How James Mishreki Raised £13m With No Product or Revenue | The Midnight Pod Episode 64

Foreign. We're back with episode 64, which has just been confirmed with James Mishrecki. I would say serial proper, D2C entrepreneur, something like that. Is that. Is that a fair description?

I guess so.

And you're from up north originally?

Exactly. From Durham.

I went to Union Newcastle. You went to.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I went to Union Newcastle as well.

Really? Yeah. That was where I originally came across you on LinkedIn. Because I was like, who is this guy? I started reading about Skin and Me and then I started diving into a bunch of other shit, which you've probably done more research on, but I had previously done someone. We then spoke a few months ago about potentially investing in space goods next time, and then thought we'd get you on the pod. I think this. We tried to make this happen maybe a few times before. You had maybe context on. Before we spoke.

Yeah, I think when it came back around, had messaged me. This is actually the first. It's been a funny day today because I've always said no to podcasts and stuff like that, and I've decided to start doing some of them. So this morning I did my first ever one.

Oh, really?

And this is my first ever one being filmed. So this is world first. Exactly. Another one next week.

What changed? What's the motive behind that decision?

Just.

I guess I've always just had my head down and I've always questioned what the value is in it. But I think I can be a good evangelist for my companies. And, um, I think that you can spread the word, you can recruit talent, you can get great pr. And I think it can just be fun talking to interesting people about the stuff you're passionate about. So I just thought, like, why not?

100%.

Yeah.

That's probably the opposite of most guests, because a lot of guests and people in this space, which is why I'm keen to pivot it towards. Not that we haven't had good guests, but we've had some guests who have a bigger following than they have proper businesses, shall we say? Which is always the case in entrepreneurialism and, like podcasts and so on. But, yeah, I just think. Yeah, but we're trying to take it more seriously, get people that we can learn from. Well, certainly that's been the biggest benefit of the pod is I've met investors through the pod. Like, literally three of my investors now came on the pod. That's how we met. We got very drunk together. We now do sober pods because it's midweek.

Yeah. You promised me when we spoke, you Said red wine in the living room and we got Diet Coke now.

Yeah, I know. Well, Christ, we're on the lucky science again because I don't look at us.

Promoting these brands for no sponsorship.

Exactly, exactly. Me and Ollie actually met rowing it in in Newcastle at Northumbria as well.

So.

Yeah, and then he was the cox, which is a funny story, being 6 foot 2. He was the cox. We used to row together and he was the cox in our national championships boat with four of us and it was kind of chaos. And then we. Then he started running ads. Well, he actually had a brand together. This goes back a long way. It's come full circle. We had a clothing brand together in uni when I was like 21. You were like 2019. I then left, he stayed. I thought he would had sold his soul to the system and was going to go down a traditional path. We then re linked about three years later when I was running the jewelry business and the neon light business before that one went wrong, he started running my ads was like scaling things. And then it's recently invested. Well, a year ago invested in space goods, my current business. And now it's on the pod. It all started brief people on who's.

Going to be here. We just let him turn up.

How many years ago did you guys finish?

Like seven years ago. Ish. I'm 25. You're 26, are you?

I'm 27 now.

27.

How old are you?

Spring chicken? I'm 36. Yeah.

So you've had a less traditional route to.

To.

To ecom, I guess. So like obviously it'll be good to kind of dive through that. I think it's obviously a very unique story. I imagine not many people have followed the same path in terms of poker to another business, then to DTC Ecom. So yeah, I wanted to dive into that really and hear a bit about the story. How did obviously professional poker player, pretty interesting space job profession and I'm sure a lot of relevant and interesting learnings for what you do now, but I know that's a big thing you push is like you felt like a lot I've seen on LinkedIn you say that a lot of business owners would benefit from playing poker. So how did you find that and what was the story behind that?

Yeah, sure. So I guess to rewind even before then. I've always just been really entrepreneurial. Always knew from a young age, even at school, always said that I didn't want to get a job and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just used to say I want to be a businessman. And like I'm sure you guys did, I was doing all sorts of little ideas in school to try and make money when traveling after uni. And while I was traveling, I'd already, me and my friends at uni had gotten into poker. I just, I loved it. I mean even before I was 18, we used to go into the bookies down in Durham, used to put a jacket on and hide our school uniform. And I just like had a knack for gambling and I loved the buzz of it. And then I got into poker and poker is a game of skill with luck involved, but it's just lumped into the same category as gambling. Basically when I went traveling, I, my friend and I, we were going around all the casinos. We had a lot of fun, so many stories, trying to like fund our trip. And then I, I didn't have a plan for what to do post traveling, but I broke my back while I was away in New Zealand, had a really nasty accident on a ski slope and had to come home early. And when I got home I was like, okay, well what am I going to do? Either like start a business or I was tinkering with different ideas, but poker was just the thing that I naturally fell into. And you can be a. Yeah. You know, most people don't realize you can play poker for a living. And I've literally never played.

People probably shout out with a shirt like that.

Yeah.

Well, you think a lot of things.

I've doubled like casually roommates. But I imagine a lot of people think there's only two and you either you either casually play or you play for millions. But I'm imagining there's a pretty large middle ground.

Yeah.

Still make a living.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I was basically starting from scratch. I, I didn't really have money at all. And it's, it's an all consuming lifestyle. You sit in front of your computer, it's quite nocturnal and you play for crazy hours. You kind of have, you can have a pretty sloppy lifestyle because of the hours that you're going to bed. It teaches you a lot of discipline because you can lose your whole bankroll in one night and then the next day you've got to bring it a game. And if you try and chase your losses, you're going to lose even more. It teaches you to get really comfortable just with the insane emotional roller coaster. I mean at the time for me it was. My whole livelihood was just going up and down. And then some nights you know, really lose it all pretty much. And so it got me just very comfortable with risk just in you. To be a great poker player, you've got to just not be bothered by the money. So you've got to treat it as just. You can't think, oh, I've lost that pot. That could have bought me the following. You just got to, you know, accept this is the way that we play the game.

I'll get him thinking almost and.

Yeah, exactly. You just basically need to have a complete disregard for the money. And if you don't, you're a bad poker player and it's gonna come back to bite you.

And so do you consider it gambling? Like, well, is it gambling to the extent that betting on horses is, or.

No, not at all. Because there's no. Yeah, there's no skill in gambling. If you imagine going into a casino, you can play poker in a casino, but you're playing against other players. Everything else in a casino you get playing against the house.

Yeah.

And so you can't win against the house in the long run. Not, it's not possible because the house has an edge. So the table games are complete gambling. There is no skill involved unless you're cheating. And poker, there is skill involved. And over the long run, the best players win. That's just how it is. But there is variance. So in the short term, you could lose, lose, lose and think that the cards are against you, but it's just variance, it's meth, it's just probability, basically. So I did that for basically a couple of years. I mean, it sounds quite glamorous, but it's an emotional roller coaster. I was living at home at the time and I didn't. I guess I started out having these aspirations for that to be a long term career for me. But as I got into it, I realized, I mean, the stimulation you get from the game is pretty damn limited. As you can imagine. You just sat in front of a computer playing against people you never meet. And poker players have a habit of just living in their pajamas. I also realized that the game had been quite easy to beat in the early 2000s when there was this poker boom, this guy called Chris Moneymaker, that was his real name, won the World Series of Poker and he satellited into it for $10. So that showed everyone, oh, wow. Just anyone can win this if you play your cards right. So poker really opened up and the legislation changed in the US and people were making money like really easily with some like, pretty basic poker strategy. When I got into the game, the regulation in the US had changed, so a lot less. There's a lot. The player pool was smaller. So what we call fish, the easy money, the bad players, there was less of those. Poker training sites were like two a penny. So your average player was better and better. And I kind of realized I've probably got to play this for another five to seven, eight years to get to a reasonable standard. And even then it's really freaking hard. And it's a lot harder than it used to be. And I wasn't prepared to give up the bulk of my 20s doing that basically.

Did you ever do any in. In person or was it all online?

Yeah, I did used to go to Vegas quite a bit. I mean, it's funny.

Good stories around that as well.

Yeah, I mean, Vegas it is. I couldn't go for more than a long weekend now, but I used to go for like three, four weeks at a time, which is crazy. Think about you guys been.

Yeah, a few times.

Yeah, I've never been, but I've literally.

Never even gambled in Vegas. I think I always. I used to bet on like, I used to do matched betting when I was like 16. You ever try that? That's what you think you can win. And I would make like 400 pound a month. But then, then I got into trading oil derivatives and shit and I remember losing like 500 quid on Christmas Eve and crying myself to sleep. And I said, I'm never gambling again. I guess entrepreneurship became the next kind of gamble, but it's more controllable.

Yeah, so there's a lot of crossovers like that though. You know, you can, you can think you're nailing it by 1pm, by 4pm that day, it's the worst day of the year. And then by 6pm you're like, maybe I've turned it around.

Yeah, very true, very true.

Yeah, I was gonna say, like the. Just hearing you say a lot of those elements and a lot of those emotional elements and day. The fluctuations in your day, it transfers a lot to business. I feel like, like even that detachment from finance from a daily today kind of standpoint is. It's probably a net beneficial mindset to have it. Obviously you can't do it to the same degree. You've got to know your numbers. But yeah, I can see. What would you say that was going to be? One of my main questions is what. What do you count as kind of say, top three transferable skills from that that you would say that has really aided you in your journey so far, yeah.

I think the, the comfort with risk is, is probably the highest one. So I just don't have something that your average person will see as risky. Like I just never have because I've never had a job and I've always done my own thing. So just things don't faze me. That in a business sense probably would phase your average.

I'm a lot more risk averse in the way I run our companies. Like I run it with large cash flow. The bank like less risk taking.

He runs an agency. That's what I say. You've got a balls to run a brand.

Yeah, but like, yeah, just how I've always operated. But I can see like I could definitely be riskier and then you'd definitely move faster and by taking bigger bets you make faster progress. I feel obviously some of it won't pay off but that's just the nature of the game. So you can see how that would definitely transfer. Well, yeah.

Did you get, did you go to uni then? Sorry, yeah, I did. Did you finish?

Yeah, I finished. I haven't used the degree. I didn't learn anything. I did marketing management. I had a lot of fun.

Yeah, the irony.

Soft skills though.

I did entrepreneurship for six weeks, dropped out, went back and did graphic design, dropped out again. And then that was that, was that, was that.

How long did you do graphic design for?

A year actually. No, Then I switched to advertising. But I was running Facebook ads at the time when they were telling me about print. So it was then I stopped going and then we were running. I did a clothing brand which is.

Even less transferable than both of those. Probably.

Yeah. If I could have another life, I'd do economics because I do find it interesting.

I find it somewhat interesting. But then I don't find like the uni structure of it. It's just a bit. It's just so much like math models and like just health, economics and like elements like that that would just. Yeah, I've just never used. But yeah, I think that's the key if you're going to do universities do something you actually find interesting. I picked it just because I was like I didn't know what to do and it sounded like obviously it was decent path to a decent career if you didn't drop out or switch into doing something for yourself.

But yeah, you asked three things. Poker. I guess also it teaches you to be much better at negotiation because you, it basically is negotiating. You know, you're having to learn to go against your natural instinct which is to Display your emotions. You have to completely hide your emotions at the poker table. And otherwise people can read you and then they can use that against you. And so it's quite similar to negotiation in the sense that you.

You selling your sitting in awkward silences and just accept exactly rather than exactly.

And also having. It's really intimidating in poker if you're running a big bluff. But you can't show that you're nervous and you can't show that you're weak and you've sometimes just got to go with it. And as you guys know, if it's a really like challenging or meaningful negotiation that you're in, you sometimes got to make a move that you know, is this going to work out? I'm going to screw the whole thing up. But you've got to act confident and just roll with it. And probably also just like long term thinking because in the short term variance really can work against you and it can be really stressful. But I've always, one of my principles is just like always focus on the big picture and I always know things are going to be all right in the end. And if you do the right stuff over the long run, it works out and it compounds. And in poker you've just got to always keep thinking probability will play out. Basically.

