there aren't many great startups in the space or people really moving the needle outside of SpaceX. And so it's hard to find inspiration anywhere because large airplanes, are the same today as they were 50 years ago. If you work at Airbus or Boeing, it's like everything is about like 3% better over 20 years. It's not really exciting. And it's hard to translate that into starting a company and telling yourself, I know we can make disruptive change very quickly, like, because you can't see that anywhere, again, outside of like SpaceX. And that book is fantastic because it tells you the story of like the '40s, '50s, '60s, where they went from, you know, flying very slow airplanes to like flying Mach 3 and at crazy altitudes. And they show how they did this on teams of like 20 or 40 people. And really, I remember reading this whilst I was in Airbus. I was like, wow, actually, a lot more is possible than what I can see around me. And I think it kind of got lost. So for people in this field, or people building difficult hardware, I think this book's really good. So that would be my recommendation.

That's wonderful. We'll put a link to that book in the show notes. Matt Johnson, founder and CEO of Marble. If people want to find out more about you and to connect with you and the mission that you've got with your drones and helping to connect maritime and monitoring, how can they do that?

I think the easiest is going to be on our website, which is marble.aero. There's like a contact form. Otherwise, the email is just contact@marble.aero. I think. And That's, I think that would be the easiest to get in touch with us.

Matt, thank you for joining me. I know you're in an undisclosed location in South America at the minute, so it makes it all sound, you know, pretty, uh, pretty undercover, but appreciate you coming up for air and talking to me on the show today.

Oh, thank you very much, Jim. It was great chatting with you.

What a wonderful story. And, you know, as Matt has got on his website, like 20% of all fishing is still taking place illegally, for example. We know that at sea, people are being transported and so on. So the need to monitor the oceans is imperative. And what's come across today in Matt's conversation is the importance of passion as a founder, because times aren't always that easy. But also what I love is the strategy that it's not all necessarily about building websites and blog posts. He's taken really a constructive approach by going to NGOs first. Getting proof of concept in an organization that needs what he's got, but doesn't have the requirement for compliance that a government would have, get proof of concept, and then be able to take that to government. So a textbook example of how you can overcome short-term, seemingly insurmountable problems by using some great logic. So do check out marble.aero. It's a fantastic website, fantastic business, and we wish Matthew All the best with building that brand. And until we meet again, I do encourage you to keep on communicating. You've been with me, Jim James, on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Podcast.