I can definitely see that transfer, even like now, especially now at the moment with encountering a lot of businesses that haven't adopted that mindset in the E comm space and they're caught in like a financial issue of thinking on too short a time horizon and not zooming out so big a picture, going into economic issues. So yeah, three solid.

I think that's the whole problem with chances. I never thought long term when I was getting started, I just wanted to fucking. And because econ can be so scalable compared to anything else and it's probably the most, you know, this generation of new money entrepreneurs, whatever guys making like wi fi money, which is kind of the incorrect way of thinking about it. But you know, you can start like Neon beach was great. I scaled it too quick because I just, I was so like revenue hungry and wanted the big numbers, but I didn't have the foundation. And I guess if I'd looked on a longer term, you know, time frame might still be here. But I guess I'm think I've learned that and I'm thinking that way with this thing. So yeah, it's not growing as quick, but it's on much better foundations.

You're in control.

Exactly. Yeah. And I won't have stat demands from creditors at my door. I was a fucking mess.

Once you get sucked into that short term mentality, it's then really hard to break it. I feel when you kind of start chasing your tail, which I feel a lot of people get into the problem.

Because of social media.

Running into headwinds and zooming out is important. But why, why did you stop poker? Why did you just didn't enjoy the lifestyle, Wanted to move to something a bit?

Yeah, I think it, it's just for a certain type of person. I love the game. It's my. One of my favorite nights of the month is I host a poker game at my, at my home and it's, it's great. So it always. But now that my livelihood doesn't depend on it, it's a lot more enjoyable. I stopped because I just had much, much, much bigger ambitions than playing poker basically. And I think you can easily fall into a trap of comfort. And like I said, like I could have easily slipped into a few more years, but they're such crucial years that yeah, I hung my boots up as hard as it was at the time because I didn't have like an alternative that was going to make me money overnight.

Yeah.

So it was hard to walk away from. But.

And how far out of uni were you at this point? So you've gone full time poker?

Yeah, graduated in 2008 and then I played through to like late 2010. About two years I played full time for. So I was about two years out of uni.

And then how does that become getting into the whole DTC space and businesses there?

Yeah, sure. So I didn't start in D2C so in hindsight I wish I did.

But it's going to be a question in 2012.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I've been tinkering with all sorts of ideas. I've been learning online marketing. I started a little, I mean had like three, four micro sites going to make AdSense money, stuff like that on all sorts of stuff. I had this website called thehomemadecookiestore.com which would make like Adsense money from cookie recipes. Never baked a cookie in my life. Just hire these writers to write these recipes. Who knows if they actually worked. And I started like a little marketing agency and I used to do SEO for people and then I started this software business with two other guys which was. It's still going today, but I sold out of it like five, six years ago. And we used to compare retail pricing of all sorts of different websites to Help companies compare pricing and BB and outsmart the competition basically. So B2B like SaaS but not SaaS in the sense that like I don't know, an intercom is SaaS. So it wasn't like frictionlessly globally scalable because there was a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes because the way we did it was through web crawlers and they needed maintenance and setup. So it was. We got the business to work and it was basically effectively self funded. You know we bootstrapped it basically and it was a nice lifestyle business. But I wanted to take it to a level that like my co founder didn't. Well one of my co founders the day to day one didn't want to and so it was just inevitable that like you know, much like the poker, I wasn't prepared to spend another five plus years of my life in that business because I could see what the outcome was going to be. It's like impossible to have a huge outcome.

Yeah.

With the, the plan that we had. So I guess from that and I did that for a while like all through my 20s and in hindsight I wish that I ditched that business sooner. But it is what it is.

Getting in the right boat. No matter how fast you row, if you're not in the right boat.

Exactly. You know, I was working every hour of the day so I'm going to make this thing work. But you know how it is. Classic story. First proper business. Business doing everything. Yeah. And like working hard, not smart. Yeah.

That's some cost Manta. It's hard again to when you're in it to make that switch though, isn't it? Because you get that sunk cost of like I've put so much time into this. Even if it is the wrong vehicle, if you're like I'm so deep into this, don't. Can't even think about sucking like not sucking it off but moving to something that probably would move faster and get.

Probably impossible to get in the right vehicle from day one though, isn't it? There's not many people. There's some but there's not many people you got to up a few times.

Or even find passion like don't know what you're interested in.

So yeah, yeah.

You just make me think of some sort of idea to help like young entrepreneurs that are like 18 and better start their first thing. Like a way for them to just test or trial out or go to an event or some sort of course to test 10, 20 different types of business and just figure out what their most passionate about or what they're like founder, like business founder. Market fit is best suited to. Because you're right, it is really freaking hard to find it. And that's one of my biggest. If I could turn back the clock, I think the trajectory of my entrepreneurial career would have step changed if I picked the right thing at day one.

What the fuck is this? Space Goods spacegoods.com Rainbow Dust version one. My newest entrepreneurial econ brand venture. I spent six months in the trenches built building this from scratch. We launched six weeks ago. What's it all about? The next generation wellness brand with a long term vision to essentially consumerize the pending psychedelic consumer goods market. Which might sound absolutely ridiculous. We're not quite there yet. The market's massively illegal. But what is this? Rainbow dust version 1 is an all in one mushroom and adaptogenic blend designed to unlock your supernatural self. Essentially experience a sharper focus, sustained energy, zen like calm throughout the day. It's an all in one powder. Tastes like hot chocolate, tastes delicious, works great, looks great, feels amazing. Essentially the broader concept here was to legally imitate a psychedelic microdose and like I said, experience those symptoms. You can mix it with anything. Brownies, bake brownies with it, mix it with your coffee, have it without coffee, replace your coffee, put it into a protein shake. It's super fucking versatile, it tastes great. It replaced the stack of supplements I was previously taking. But you need to try this shit. It would definitely change the way you work, get you into that deep workflow. I obviously think that myself. Plenty of a thousand plus first customers think the exact same shit. It's not just a pretty packaging, it actually works really fucking well. Keto, vegan, all that good shit. Trust me, you need to try it for yourself. Let's scale this shit to the moon. Spacegoods.com get on your rainbow Dust subscription.

And see how you fucking feel. Let's do it for the boys. Spacegoods.com. Well, I was gonna say I've always been in E commerce, but I've always chopped and changed between different things in E commerce. I've never built a brand for even three years, let alone five years or 10 years. And if I had, but you know, might be very different. But I guess my thing was I knew I wanted to. Originally it was design logos, then it was monetize design. So it was selling T shirts and it was drop shipping jeans. Then it became a jewelry business. Then I started a fucking other thing. And you build the skills. But at least I was doing something that was getting better at. So now I'm much better than I was five years ago or six years ago when I went full time. Five, five and a half years ago. Whereas, yeah, I think the scary thing is people. The biggest risk and people message me all the time with the back of their pod is how do I. How do I know what I want to do? And it's like, well, if you're stuck in a grad scheme, say you can get a degree and you know, get into a job you don't like, it's very hard to then find what you like doing. Cause you're spending 10 hours a day working a job. Whereas I never. I guess not luckily, but fortunately I. We made it work with that clothing thing was the first bit of real money I'd ever seen. And then I left uni and jumped headfirst into entrepreneurship, which was always what I was going to do. I just didn't know I didn't have the money to do it until then. And that was like, well, fuck it. Then I met people. And then when you meet other people, that's the biggest change. Suddenly that becomes your world and learn from them and so on.

Exposure to people, exposure to experience. You're. You've kind of. I think your business interests have matured as you've matured. I definitely think that's a thing. Like what you're interested in at 18 is not going to be what you're interested in at 30 or very rarely. Yeah, your interests are going to change as well. So your desires and things that you want to work on are probably going to follow that. But yeah, I think it is hard to think of how you'd. How you'd structure that. I know there's a. I think it's antler. Antler do something. They're like a founder's scheme where they get a big group of founders and you pair up with someone there.

They're not a suitcase brand.

Maybe I've got the name wrong.

No, it is. There is some sort of incubator.

They do something like that. They pair you up with someone as a similar interest and you try and align on. On a vehicle and a business to start together and then they provide you with like incubator funding, which is.

I nearly did one called Entrepreneur first they offered me a place on it and. But I turned it down.

I actually. There's one called Jumpstart. Don't know if you heard of that. It's for the. They call it like the 1% of graduates. So I actually. Yes, I did a presentation to their cohort last week. I wasn't actually sure if I needed someone, but I thought interesting to see the sort of talent that's out there. And it's really weird because I wanted to go to Oxford Uni when I was younger because I used to be a rower and I thought I might get a rowing scholarship. But then I quit rowing and went through this weird wanting to be a travel YouTuber phase and whatever I went to Northumbria wasn't quite the same. But now there's people that have. They're all 90 are Oxbridge graduates. So they're very smart. But they're like pitching that they want to come and get a job working for me now. And it's just the imposter syndrome is insane. So I'm thinking these guys are way too clever. But then they're probably thinking I would never have the balls to start my own thing. Like I've done.

That's who you want, so.

Exactly. Yeah.

Smarter than you.

But I guess they're all the sort of graduates that, you know, have a generally more entrepreneurial interest and it's kind of similar because they would want to work very close to the founder in an early stage business where they can learn probably 10 times as much or 100 times as much as they would in a big corporate.

I definitely advise people to go work in startups.

Yeah.

If you don't know what you want to do. That's what I did. I did like a 12 month internship at a SAS startup. Just got thrown right in at the deep end. Two people on the marketing team, me and one guy. It's just like systems operations, front to back finances.

Yeah. I completely agree. I always get a surprise when I hire someone. I'll just even talk to someone that has always been in the corporate world because I've only ever had my own businesses and I've never spent a day in a big established company. And when they're so surprised or like inspired by just a day in the life of a startup, like, oh my word, it sounds so exciting. Oh. And yeah, I guess you get to know about them. Like yeah. Everyone knows everything.

Faster, scrappier. More learning.

Yeah.

Exponential. Potentially more exposure to things.

Consistent. Extreme anxiety.

Yeah.

Than sat in a booth bucket into some operational procedure where you're just doing like the same thing over and over and over again. Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is what I think they get to at that sort of stage.

You know, you mentioned the whole Oxbridge imposter syndrome. Do you think that. Do you look at if you're recruiting, do you look at the university that someone has been.

Well it's funny because signal I've only really started, I've been so at hiring. He's going to help me with this because it's much better. I'm very 0 to 1. I think I'm one of the best in the world. But that's my strong point. Zero to one. You put me in a room six months, I get anything to a million in revenue. Anything. It's. It's getting going from 1 to 10 and 10 to 100 which I'm now because I'm. My brain is fully formed at age 27 they say it happened to 25. I'm now finally aware that I actually need to hire people because anyone good is going to be better than me at the thing that they're doing because I'm very, very much generalist but particularly I like the creative stuff most. I'm just not an operator, don't enjoy it. So that's the first thing I previously used to just not even think about hiring properly. It was always freelancers, agencies for everything. So what was the question again? I've gone off at a time I was asking do I care about that?

No, no. It's like do you view now that you've got a different perspective and you at one point wanted to get an Oxbridge yourself?

Yeah.

Do you think of that as a strong signal?

I mean it would signal to me that they are and maybe this is just chip on my shoulder. It would signal to me that they're not an entrepreneur which is either good or bad because if they're entrepreneur they wouldn't have finished their degree in my opinion.

I don't think that's necessarily true. I think you look at like some of the people who founded some of the biggest companies in the world.

I think they can be a good number too. I don't know if they're like a founder type.

A lot of the ones in the US go through four year degrees and leave and found they'd go onto it like an incubator then found.

Yeah. I mean you talk about like Harvard and then. Yeah. Which I guess is similar.

I think like for me we don't look at that. For us we've got like 60 people.

I think this is your agency.

Yeah, two different agencies. I think if I was hiring 15 to 20 years ago I would use it as a much bigger signal or maybe maybe slightly longer time period ago than that. Obviously you'd be in a different industry and Climate entirely. So you're hiring for different things but I think it mattered a lot more before then. We don't really look at formal education at all. We hired very much for mindset, personality, culture, fit for the roles that we're hiring for and then anything technical skill based is like secondary to that but still important. This would differ if I was hiring like a developer or something that requires like really high tech technical acumen but I'm a value like mindset and like willingness to learn proactivity exponentially harder I.

Guess if they're through something like Jump Start though you have the social proof of firstly they've gone through a process to get into the best uni which is definitely one card on the table over like just I don't know, going to Teesside Uni, no offense and then going through like an incubator like Jump Start they've gone through another process which makes them suitable for startups apparently. So yeah, I mean something like that, that's different. They're guaranteed to be a baseline good. It's just whether they get on with you and understand the business I suppose.

How about yourself, do you look at education as a proxy for.

No, I'm the same as you in that all that really matters is I mean it depends on the seniority but like the non negotiables are that they are going to be a self starter, they're going to take initiative and they just get it a no problem solver and they're not going to be a passenger, they're going to be like a driver in the business. That's the most important thing. It's a nice bonus. Sure. There's other ways to demonstrate that you're really diligent and committed and you can get stuff done like other than going to the best unis. So yeah, it's, it's a tick but it's like a bonus tick basically it's.

Like third or fourth on the list for us I think like our, our best staff members, both of them. Well other than like C suite, high high end, both from didn't go to university and they're both just the best by far and I think, yeah, I think you can use it but I just don't know if it transits. It just definitely doesn't translate to our industry as much as it would to others because marketing, you just fundamentally don't learn at university I don't believe.

Yeah, I definitely didn't learn marketing on my marketing management course in Northumbria.

Two hands on the job entrepreneurial business management. I did for six weeks.

I didn't even know that was a course. Maybe. Maybe sounds like a joke.

It was actually a course. Yeah, it definitely probably wasn't in your day. I think it was fairly new. I think I might have been the first year that did it but no one that was teaching it had ever started a business. So it's quite ironic. So after the software business, I had.

Basically been running that company for all through my 20s, decided to take the leap of faith and step out, which was like walking away from my stable income and all of that and went through the challenges of untangling with my co founder basically. I think in the space of a month I stepped out of my business which was like my baby. I broke up with my girlfriend of like seven, eight years. I sold my house and I moved to London. There was a lot of change going on but I was either going to move to London or San Francisco and I, yeah, came, came down here and just started getting into the mixer and was laser focused on starting a business with someone that had started a business before basically or had, sorry, sold a business before. So I basically became like a full time networker in London and spent six months just meeting all the ex founders that I could find. Didn't have, I didn't have a clear idea what to do next, to be honest. I didn't come to London and think, oh, I'm going to do D2C and that's where my heart is.

Did you need to work again though, just for context when you exited the previous business?

I hadn't actually. No, no. It didn't set me up for life.

Right.

Yeah, it was, it was a nice cushion. But that actually was after that point. That was like a year or so after I moved to London.

Okay.

Yeah. So I still had the dividends coming out of it and I'd invested to my money so I was, I didn't have to come straight to London and earn basically. But I met a bunch of interesting founders. I met like one in particular who is the guy that I ended up starting Skin and Me with. And the, I guess the journey to starting Skid and Me was like very accidental. You know, we met a guy who now is a board member of mine at Skin and Me who has a private equity fund in the beauty industry. And it was really through him I got exposed to the beauty category. There's this whole thing called the lipstick effect. Are you familiar with that?

It's like I was going to say, you've got good skin. So you must have had a great routine and started skinning Me.

Yeah, yeah, something like that.

I remember that though.

I had really bad skin actually through school. My nickname was Pizza face.

Really fucking.

Yeah.

Ruthless English school nickname.

Yeah, yeah. Boys get bullied. Yeah, yeah, that's how it is. So yeah, the lipstick effect basically just speaks to the resilience of the beauty industry. So like even in times of war and real hardship, women will still wear lipstick and buy lipstick because it gives them confidence and they won't compromise on that. And so it's really resilient as a category. It's a very high gross margin category. It's very standard to get 90 plus percent gross margins in beauty. The packaging always costs more than the products inside it. It's got a really low return rate and a high average order value and people spend a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on it. In a lot of cases like quite an irresponsibly like give me ideas and.

I'm going to start another brand.

You've got enough going on right now. And so we had a bunch of ideas that we wanted to test out. In the beauty industry there was a trend at the time around personalization. Everyone it was like AI was one day now AIs had a resurgence and it actually means something. Back then it was like everything is personalized. But all it was was basically a quiz on a website and it would just send you to a few products. What we tested out was we had this theory that if we could set up this website that gave you skincare recommendations from a real human being that you could trust and we sent you a personalized collection of products that we could then hook you into a subscription and you'd stay subscribed to that box. So we did it proper mvp, me and Phil, we set up a site, it was called Mr. And Mrs. Oliver, which is still to this day the limited company of skin. And me and people would complete this consultation and then we hired these skin care experts that would make a recommendation. And then we had this idea to send people the full size products along with a little sample pots. So the idea was that you would use the sample pots over the course of a week and we've pre authored your card and only if you liked the products would we then charge you. But if you didn't like them, you'd send it back. What I would do though was because we were self funding this and these products cost a lot of money, we didn't want to have to buy full size products and squeeze them into sample pots. So my job was basically every day running from our office on Wardour street in Soho to Oxford street and going into the beauty counters and convincing them to give me samples. And I would go in with my own pots and they would look at me like, why have you got your own pots? Oh, I've just got like a problem with hygiene. I can't use other sample pots. And I got barred from Debenham's Beauty hall as part of this. I was going for that long. And we used to send people these boxes and I had all these ideas around. This is my ideas as to how we could improve box one retention. I was like, oh, we'll put a free gift in and we'll put some chocolate in and the amount of people that would get the box, eat the chocolate and just send the box back to us. But that as a business model is really flawed because in order for it to work, you've got to have stock of every brand, basically. Otherwise you've got to like, you know, you don't have complete impartiality when you're recommending stuff and you don't have the margin because they're not your brands and you don't have the control. So what's to stop you signing up on our website? We recommend this box and you go, oh, thanks for all the ideas. I'm going to go to Amazon and get them for a lot cheaper. Or Cult Beauty or something like that.

No ip, really?

In a way, yeah, exactly. There is a company now doing that exact business model, but they'll never make much money from it because it just doesn't work, it doesn't scale. So we took the learnings from it, albeit we didn't like the business model. But the big learning was that people really like a human being giving them personalized recommendations. They absolutely loved the feeling that, well, they're like offloading the research and the decision making. The credibility has been outsourced to someone else. And so they just have to listen to what we say. And they wanted to get to know their skincare expert and all that. And we were trying to figure out how could we keep that component but build a business model around it which is truly defensible and scalable. And when it comes to high street products in beauty, they don't really work. They promise that they'll work, but you can't put really effective ingredients in them and sell them on a shelf in a beauty store because a young person could go in and buy them and so there's really tight controls around what you can actually put in them. So what we felt was, well, if we could get really effective ingredients that are proven to work in clinical trials, that is medicine, and put that in a personalized treatment along with this sort of layer of a human being that you trust, that'd be a really compelling service that you cannot get elsewhere. And so it took about a year of exploring what is and isn't possible, meeting different people, testing stuff out to land on what is today the Skin and me business model. It was actually called Gleam at the time, which in hindsight is better suited to a teeth whitening business. But we sent out 250 handwritten letters to a third of the UK's dermatologists in order to find our first dermatologist and just spent a while written letters.

That's a good strategy.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean I found a software or website that does that with a robot writing it.

Oh, really?

Literally, it's called handwritten but it's, but it's actually written, it's not printed. That's the usp. It's like five pound a card. But I think it's genius.

Fascinating.

Yeah, yeah.

Was that Gleam a joke purpose? Because there is a Gleam teeth whitening?

No, no, no.

One of my has a skincare brand called gleam in gleamin.com.

Well, there was loads of like conflicting.

Gleam is a teamwork teeth that really run.

Yeah, that's so funny. Yeah. In hindsight I always think that it was. It's better suited to like car polish or teeth whitening.

Ah, true shine effect.

Isn't it?

The reason that we didn't go with it, we were literally days away from spending a quarter of a million dollars on the domain name and wait, you're.

So fun in this at this point.

Oh, sorry, no, no, I've jumped ahead.

But yeah, we'll go to that bit.

Let's come back to gleam.com in a bit. So we had this business model and got really freaking excited about it basically because we had this idea that, you know, you can't get these products elsewhere. There's, I mean it's a huge industry, 140 billion pounds skincare industry. You know, 50% of people are not happy with the skincare that they're using. And there are skin conditions like acne, which is really debilitating as a condition. It's a huge like group of the market that have pigmentation issues or rosacea or anti ag. They want to like reduce the signs of aging. But the stuff on the high street, they spend a load of money on, but it doesn't really work.

It's like a generalization for what is an organ, really, isn't it? And everybody's. Everybody has different skin. It's like. I can see what you mean. Like the high street has to be generalist because it's selling to millions of people a day and only by taking out that scale, touch point and taking it down to like a linear one to one relationship can you be as individual as you. And that's kind of emote, I guess, like instantly emote in the business. Like we do something that they can't replicate.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they cannot get it elsewhere. So with skin and me, your alternatives are you go to the high street and you buy stuff that doesn't work, you go to your gp. Sorry. The second option is you go to a private dermatologist. No one in the UK can afford that, really. It's hundreds of pounds for a 20 minute consultation. So only rich people can do that. Your alternative is to then go to a gp. I mean, my dad was a gp. They've had two weeks training in dermatology. They're not the specialists at it, so they give you general, like, advice and then you're kind of like on your way and you're alone. It's not like you can WhatsApp them and pick up the phone and send questions every day and. And you've got a generic treatment that has been manufactured en masse and has been sat on a shelf and is just given to you in the same way it's given to someone else. If you get referred to a dermatologist, which you have to have been through multiple courses of treatment or have something severely wrong with you, you're probably going to have a six month wait. In, like, much of the UK, there's 650 derms in the UK. You know, in the US is like 15,000. Everyone has one. It's like part of the culture and here it's just completely different. So it was clear that not only if we set, if we can figure out how to set this up, are we providing something that you can't get elsewhere. It's genuinely alleviating, like, stress on the NHS and just giving people a route to treatment that they can't get. And so the path that we then followed was we were actually going to raise a small funding round in order to do the whole, you know, 3,500k MVP, prove it out, raise more money. And we got an offer from an angel investor it's just the two of us @ this time still self funding. It got the one dermatologist on board. We met an investor who wanted to put 200, 250k in, but that happened really quickly and we were just like, kind of feel like we want to suss out more of the.

Market. Probably sounds like I've got a good idea here if people are trying to give me money straight.

Away.

Yeah. Also I think it was an investor that we knew would hammer us down on valuation and want all sorts of controls and all that. And so we kept that investor as best we could in our back pocket and we ended up meeting an angel investor that had built and sold three successful DTC companies in the uk. And so he actually been basically top of our list in terms of an investor that we could bring on board. And so we met him, took a while, bit of time to get him over the line, but he just deeply understood the business better than anyone. And just through spending a little bit of time with him, we really started to understand frankly what ingredients you need to make a business like this work and to set it up from scale from the get go. And we also realized how flawed our 300, 400k like MVP strategy was to achieve a really big outcome, basically. So what we did was we still raised a small funding round which he led. It was less than 300k, but the only reason we raised that money was to build the team, create the brand and so on, to go out and raise a much bigger funding round to then set up the business for scale from day one. So we closed that, say in December 2018. Been working on this throughout the whole of 2018. And we then just went all in on creating the brand and making progress in other areas of business to the extent we could and recruiting a really high caliber team to get ready to go out and raise a meaningful round. And we were thinking between 5 and 10 million.

Pounds. Any revenue up to this.

Point?

No. We just sussed out the.

Market. Yeah. No revenue. I've never raised money with revenue, not yet. So my friends call me the.

Traction. It's funny. How to raise money with lots of.

Revenue. I think they.

Are.

Yeah.

2023.

Right. That's because. That's because you get judged on, on your, on your metrics. If you can sell the dream and you've got a really compelling plan, then they can't judge you on your metrics the second you have them, if they're not completely on.

Fire. So that's the.

Trick. Yeah. Well, you're Selling a story basically. And like you selling I think.

You came up with, obviously you had credibility from the previous venture. And you mentioned the co founder, what was.

His. Yeah, so he'd had, he'd had a couple of businesses of his own and he'd sold one in the like early.com days which was a real success as a price comparison site called Calcu. And I think what made a really meaningful. So obviously when we met Graham, who in the. He was the 3 time D2C exited founder that led the.

Angel. What's his second.

Name?

Bosher. Yeah, I actually emailed.

Him. Was it tails.com tales.com? yeah. And.

Grace.Com? yeah, yeah, all right.

Cool. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think like for his decision making to come on board obviously it was like he needed belief in Ursus of handling team and belief in the business model. And then I guess for the next stage which was the big like 8 million pound round, they needed belief in like what became a bigger team. So we recruited in the time between his funding round and like six months later the round led by Octopus, we'd recruited three co founders. So they were like really pivotal team members. One in ops, one in tech, one in digital basically and customer. We'd build out more of the team underneath that. We'd created the brand and we'd built a five year financial plan. We had like designed what our factory was going to look like. We'd got everything that we could get in place ready to go, you know, until we had that money in the bank basically. And so it's a slightly atypical strategy and if I hadn't met him I wouldn't have thought about setting up a business for scale like that from day.

One. How can you build a financial plan if you don't even know if the CAC is going to be five times higher than you thought it.

Was. So you can only build these things based on assumptions that you're comfortable being challenged on. And you can use reference points of previous businesses that maybe you and the team have operated in or started. You can use reference points of comparable companies in the US that you can get from second measure and stuff like that. And just through relentless hammering people that you know that are close to companies that are good comparables and like it's always a good test of a founder. I find when they're like, oh yeah, this company's killing it in the U.S. okay, what are their numbers? Oh, we don't know. Why not? Oh, we don't know anyone there. No one knows anyone Anywhere until you really, really push it. And so there's always a way to find this information out. And it's basically just a case of triangulating stuff but feel, but having, like, sound rationale when you're.

Challenged. Yeah, interesting. Never heard of raising pre. At least in D2C, just like 8mil is a pretty chunky amount. Was that largely credibility? Because, I mean, I think I would struggle to go out and raise. Yeah, I think, unless I'm thinking too.

Small. Well, this is the thing. I think part of it is, well, the starting point is mindset. You can't raise that funding round on mindset. But I'm just saying it did require a mindset shift. And I remember I used to go to different events around that time, and I would be a bit sheepish about the amount of money that we're planning to raise to begin with. And I remember at one point just being like, oh, this guy asked, oh, we're raising. Yeah, how much? I said, five million. Okay. But you haven't started yet. No, we haven't started. And I think that either goes one of two ways. It's either like, well, you're bonkers, or it's quite inspiring and motivating. And in that case, he found it the latter. And ever since then, it just reminded me that you just got to own whatever it is you want to do yourself. And no one's going to push you to think big or act big. No one's going to make those decisions and those calls for you, and you've just got to just go for it. And so in our case, yeah, I mean, I didn't even at one point, I didn't know that it was possible to raise between 5 and 10 million, like, pre launch. But I've done it for my new company as well. And it definitely is. If you have a huge market opportunity, a defensible business model and a highly credible team, and you've just demonstrated that you've deeply, deeply, deeply thought and planned out what are you going to do with this business? And you've got, like, credibility in terms of execution, I think.

Yeah. The vehicle that you're trying to raise it for and the idea that you're trying to raise it for is. And it's got to be compelling. But then, yeah, conviction and team. We're trying to do the same for an app that we're building on the side. We're trying to raise like 2 million pre rev to build to. Basically, we've got an mvp. Like, we've got an app MVP but you need to take it to market. So we're going through the similar thing at the moment. Very early.

Stage. I wish I never had customers. I should have raised 10 mil pre.

Launch. Well, I always say to people they should, you know, you should raise as much as you can when you don't need it, because you always need more than you think. And there's nothing worse than going out begging for money when you really need it. And look at what's happening this past 12 months. Frankly, the amount of companies that wish they had. I mean, one I invested in and you know, the founder could have taken on an extra like 600k. I remember at the time and said, oh, I don't want to take the dilution. I'm like, the dilution's irrelevant. It's irrelevant. You're thinking about the wrong way. And they've since had it to stop, like shut down the business. And I bet if they could turn back the clock. It doesn't matter how much you.

Dilute. People are much more willing to invest in you when you don't need the money. I feel same.

With. Mine's gone now. I'm back, I'm back. Were you building the team? Gone again. What's going.

On? So, I mean, this is what man keeps.

Doing. Let's be a professional studio. We're good. Building a team. Pre cash in bank or were you self funding a little bit? I mean, you said you raised like 300k, so were you.

Just.

Yeah. Team from that? And.

Then. So me and Phil had put like you know, 20, 25K in and two other guys also put in that same amount. But we'd pretty much spent all of that. Yeah, I mean, until the point that Graham invested, I was literally subletting two of the desks in our little Soho office to make money. And then nine months later, there's 8.3 million, like, or something in the bank. So we weren't like flush for cash. But the route to recruiting the early co founders was not like, how much money can we pay them today? It was getting their belief in what the value of their equity was going to be because they're both walking away from. Well, the three of them walking away from very stable careers and earning rates. One of them at Facebook on a really high salary. So. Well, I don't know, whatever Facebook salaries are, but they're probably pretty solid. So you can only do that if they really believe that equity is going to outperform what the earning rate would be in their. In their job and that they completely believed in the plan in the way that the investors were going to. So yeah, so that was, it was a journey though. It's a journey to like. And it's a snowball effect. You know how it is. You know, if we hadn't. Landing Graham the angel investor materially helped both my learning from him and also just the playbook and also our ability to then recruit people because, well, he added credibility as well to the business. And so it's all a snowball effect. And once you land a few people and the word gets out, then it gets a little bit easier to add.

More. Yeah, it's de. Risking it when other people are on board almost to other people, I guess, like Graham being one and then other people. As you get those other high level founders in, the next one that comes on board is probably like, well, if they're in, it's probably not as risky as if it was just one of.

You. Your view on dilution is interesting because I've always been a solo founder, I guess since we did the little thing, but it's kind of irrelevant in the grand scheme. And some of the feedback I had, I spent in the past four months. I've just been, I don't need to raise money. I raised a bit of angel money previously for the new business which he was part of. And then VC started coming to me. I think I said this when we had a call a few months ago. I spoke to all the usual VCs because one emailed me then, you know, fucking, they pass you on to the next. And they all seem to know each other. But one of the most common bits of feedback they. The ones that said no to me, which was a lot of them, was you're a solo founder. And I was like, hold on, I've always been a solo founder. Well, they didn't just mean that. They also meant the team is too small and you know, it's probably six months too soon, whatever. But I've always thought maybe stupidly. Well, you know, if I have a co founder from day one with 50% whereas right now I've got 76% having raised a decent amount of money, obviously. Yeah, I mean, maybe I've been thinking about the wrong way as well because I guess 20% of a billion is a lot more than 50% of, I think 20.

Million. Sure. I think it's, it's just such an art and I mean, absolutely. If you can build your business to an amazing outcome and you haven't had to do that, chop down the middle on Day one, you get double the outcome. But and I also think that, like, as you progress through your entrepreneurial career, you, you're in a different ability to attract the right talent out the gate and do the right stuff and equip the right people without needing a whole lot of co founders, you know. So in my latest business, I'm a solo founder in Life Supplies because I kind of know much more what I'm doing now, and I've been able to raise the money and recruit the right, like, hires at the right stage without needing to like, chop everything right down the middle with a 100% committed, like, co founder on, on day zero, basically. So I think if you can like, skip that out, then, like, why not? But there's different ways to look at it because, you know, do, do you have. It's like it's, you know, is it a constraint to your business's potential at the moment? The fact that you don't have a duplicate of you doing all the stuff that you're not good.

At? I think you'd better, I personally think from the outside and you'd, you'd massively benefit from a complimentary founder that. A complimentary co founder that's massively operationally.

Focused. I kind of feel like I have that with one of the team members, though. He's as committed as I.

Am. But if you'd had that from the very start, you probably would have moved faster. Yeah, maybe, maybe if you'd had that on Neon beach to maybe go back to that way.

That. Yeah, I guess I feel like my angel investors are co founders now in a way because I get so much advice from so many intelligent people that built and sold businesses. You're like the least intelligent one, I guess, for comparison. The least experienced one for comparison.

Yeah. Should kick them.

Out. Yeah. Yeah. So I fundamentally feels like a.

Win win things with people I enjoy working.

With. It is.

Lonely. I just enjoy it. Like I don't really care about selling something for a ridiculous amount of money. Like, enough is enough for me. Like, I just enjoy doing things with people I enjoy doing, working with and take like being on a journey with other people who are. Obviously they have to bring something to the table. I wouldn't do with anybody but like one founder maybe focus really, really strong in an operational sense or a technical sense or a creative sense where I'm slightly weaker and then kind of position around that. But even just like the actual camaraderie, I guess, of building. Yeah, it's really undervalued, I think, by A lot of.

People. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's my. I mean, on Friday at my flat with my new company, Life Supplies, we had me and our team as nine of us, full time and we had a celebration there because we hit a milestone and it was. It was amazing. It was so much fun. And that's kind of why you're doing it, basically. Like moments. Moments like that. So I'm on the same.

Page.

Yeah. Going back to the business, I feel like we could speak about fundraising. Could be two hours in itself. I find it so interesting. So in a relatively nutshell. So Skin and me, we can come on to Life Supplies after you raise a bunch of money. After initial proof of concept, how does the next year look and how quickly do you get to a decent scale? And what did the business look like when it, you know, over the past few years been, what, four years since.

You.

Yeah. What's that.

Money? What date did you get that? And then how. How close to your plan did the.

Next.

6. Yeah, we closed the money, we raised the money late 2019 and we launched in 2020. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we basically.

Launched. Perfect timing.

Started. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We basically launched during COVID As you can imagine. It was like kind of a. Yeah, well, it was like not a soft launch, but it just took a bit of time for us to fine tune some of the early niggles because we launched like effectively seven months after closing that funding round. Something like that. But what we'd really focused on with our strategy was laying the operational and the technical foundations for scale, such that they were never a hindrance on marketing's ability to scale the business. And so that put us in a really. And we're completely vertically integrated. Do manufacturing, pick pack, dispatch cs, everything. Yeah, everything in house and build a factory in Park Royal. So all of that was kind of in place and we really did launch it effectively the dream time because people were taking self care more seriously and we just had a really strong start. We got featured like on this morning and just loads of stuff happened in that first trading period. It took us a bit of time to fine tune how it is the proposition and just get the right messaging and the right landing pages and the right flows. One thing that we knew we always wanted to do from the get go was have a really strong incentive in the first month. So with Skin and me, it's a very. It's like a personal transformation that we're selling effectively like this service PT.

For your face in a way. Aren't you.

Really? Yeah, yeah. And Think what works well for a pt? It's a before and after photos. It's hearing from people that have like transformed their life and how does that make them feel? In our case, we use loads of that in our marketing, but we really wanted to be able to get people a full month supply effectively for free so that they could literally see the results. And we thought that would be a game changer if we can figure that out. And so a lot of the work that we did was in designing our own packaging system so that it's like this measured dose and it can fit through the letterbox so you don't have to be in to get it. We can get in the right posted rates. So, you know, we fine tune our cogs in that first month and we basically offer. I mean, if you go to our Instagram page and look in the bio, you know, it's not hard to find an offer. We basically do a free.

Trial. I usually use a reference point for loads of.

People. Oh.

Really? Yeah, yeah. I'm just like, look at this brand, it's.

Good. So that just means that people can try it out in a really low risk way and they try it out and they get results because it does work. Because this is proven medicine. It's the only like at the product that we put in some of our treatments, called the ingredient, rather called tretinoin, is the world's most effective. It's like the most effective way to treat skin aging. Nothing has.

To. Is it like hims or.

Something? Yeah, they do a consultation, they answer questions and they upload photos and then we have a prescribing team that review the consultations and if you're suitable for treatment, then they'll create a prescription and a treatment plan and that goes to the pharmacy where they'll create the treatment and then it'll get sent out to you.

Basically. Is it difficult to do? You have to become like a registered pharmacy effectively to do.

That? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's all that fun.

Stuff. So we are.

Not. Well, I mean it's all doable. It depends how you define easy. So we had to build a, a unit, we had to follow all the regulations, we had to hire the right people, we had to like spec it all out in a tight time frame. But, but we've had like stellar reviews from the General Pharmaceutical Council. So it depends what you're doing in it. If you're just like dispensing medicine that someone else makes and you're basically just like a cupboard, it's a lot, lot Easier. You just need one or two processes. It's a lot easier than literally like.

Manufacturing. Basically I want to sell psilocybin D2C through people's letterboxes. That's always been the vision. Longer term obviously it's a class A drug right.

Now. It's class A.

Drug. Yeah, it is.

Yeah. Is it going to.

Be. Well look at Australia decriminalized last week or something. Decriminalized in most of Canada. I think it's parts of the States but big difference between decriminalized and you can sell it D to C. Do you know what I.

Mean? So significant time horizon but it's a.

Long. Yeah, that's where I'd like to go longer term though. 100 and I guess you would kind of have to be a pharmacy in the same way. Well I guess you could probably do in Australia now. I don't.

Know. Don't.

Know. It's getting.

There. Doing.

Those. No idea how. It's just. That's the.

Plan. Yeah. Fascinating market. I think I told you I invested in a one in the us. The name always.

Escapes. Yes. Mojo. So that's the brand. Yeah. It's funny I've been speaking to well this fund that invested in them. Hopefully we're nearly there. But yeah, I was like is this not conflict of interest because I'm releasing a gummy. I'm literally a competitor but apparently not. My numbers are bigger than theirs for the.

Record.

Really?

Yeah. I picked the wrong.

One. You did. You can still come in, the round's still.

Open. But doing those hard things again is enterprise value and moat, isn't it like. Yeah, great place to be. Once you've done it. If you've got. If you've got the money you can get it set up and you.

Can. Well that's the thing with skinny Me. There is a high barrier to entry because you need a lot of capital and there's just a lot you got to figure out really. And so there is just defensibility in. There's a reason why there are a never ending like swathes of new skincare brands launching. But you don't see skinny competitors popping up. You see companies that are personalize this, personalize that but then you dig in and they're not. They're not really. They're just yet.

Another. How much did you spend that money before? I guess you got it moving and kind of relatively self sustaining. How much sunk cost before you actually started.

Selling? Yeah, I think we had probably burnt through. Definitely less than 2 million. Probably more like 1.5 when you account for all the capex and all of the setup to get it going. And then the good thing about raising that amount of money was that it just meant that we didn't have to think about fundraising for a long time and we didn't frankly want to think about it again because it's such a distraction for the business. And so that was the reason why we, one of the reasons why we went big with it. And so the business, once we'd cracked that right message and proposition and understood the customer and we got the right offer, we, we just like really started scaling that effectively and, and we have been, you know, focused on, on the main, on the regular channels like Facebook's really good for us. We do a lot of influencer marketing now. Kind of wish we'd started that sooner because it's so, so good for us. And in hindsight it wasn't as obvious as it is.

Now.

And yeah, it's just been a crazy journey, but it's worked out really well so far. It goes down a treat with people, they love telling their friends about it. We get some really sticky customers who just shout from the rooftops about us and will religiously and aggressively refer people because they've had such good.

Results. Life changing service, isn't.

It? Yeah, well, they go on to. Any day on our Instagram, you can see us reposting people that are saying like, you know, this is the best thing I've ever used. You've changed my life. I've been able to let my partner or my husband see me without makeup for the first time in years. You know, it can be really, really impactful on people's self, self confidence. And so I think that, you know, if you can crack that, the customers basically do the marketing and the credibility for.

You. Yeah. 100. It's a snowball effect, isn't it? Massive snowball effect. You get more and more nodes shouting about. You just exponentially grows. So how in terms of, forgive me, I don't know, your broader offer, are you still scaling like a linear offer? Is it just this kind of one simple funnel? You go, you take the, you take that consultation and you get sold on that. Or have you broadened your offer and.

You. So we've added, we added a year ago, we added some additional products like a moisturizer and a cleanser. And another key learning there is that if people trust your brand, they will trust you to cater for more of the regime. And 50% of people have already taken that up. So we Wish we launched it sooner. It's been great, great for the business, frankly. And there's demand from customers to do more and more. So we're working on some new products at the moment. But really the core business and what we're great at is I think the principle of doing one thing really well is something that we've just obsessed over. So that's what's enabled us to one piece of packaging, that's amazing and it does one job and we've got one consultation flow but it personalizes and sends you down a lot of different paths. But it's really hard to compete against us on that one thing. We've done well for so.

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Go. You what you occupy, I think you occupy a really nice spot in someone's mindset as well. Like that expert position because of the way that they come into the brand off that consultation piece. Then inherently, if again, touching on the point of trusting you, like you, you occupy a position of trust where if you bring out a product they're probably just going to be like, well, this is going to be the best solution for this problem if I'm having it. And therefore your uptake is probably really strong. But yeah, doing that, doing less better is definitely a thing that I believe in. Like just focus on really nailing one like one, one Skew products or one like offer can take you a long, long way before you need to really start.

Diversifying. Yeah. Could be hard though, as a founder, because you see opportunity everywhere syndrome. Yeah, I still get.

It. That's. Yeah, yeah. New products, new countries. Did you launch just in the.

Uk? I was going to come to that because you mentioned the, you mentioned earlier the US market, obviously dermatologies, almost commoditized. Have you launched into that US market.

Yet? No, we're just in the UK at the moment. Yeah, maybe, maybe. I think we're still just scratching the surface in the uk, to be honest. There's so much more we want to do and we're working on some exciting new initiatives at the.

Moment. So you physically don't ship outside the uk, you just don't advertise outside the.

Uk? We don't ship. We only sell in the.

Uk. I was going to ask that question later because I wanted to dive into quite deep, the US element. But yeah, that was like we kind of got to now almost. But yeah, what is the kind of plans? You could say initiatives. You got some exciting initiatives coming. But yeah, you see the next.

Kind of year, two years, I think, you know, we've scaled the business like in a really healthy way and got it to cash flow positive. We just raised 10 million just before Christmas to like bott bolster the business and support growth over the next year. We, you know, are just trying new stuff out at the moment. We've gotten to a certain stage. We did our first out of home campaigns in January. We covered every tube in.

London. I was going to say I really liked it. I really enjoyed those ads. A lot of tube ads are really boring. Rubbish. That.

Wasn'T. Yeah, well, time will tell, like how well it performs. But yeah, a lot of people noticed it. I've never had so much like inbound, you know, when your whole network is like noticing.

Something. How are you tracking uplift on that? Are you isolating London as a location and then trying to track up. It's difficult. Like if you're going to run TV ads in America, for example, you might isolate a state and run TV ads to that and then measure your lift in that location. How are you tracking incremental lift off a Tube campaign? Because that's something that obviously, so.

Obviously there's a direct response like code on there, which we track. But yeah, to track the, to track the uplift, it. It is like, you know, narrowing it down to London and look at what the impact is on, on the blended costs. So I think we did all those tests at the start of the year, like, like ran all the ads earlier in the year. So I think time will tell over the next like month or two what the impact's been a little bit.

Longer. Tail. Yeah, that's interesting. Difficult thing to. Obviously can never get that granular on.

It. Like we haven't, we've got opportunity everywhere. We could go into retail, we could go international, we could expand more products. Like there's lots that we could do but we're not going to do all of that, but we're going to do some of it. So watch this space. Basically we just, we're still decision making and planning at the.

Moment. Do you think keeping it one country, one channel for as long as possible is always net beneficial? Because I've just launched in the eu, for example, because I think Germany could be massive. I want to get into retail, I'm getting into retail, but I'm already thinking, fuck, this is hard to keep track of and like limited funding compared to some. And it's like one mistake and you sink it all if it all goes.

Wrong. I think it really depends on the motive of the business and I. So like, I don't think it's a blanket. No, don't do international in the first like two years. I think for Skin and Me, ironically, we thought that we were going to do it sooner and we even built in some capabilities like into our tech to account for us going international. The way that we print on the packaging is like done like dynamically to mean that the packaging can be printed in different languages if we want to at source, but. But we've never done anything but print in English and sell in the uk, so. And even if we wanted to now launch into a new, a new country, I'm sure that tech work that we did years ago, it wouldn't even apply. So back to the point of just like doing one thing really well and not getting carried away? We probably did get carried away. But yeah, I think it depends on the defensibility of the business. If it's truly defensible, then I think that staying in a single market and just growing and growing that moat and building your customer base and fine tuning your proposition as much as freaking possible and then exporting that into new markets. I just think we've all seen, especially in the last few years, until the things have pulled back this past year, you can just raise a lot of money and go and do 20 things and loads of companies screw it up because it's really hard Running a startup in the early days and especially manning multiple like strategic.

Initiatives. Just complexity. There's a lot of decisions. There's also a lot of decision decisions I think you make in business that are irreversible that people don't.

Value. Like, like launching a neon sign.

Brand. Yeah, like even launching a second business or doing like making a big strategic decision. That's insanely hard to then go back on if it's like if you start employing people in a. It's not impossible but it's, it's hard to, to reverse a big decision like that. I think. Yeah. Like I think some businesses like if you, some set, some say you're relying on lower repeat purchase rate or you have something that people buy once or twice in a, in a two year period then you, you're going to cap out sooner probably in a market as well. So therefore horizontally scaling would be a bigger benefit. But I guess your business is so in a way that you must have a pretty good ltv. Pretty.

Good. Yeah. I mean the economics are really favorable, really strong. That's what's helped us like, yeah, like raise this recent funding round and all of that. I think that people often just back to the international piece, they just underestimate. Not that I've taken a brand international. I just think they underestimate how much work there is. Especially it's like, oh, we'll go and launch in Germany. Maybe some of them make it work great. But like the amount of complexity and understanding the local regulations and labeling and returns and customs and advertising and just all of that. You know, I'd even argue that you're better off if you're going to go anywhere, just go to the US.

So we're just doing that with the, with the brand that I'm involved in directly. We're doing like good numbers in the uk. We're moving to very big numbers. Yeah, big numbers in the UK yearly. But.

It'S. So which brand is.

This? It's a brand I CMO for. So I see them over an E commerce group alongside the agency. So it's a brand called the Essence Vault. It's like a fragrance brand. But we just literally this week localized to the US we're doing like.

How much did the Essence do last year? For context, can you say.

That? I'm not going to say numbers. I can say off podcast after.

Because it's way bigger than.

You. Listeners hate it when people say.

That. Way bigger than you.

Think. Connor said that we're on. Connor said on the podcast that our Target this year is 60 million. So I can say that.

Revenue. So it's big and sorry, it's a.

Fragrance. It's a fragrance jute brand. So it's like you can't copyright fragrance. So it's a ju.

Brand. And Connor's 27. I always call him the richest man on.

Twitter. So I.

Jumped.

Yeah. You think he was 50. The Don is just like he's also an investor in my.

Brand. I jumped his guy to what we're trying to move.

That. He's going to be a billionaire.

I think build that into. So we own the supply. He owns the supply chain 3 PL and similar setup. Not as complex as you. And we're trying to then take that and build it into like an E commerce group where we launch brands. A couple of brands a year and then hopefully obviously not every one of those is going to.

Work. Bit of a big vision, but the next super interesting. So I've always. My business hero, frankly, if I were to pick one not, you know, that I think about it as the word hero. It's a bit cringe. But is Bernard Arnault the founder of lvmh? Because, I mean, he's.

Not.

Yeah. Also the richest man in the.

World. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It probably is, depending on the day. But his genesis isn't necessarily as a classical entrepreneur, but just they've done that in a really short amount of time. And I love that he is. You know, I've got two companies. I'm not CEO in both. I couldn't be CEO in both. I'm chairman in one and CEO in the other. And Richard Branson isn't the CEO of all of his companies. And Bernard Arnault is a group CEO and he's just got like great teams doing great stuff. And I just love how they can have like such individual creativity in each company. They get these economies of scale across the whole group and they just. It's like a snowball effect of like, of of like control in the industry, basically. It's.

Fascinating. That's what we're trying to do. Basically. Obviously you got to accept that it's D.C. it's hard. You're not going to. Not every brand you launch is going to get product market fit, but kind of operationalize and systemize that concepts to product market fit.

Process. That's what I was trying to do when I was.

Running. You then hire a team and you take it. If it doesn't work, you sunset and just move on to the next project and try and rinse and repeat that's.

Fascinating. Have you, have you. Do you know any companies that have done that really.

Well? I know if I know some that have done it in.

Different. The hot group, I guess they.

Bought a lot of brands, a lot more do it in a private equity sense. They'll roll up a lot of Amazon roll ups and there's a lot of DC roll ups now as well. I'm not a massive fan of that because you don't own the message, you don't own the ecosystem. I think you can spot opportunities with the right R and D structure and the right product development structure to build that from the ground up a low cost and get proof of concept fairly quickly. And then you can systemize the growth of A D2C brands as well. There's a lot of similar inputs with variable change. So like obviously market position, vertical content. But like what makes a good funnel, what makes a good landing page, what makes. There's. It's. It's similar in terms of skill set. So trying to build like a hit squad that kind of does the first part and then have really talented strong operators that do that first product market fit piece and then once we've got it past that point we'll build a team and put it in.

Place. Super interesting. So would you imagine the sort of people doing growth are coming into work on a Tuesday in working on like more than one of your brands at one.

Time? No, we'd keep the we. So I think there's. There's some elements of this roadmap that we've not. We're early stages in this. Obviously we've got like one or two brands. One the. The beast brand that is the essence for. And then we've got a couple of other ones that are in the works. All launched but small.

Scale. I'd.

Built. I'd have them working on one project until you got it to that point where you then put the team in place and that. But then beyond that, once you had multiple, you probably have teams a bit like an agency structure. You'd have teams in each kind of vertical of our channel maybe. And I don't know, like to be honest, transparently we've not got to that stage yet. So I'm not sure what to move things.

Along. I feel like we could do three hours at this rate. We haven't even got to. I was about to both of these businesses. What are you gonna.

Say? I was about to touch on the U.S. we've, we've moved it. We've tried to move into the US to add back to that, tried to move from UK to US launch this week and it's just, I think what's good, Great in the UK is good in the US for D2C. Like the standards are higher. You don't appreciate when you're at that scale how much brand awareness has an impact on conversion rate success and like how much repeat customer rate even has an impact on your conversion rate on your site. So you don't know what your baselines are when you go to market. So yeah, to go to that point quickly, I do think there's just unknowns and.

Complexity. Maybe I should stick in the UK for now then. Just sound more fucking mushroom coffee to everyone else first. It's probably a better strategy. So roughly four years, what was the growth like? I mean, you don't have to say exact numbers. You can if you want, it's more interesting. But at least in terms of X to X, you know, what did that look like trajectory.

Wise? I haven't seen another DTC company, I see all the decks and we all hear the metrics of them all. Haven't seen one has performed like close as well as ours. Um, we've shipped now like millions of boxes to people in the UK. We've grown like 100% year on year in the past year. And yeah, I think it go. I'm trying to think what metrics I can share without giving you all the juice, but it's been like, when did we.

Properly. I guess maybe a good way to answer how much bigger was the second year compared to the first and then the third and then the fourth? If it has been four years.

Right? No, no, it's been. It. Well, in terms of trading, it's been just, just over two years of actual trading. Because we were, we were fully like launched in the summer of.

2020.

Right. So, sorry, like two and a half years. So yeah, the first year was like from zero to like a punchy number pretty damn quickly and then we've more than doubled that in the subsequent year and we're on track. You know, we're on a similar trajectory at the moment. And so the investors have come in on the basis of their belief in our ability to hit that and.

How big do you think it can be? And I guess, you know, and also your involvement because you started another brand, which is the one I noticed on LinkedIn maybe a year ago. Have you exited from. You completely got your shareholding and you just built a team and moved on to the next.

Thing? I haven't sold a Single share. I'm still the biggest individual shareholder in Skin and Me and I'm chairman now of the board. So I've got like my board involvement and I support the leadership team. But we've got an awesome team there. Well, incentivized, scaling the business and I'm now all in on my next thing. I've always wanted to have more than one business. I don't think that you can do. I basically think that you like, if you want to get a lot done, you can't run everything yourself and you can't run all of your companies and the conventional thing is oh you know, be CEO for like five to 10 years and like, like back to my point earlier, like no one's going to make the big moves for you, so you just got to do them yourself. So you know, and it just goes back to like planning the seed early on with the right team. You know, I couldn't have moved into chairman and started another business if we didn't have an amazing.

Team. Yeah. Much smaller scale. That's where again, I'm in my agency. Like I'm very top level, very much like removed. Very much kind of top down decision maker but probably nowhere, nowhere near the same level. Just.

Strategic.

Yeah. Interesting. What did your path to that look like? What did your role when you first started and how quickly did you kind of progress to that and what did the roles in between those two points look.

Like? Yeah, so I mean I was CEO throughout like all of the funding rounds and all that and through the launch. I then my next role was executive chairman which is, you know, it's, it's whatever you want it to be.

Of any, like deep into, say deep.

Into. While I was exec.

Chair. Yeah. Like, or at any point were you like so super deep on sort of growth or super deep on sort of logistics.

Or. Yeah, I mean I, my areas of passion and my strongest areas are brands, customer experience and culture and leadership. But I'm just, I'm just like obsessed with like nailing things for the.

Customer.

Yeah. And it takes time to get out, you know how it is. And so like I would, Yeah, I would much rather try to figure out what the right thing to say is to the customer at the right time or the right creative to be using or the right messaging to be putting in the boxes in order to deliver like an amazing experience and to drive better attention than I would be looking at say like, you know, the Facebook performance in the last 24.

Hours. Basically not where your leverage and time comes.

Either. But I also think it varies over time. So you know, you know how it is. In the early days you've kind of got to do everything. So I'll be like literally coordinating like sourcing ingredients and finding a factory and like ringing up suppliers and dealing with legals and all of that. But then as soon as the business is in a position to have people do the things that I'm not good at, I'll just gravitate towards brand and customer experience basically two strong places.

Especially customer experience which I think a lot of people under undervalue or leverage. Technical issue going on. Yeah, I think interesting. Then you've obviously moved to chairman and now you've moved on to new venture of Life Supplies. I haven't. That's the only business that I didn't have like actually research before we jumped on it. So if you could say a bit about that, like yeah sure, what's the mission.

There? Yeah, I mean I've always been really interested in the personal, like the consumer goods category basically. And I've always had this vision of building the LVMH of like consumer goods. Right. So you look at companies like Procter and Gamble. I've always felt like they can't be around forever in their current form. You know, they don't innovate. They have like these brands that do like. I think PNG have like over 10 brands that do more than a billion dollars in.

Sales. I think pumpers is the biggest in it and they're. Is it pumpers? They own Pampas. One of those two big. One of the two bigs, John, either Johnson Johnson's or.

Png. Yeah, yeah, I can't both of.

Those. I think they have.

Pumpers. Do they have Pampers? Probably Kimberly Clark or something.

Anyway. But their funnel obviously that's a billion, that's a billion pound brand. And that funnel is like you get given them at the hospital in America. Straight away it's like enter the funnel is your.

Born. So like they're really smart, a lot of that stuff. But I'm just convinced that they are not going to win over the new generation because the new generation cares about stuff that people didn't care about way back. You know, they care about the values of the brands they care about, about the look and feel of the brand. They care about what's in the product, they care about the ingredients, the transparency of the supply chain, the sustainability and all that. And the companies like P and G, they are retrofitting sustainability into brands that don't have sustainable heritage but doesn't necessarily fly with the new.

Generation. Yeah. I think there's also a degree of individuality in the new generation. Whereas the older generations were sheep. And you can see this not sheeps like a negative word. But if you look at like.

Pre social media, they had no source to.

Follow. Kind of pulls through to education. Like everyone went on a very similar path. Everyone purchased the same things. It was seen as like normal or great to be like buying the same things or items or brands. And it was like a status symbol almost. And now it's like I feel like people now really value being part of like a smaller brand or purchasing from smaller, smaller brands. Fashion is a good example of that. Like a lot of people buy. Would a lot of people anti fast fashion, anti fast fashion movement. There's the same in like supplements, nutrition and that's. I can completely see that in your mindset though. I can completely agree with it. I think it's like a breakup of those.

Massive. You might cover this. When I was having a break. Are you going DTC with Life.

Supplies? Yeah, we did. To see only. Yeah, I just think you can get to.

Basically. Does the AOD work on.

That? Well, we're working on that. Yeah. So yeah. There is a. My general philosophy is that in dtc, given how fast the feedback loops are, you should just stick to DTC in the early days and you can at least get a 5 million in revenue. I just don't think there's much of a reason not to unless you've got a very unique business case for why you should not be. Absolutely. The AOV can work. The only reason I'm saying we're still working on it is because we only a week ago launched any more than our first product, you know, at the start of the year. Up until like two weeks ago, we only had our first product on the website, which is like.

13.99. What was.

That? It's a refillable roll on.

Deodorant.

Right.

Okay. Yeah. So it's a. It's an.

Antiperspirant. So going up against Wild Native. Well, we are in all these.

Brands. In some ways we are, but not.

Really. They're.

Liquid. It's a liquid roll on. Yeah, yeah. And the difference between us and companies like say Fussy and Native is they're. I don't know if you guys have used these products, but that's a natural.

Deodorant. I use Wild because I was gonna launch a competitor like two years ago, but then I thought I don't give a. About Deodorant I'm not launching this but I did try.

It. How did you find it and are you still using.

It? I'm not so using it. I think I just wasn't. First, it wasn't a target market, which am. I mean I think that target market is kind of like tree huggers. I could be wrong, but it basically didn't really work for me. I just.

Thought. So what have you gone back to just.

Standard? Sure. Honestly, like the most basic.

So. So we are the solution for someone like you. So there are 30 minutes, 30 million people in the UK that use antiperspirant and they need the performance of an antiperspirant. It stops you from sweating. They will not. They can try a brand sounds.

Like similar logs with skin and me. So it actually.

Works? Yeah, yeah. They need something that works. And so there's this. You've got these challenger brands that are like completely natural and a lot of people are up for that. But like take that example. Deodorant, natural deodorant does not. Well, with some people it does, but depends on your body type. For me, I will definitely still sweat because it's not intended to stop you.

Sweating. I think it's meant to be like an onboarding period almost to.

It. There is an adjustment.

Period that.

Was a much better way of saying.

That I spent too much time in.

E commerce, too much too deep into.

The city of the.

Agency. But yeah, there's going to be like an almost an up to like a period that you need to just push through.

That. But our position is that like someone like Matt is never going to switch to a completely natural deodorant because it doesn't work for him. So we either get him using something that works in a sustainable format so a refillable roll on, or he just continues the like single use culture that he's using. And whether it's a spray or a roll on, he just continues using that. And so our position is we're not. If you're a 100% eco warrior that needs completely natural, please continue using it. We sit in the.

Middle. Early adopters. They are your mom, I guess. Potentially more mass.

Market. Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of. I mean it's gone really well so far the deal. We've only been selling it for like Q1 and it's clear that a lot of people want something that enables them to be more responsible and lower their impact but not lose the.

Performance. I'm probably going to take a look at it.

Because. Yeah, same that's probably exactly why.

I've got one in my.

Bag. I'll dig it out for.

It. A live on set.

Sample. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. You selling it on 30 day rolling subscription?

Yeah. Yep. So people sign up, they get a pre filled bottle in the first month and we encourage people to take a refill plan and then a month later their first refill arrives and then there's a cadence from.

There.

Nice.

Basically. And what's the roadmap for that? Obviously you said you did, you just launched second.

Product. No, we launched a range of products a week ago. That's why I'm saying we're still fine tuning like how we get the AOV up and we've got some really like we're running a bunch of landing page tests every week at the moment. So we've launched a body wash, a hand wash, a facial cleanser, a body lotion, shampoo conditioner and you just.

Go in Facebook ads or are you mixing.

Up? Yeah, at the moment we're on Google as well, but I just don't think there's a need for us to do any more than that for the time being, basically. At least until we've got like, you know, much closer to product market fit and got the right.

Messaging. Yeah, interesting. Never tried.

TikTok. We dabbled with.

TikTok. Doesn't work for.

Me. We've got. So you mentioned Jumpstart. We hired a great marketing exec through Jumpstart and he's a great video editor and so we had some organic success on TikTok. But I guess what we feel at the moment is we shouldn't put too much energy into it just yet because when we do it, I want us to do it like really well and do it with a lot of like consistency and focus. I think we're just a bit stretch at the.

Moment. One of our agents, one of my agencies is Tick Tock DC Agency. We just do Tick Tock through that vehicle and it's. We usually say like if you're not spending over 100k a month on Facebook efficiently and have a very clear idea of who you, who your client is, who your customer is, that's a really nice package as.

Well. That is.

Cool. That's. And then you refill it from there. So you buy this.

Once. Linking buyer. Yeah, that's.

Cool. There you go. Keep.

That. I can actually keep.

That. You.

Can. Oh, thanks. I was gonna actually.

Order. Give me a neon sign in.

Return, you would never arrive. That's cool. Yeah, nice weight to.

It. I think it's a. Yeah.

Cool. That's a much more convenient shape because the natural ones I tried, they're like literally flat. It's like rubbing, almost rubbing like soap against your.

Arm. In the uk. So there's this company that sounds like you.

Guys. Is that used, by the.

Way? It's not.

Used. Just checking. It smells.

Nice. Yeah. I respect you more than to give you my used deodorant, but the company in the US that you mentioned, native deodorant, they launched a natural stick deodorant. But in the us, stick is much more popular than roll.

On.

Interesting. It's actually the inverse. You've got stick roll on aerosol in the us Here it's aerosol roll on stick. And so more people want that format than want a refillable stick.

Format.

Yeah. So we're super excited to start scaling.

It. Basically that's essentially like the sure roll on that I would use, but just in a reef in a friendly.

Format. It's refillable. It is. And it's got, it's got the ingredient, the salt in it that deliver sweat stopping performance. But it also has like hemp shives in it. We get these hemp stalks from Champagne in France that provide like an additional layer of protection and these fermented sugars. So it's, it's got natural properties in it as well. So you kind of get the best of both.

Worlds. I can make sense why you listen to Moise Ali podcast.

Now. This feels like I find him iPhone of deodorants. Like you've got a good product design team. I'm. I'm guessing. I appreciate product. I think there's not enough discussion. We've said this. It might just be the Twitter sphere, but I think in like young entrepreneurship, particularly D2C, there's not enough talk about product. It's all about marketing. I think, I think that you can't polish a.

Term. I think that's where it's going to move along as well in the next few years. Like until now, the, the competitive advantage up until like iOS14 was just being a really good.

Marketing.

Yeah. And you could just shovel. Exactly, basically. But now it's like the competitive advantage is. Or it or it was products still at that point. But you could get competitive advantage purely better than everybody else. I really think. Like logistics, products, manufacturing, process, just customer experience. Owning those driving cogs down, that's a much bigger competitive advantage and will be the bigger competitive advantage for the in the future. Because it's just like it's.

Hard. You Also just can't build a DTC brand on first order.

Anymore. No, no, you.

Can'T. Maybe you can with a 300 pound product.

But. Well, you can short term, but it's very long, very small, short time horizon on a business that people don't buy from.

Twice. I completely agree. I love product design. I think that in our case we with Life supplies could have launched much sooner if we just took off the shelf packaging and did everything like everyone else. But it just doesn't motivate me to spend the next chunk of my life doing that. So, you know, we raised 5 million, we got some amazing product designers on board through this agency called Pentagram that we've worked with. Now they've got equity in the business. We worked with them for years and we just don't compromise when it comes to product. Because our vision is if you go into your typical bathroom, everything in there is designed for the shelf in the supermarket. It's not designed for your bathroom. So we want to get rid of all of those shady brands and replace them with stuff that you don't have to hide away when your guests come around and replace it with the Aesop hand soap. And we can only do that if we like cultivate desire basically. And to do that we just need awesome design. It needs to be a system, it needs to be sleek, it needs to all connect together. So that's basically what we're on the road to.

Creating. I think that's a great way of thinking as well. Really great way of thinking. It's almost like a fashion mentality to a bathroom product. Like a minimalist, clean.

Look. I would honestly my ideal for the next few years, they get to the point where I can just sit in a polished concrete floor office in Fitzrovia and fucking design.

Products. Maybe you should get a.

Job. Well, no, I should just hire a proper team. But it's hot, it takes time to get there, then it. I'm definitely in the trenches right.

Now. What sort of.

Products? As in products for my brand. But like spend more time. Basically be in a position where I don't have to be in the trenches 15 hours a day, which I am and I have been the past five years, but there we go. So I can actually just stop and fucking think about. Because I'm a designer at heart, that's like where it comes from. I'm a creative first, definitely not necessarily a product designer, but like I've built competence in, you know, the whole brand, all the products, the website is all done by me. So I Never spent a penny on it, which is probably a competitive advantage in a.

Way. It's a great brand. When I met you, that was one of the things I said. I genuinely commend what you've done with limited resources and you've created a brand that is really distinct in a crowded.

Category. It's definitely very distinct.

Yeah. You're a brand builder. Like, you are a brand builder. Your brand is a story, it's a connection, it's a feeling within a customer that you cultivate with what you're putting out, like a message, a product and what you're very good at that like you've proved that. It's like you just need the other. You just need some people to do some of the.

Balls. Yeah. Now I just need someone that knows what they're doing to run the business so we don't run out of money. So I can. Can actually have like reasons to make another product. But yeah, we'll get there. It definitely product that excites me most, the product and making 80s movies with beautiful girls that don't takes.

Back. What's the. So obviously you've launched those that. That range. What's the kind of again, year two year roadmap on that side. Where do you. Where do you kind of see that.

Going? Yeah, sure. We want to start by owning the whole bathroom, basically. All of the. All of the essentials you'd expect to find in a hygienic person's bathroom, basically. So we're not talking anti wrinkle eye cream, we're talking like, like loo roll, mouthwash, toothpaste, haircare and so on and so.

Forth. Wild are compared to them. I think they're expanding into that.

Space. Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I guess.

The. Is that. Is there many others kind of in the UK that you think are not threat but trying to do the same.

Thing? Well, someone asked me the other day like, who's your biggest competitor? And I think founders always default to the other startups. I'm like, well, the other startups have a slither of the market. If you look at any of them, intel reports it's Procter and Gabelle and Unilever that get all of the sales still. Even though in our bubble in London it can seem like the startups are swallowing up.

Everywhere. Yeah.

True. So we still look at the big players as our big competitors and most. And our target customer isn't currently using our fussy and wild and these companies, some of them are, but most of them actually aren't yet. And we're their first step into sustainability. So it's a huge category. I think that we're doing things a bit differently. So like I said, we could have launched much sooner if we just wanted to launch. We could have launched with, say, just that. But we put a lot of time, resources, investment and planning into building a whole range of products and it's really freaking hard. Like just the amount of moving parts, the supply chain complexity, the unexpected last minute problems that happen with a thing that you think you're about to launch and then you find out it doesn't even work or something goes wrong and then you've got to retool and all of that fun stuff. So we've deliberately just tried to get as much of the range ready in the early days so that when people hit our website, and our website definitely today doesn't reflect this. Like, it's going to go through a hell of a lot of change over the next like one to two months. But we want people to hit the website and think, ah, I get it. Like, this is just like one click and I can, and I can get this like transformational box for my bathroom. And it's just, it's appealing and it's exciting. It's not like a compromise. And, oh, I'll do my bit for the planet and I'll become a bit of an eco warrior. Like, it should be an upgrade, not a.

Downgrade. So that lifts your.

Aov. Exactly. The thing I'm genuinely most excited about at the moment is figuring out how to get AOV up. Yeah. Because it just involves everything that I really enjoy. It's like, how do you make this look really appealing? How do you get the right messaging? How do we convince you emotionally to think, oh, my word. That. That is the. Yeah. That much like. Do you guys know athletic greens?

No. I'm obsessed with.

Them.

Yeah. I take it every day they.

Are convincing people to spend 80 quid a.

Month. Yeah, yeah. And I tell everyone and I, I reverse engineer their funnel every.

Day. I think.

That'S. And I copy their landing.

Pages. Yeah, yeah. Views.

Repl.

Yes. Yeah, it's in.

There. I'm literally this week. I spent about five hours last.

Night that was like, I've made.

Enough. Like, so I'm hiring someone to do pages. I always like to do a little test. So I hired this guy off at work as a little trial. I was like, all right, do me a test page. He spends like three days on it. Little did he know that in three hours I'd done a better Page than him myself. So I'm like not good enough. Maybe I'm just a cunt. But replace good. It's very good. Yeah. It's really so easy to.

Use. Yeah.

Yeah. So.

Easy. Athletic greens are definitely one of the good. You know we said earlier about doing one thing really.

Well. Three. Well, one skew, isn't.

It? Basically I mention them to everyone. I say I want to be. I ref. I referenced three brands actually. I reference athletic greens, Huel and Tripp and I say I want to be the fourth in that lineup of greens, supplements and cbd. I want to be the mushroom version in what I believe a category defining maybe trip less so. But athletic greens and Huel, obviously they're not one thing anymore, but I think they did one thing first very.

Well. Yeah. Hugh, I bring up Huel a lot as a good example of and.

I've been a six year customer of.

Theirs. Oh.

Really? Literally. Yeah, it's LTV is.

Crazy. You know, it's a good example of a brand that has scaled past 100 million revenue on just native Shopify with a native Shopify checkout. Because I don't know if you went through all this process of should I be headless or should I not and do all this fancy customization and companies out there have done all the hard work like in the Shopify ecosystem and you can just plug it all in and you're away. And I'm sure he'll have a tech team. I don't know if they do, but the site is pretty straightforward and it's using off the shelf.

Technology.

Yeah. Product again, that product is so good that it just is that your product.

Is. That's what people come to you for.

Away. All of the friction only exists if you have to hard sell a product. I feel like people won't bounce out of your checkout if they want your product.

Enough. So.

True. And it's like if you can cultivate that on the ad or the front end or where they see the product, who sells it to them, you can get to a point where the percentage perceived value is so high, no matter how much friction in your checkout is there, they're still gonna buy.

It. I completely agree. And I bought a gift for someone. I bought this like lip gloss on Christian Dior a few weeks ago and it was an absolute shocker of a, of a, of a process. But I'm never not gonna buy it because the, it's like this is the brand. This is their own website. It was like it was built in like 1998 or something and everything wasn't working properly. But like it doesn't really.

Matter. It's gone.

Off. It has. Just move it a little bit. You were back just like. I don't know what's going on with these. I get the last five minutes. Don't touch it again.

Yeah. I think that's a massively undervalued. He'll make most of their money off the drinks in supermarkets though. Do you know the one.

Times. Do they.

Really?

Apparently.

Apparently. Yeah. Maybe most their revenue but is.

It? Pretty sure it's most. Is it? I don't know. I can't remember how I was reading about it but yeah, super interesting. Significant chunk of what an uplift.

That must have driven for.

That. I spoke to some big fund in Germany who didn't invest in me. They said they nearly did but they just couldn't get it over the line next time and they were saying the athletic greens isn't profitable. I don't know how they know this. They told me. They said it's 15 years old. Not.

Profitable. 15 years.

Old. It's very.

Old. It's.

Really. It's not a.

Startup. A long time.

Ago.

Wow. They only got. They went through this. I've seen. I did. I didn't know about them before then but I've read into them since.

Seeing them because I only saw them in the.

Warehouse.

Yeah. The way I've got like exposed to them is I went through like a six month period where pretty much every ad on my Instagram was athletic screens four or five times a.

Day.

Yeah. And then they were in every single podcast. I listened to Huberman Rogan. So all the big podcast it was them and then the Facebook ads just vanished. I've not seen a Facebook ad from them in months. And whether they just heavy exclude me. I don't.

Know. I get them every day. I'm a.

Customer. I suppose it's interesting but I haven't read into the financials but yeah, they've been around for a long, long.

Time. It doesn't surprise me they're not profitable today because just given that they. I think I raised like over 100 million and they're probably going heavy. Deliberately heavily loss making into growth mode. But yeah, I didn't know they're that.

Old. Recharge told me they had 300,000 subs on £80amonth. That's 24 million a.

Month. Probably shouldn't have been telling.

You. They told you that we just got someone.

Sacked. I'm not using.

Recharge.

Anymore. So it's off the.

Record.

They. Yeah, there's a quote on the website. I think it's Huberman says that he started using either 2011.

2015. Yeah. They pay him a million a year, so I'm sure he'll say.

Anything.

Yeah.

Really? That's obviously. Yeah. They've been around for a while longer than you.

Think. You don't have to pay him anything to go copy and paste and just change human's quote on your landing page in reflow. That's free for a week or so. They get an.

Email. Yeah. That's interesting. But they're. They are there, I.

Guess.

Yeah. I really like the brand. I'll look into it in more details. But excited to see where. Where it goes. I wanted to just segue into one other thing that I read. Obviously it ties into a bit of what we've discussed here. Is the, like a big part of what I read around you and even into some of the articles was around like encouraging British entrepreneurs to think bigger and kind of push that kind of. Definitely a British angle to it from what I was reading. So what's your kind of thoughts there? Is that something you kind of involved in actively or just something you want to kind.

Of. Yeah, I don't like I said this is the first time I've ever sat in front of cameras and all that. So I don't like put time into media. But occasionally I'll post something and I spend like. I'm sure you guys do. I help like emerging entrepreneurs out, like to the extent my diary allows. But I just think in general people are conditioned to think quite small in the UK ecosystem is what I.

Find compared to the US especially, I.

Think. Yeah. If you spend time in San Francisco a little.

Bit. Not a few times. Yes. It's.

Different. Different.

Mentality. And I know everyone says that, but you. You have to go and just like experience it. Don't just listen to people like us on a podcast saying. And it's so, so different. And you'll just even be in an Uber and like you change the drive and just everyone is thinking big. It's like we're going to change the world and we're going to. And sure. I mean, I think some companies over the last year have had the rug pulled out from under them and they were just like built on hot air and it was all vision and there was no actual underlying business.

Sure. I was literally outside. He spent 2 million on Coldplay at the chain smokers. That was it.

Yeah. He had a party and spent 2 million of investors money on.

Chainsmokers. I would still back that.

Guy.

Absolutely. If I had the money to.

Do. Is this the competitor to.

Bolt? No, it's fast checkout. It was like.

A. The one click checkout. Yeah, yeah. Like no Bolt taxes. No. You know that Ryan Breslow guy? Yeah. He's the founder of Bolt and that's the.

One. Oh, he's on Twitter, isn't he? Or.

Something. God, his tweets make so much more sense. I thought he founded Bolt Taxis. I've been reading it. Like that just doesn't relate to this taxi company that I've been.

Using. That's some like Eastern European.

Guy. Oh, that's a.

Revelation. That's so.

Funny. Right, okay, makes.

Sense. But I know there was two neck and neck and then one of them overnight just went. Yeah, they just went bus busto.

Basically. That's.

Impressive. It's a bit like burning 100.

Miles. The guy we work, founder as well.

Document. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Well he's starting that new thing now. Any. Whatever it's.

Called. Yeah, some crypto.

Thing.

Yeah. But in, in general I just, I love entrepreneurship. I love like high energy, like founders. I think people just need to be have their system shocked a bit. I think the strategy I was talking about with fundraising, it's like, you know, you're only limited to what you've been conditioned to believe by the people that you spend time with. And in London if you go to founder events, it is in general small minded thinking. It just is. And it frustrates me a bit because you get like the energy of the people you spend time with rubs off on you. And so I often find that I'm the one that's having to like crank things up and it's not like. Whereas in San Francisco they make you feel like small minded. And then you start thinking, oh my word, I can have a much bigger impact with this business. Maybe I can raise more money or maybe I can take more.

Risks. Did you raise money.

Overseas?

No. Or largely in the UK or all in the.

Uk. Definitely reckon some of that comes back to poker to go full circle, like to the start of this. I don't know if you paid with a load Americans or that. Just that whole process of.

Poker. I want to get an American.

Trip. But like De Risk, I think Americans are inherently less risk averse than the UK. The UK's 100 eternal optimism, massive pessimism. Even when you sell into people in America. Take my money. Like UK people are just pessimistic. And like always, like, worst case scenario, like, you're gonna burn me, etc.

Etc, so you can see how that is a.

Shame. Yeah, yeah. Everyone's different. Like, some founders just aren't like me and they don't want to go commit their whole life and go all in. I just would kick myself if I felt like I hadn't given it 110%, because I wouldn't have. I want to know what I'm capable of, basically. And that's not for everyone. Like, I'm sure you guys like the amount of sacrifices we make. You don't have any time really, outside of running, like, your company. It's all consuming, so it's not for everyone. But I think there's a lot of founders that could get more done if they were surrounded by the right culture. You know, there's this guy, always sticks out at me. We didn't actually raise money from him, but I met him as part of a Skin of Me funding round called Oliver Samwa. Do you know this guy? The German Samwa brothers. You don't hear so much about them lately, but Samwa. Yeah, yeah. They're a bit infamous because they're known for cloning.

Businesses. Oh, oh, is it Rocket.

Internet? Germany Rocket Internet guys, they cloned ebay. Not.

Ebay. Yeah, yeah, they did. They did. Or was it Facebook? Or maybe.

Both. I think it was eBay. EBay's the one I've heard.

About. Sold it in like 40 days or something like.

That. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I like pitching him. We had a load of competitive tension in the end and picked another fund. But we had a. Like, terms were better. But he just, more than anyone, just like pushed us to think bigger and was like, come on, let's go. Yeah, we can do this in this amount of time. And I'm like, this is so inspiring. And every other VC that we'd been meeting was like, yeah, well, where could this go wrong? And could we deep dive into your financial model? It was just like such worlds apart. But he was an operator that had built a billionaire. Yeah, yeah. Well, he'd done loads of companies since then. I think so. Yeah. I kind of just love the idea. You know, you mentioned at the start about, like, I love the idea of having some sort of DDC event someday. Also just love the idea when I've got a bit more time in my hands of somehow, like, giving back a bit to the new generation of entrepreneurs and just encouraging them to. I know I didn't have that at Northumbria Uni or at school. Like, you know, you had to like figure it all out for yourself. No one really like pushed me to open my mind to just like start something. Yeah. Anyway, ran.

Over. Yeah. All right. To come to a close shortly because we'll be here for about seven years. Otherwise it's a good episode. So on that then, do you have, is there an end game? Is there a midterm game? Do you have a specific goal with the two brands that we've discussed? Where do you see that those going? Is there a number you'd like to hit, an exit position.

Something? Yeah, I, I kind of came out of my 20s thinking that I've learned loads of business skills and I've made some money, but I've just like really wasted a lot of time, frankly. And I should have stepped out of this business years before. So I set this goal of having 2 billion pound companies in my 30s and I'm now 36 and one of them is like valued at a high number. And that's on the right path. And we're on a path to, you know, we've set out a plan to achieve 100 million pound revenues in that business and we're on that trajectory. My new business is still in the early days, but it's a huge market. So I want to build these companies to like the biggest possible size. Basically. I don't have like a personal number of like, I must make this much. You know, we've all been on our own journeys. I realized when I made some money, you know, a little while ago that the money actually doesn't. I know everyone says this, like anyone that's watched any YouTube videos of people that have done business, we've all seen business people say it's not about the money, the money doesn't make you happy. But you kind of have to figure that out yourself. So like, I kind of know that, but I still want to achieve the biggest possible outcomes. But, but just because, like you were saying, it's addictive, it's fun. I love creating a new customer experience. I love getting loads of trust palette reviews. I love like getting to the top and I love like winning basically.

Problem solving in a way as well.

Like. Yeah, yeah, like figuring out how to get people to convert their whole bathroom to this and stick around and stay retained. It's really hard. And that's a challenge that I've taken on basically. But ultimately I don't want to be. I want to be in the Bernard Arnault position, you know, the, or the Richard Branson position in terms of like just having excellent people like running the operation. Because I'm not like, I'm like you. I'm really good in the very early days. I can set things up from scratch, I can figure out, solve all the problems, I can do everything. But I much prefer having someone like really operational like running the company. Then I can focus on brand and customer experience and the strategy and the culture and all of that. So that's position I want to get a. I want to get into. If we can turn life supplies into like the LVMH of consumer goods and have multiple brands in the way that you were talking about. Yeah, I definitely see us acquiring brands and bringing them into the fold, developing new brands. That'd be like, yeah, that'd be.

Sick. I guess the final. Well, you probably could be trying to answer to this, but the final question I do ask people, and it's become a traditional, is if you give three bits advice to your 18 year old, let's say self, upon reflection, what would they be? They don't have to be long, but off the top of your head.

Damn, if I was how old?

18.

Yeah. Don't go to uni. I wasted three years. Leave the.

Northeast.

Agreed. I should have come straight to London or San Francisco. And don't freaking do B2B because that's not what I enjoy. I enjoy B2C. I enjoy D2C. I enjoy E commerce. I should have gone straight into that as well. And just like, you know, just like take even more risks because it just doesn't matter. It really doesn't.

Matter. You know, especially when you're younger, like even if you've lost.

Everything. I used to like, wait. You know, it took me a while to realize you don't need permission to do.

Anything.

Yeah. You know, and I wish I'd figure that out at a much younger.

Age. I want to follow up with my own cringy question that got caught last time because you've got one. I might as well have a trademark. If you could meet anybody in the world right now and you could ask them one question, who would you meet? What would you ask them and.

Why? Great.

Question. Surely.

Bernard. I was just about to say it'd be Bernard Arno. And I would ask him if he were in my shoes, what would he do over the next year to set the business up, to create the vision that I want, which is effectively his business plugged into.

Mine. A different vertical and different.

Industry. He flies under the.

Radar.

Yeah. You can't find much ad like.

Last three weeks when he's been richest man in the world. That's literally. I'd heard a bit about him, but only because I've intentionally read about him. But, yeah, really interesting guy. Did they buy apc? Someone bought apc, which is a big brand today, and they're in the room. It's rumored that he might be probably in the running to buy them as.

Well. Yeah. Interesting one, like, final point on that, which I hadn't actually consciously thought about until the other day when someone was talking through it. The difference between premium and luxury. LVMH is all about luxury. Premium is like, you know, you said that basically reminds you of an iPhone or Apple. Like, it's premium. It's got features that are better than everything else. Or like, you know, a BMW X5 or something has got better than a Corsa or something. But luxury, you're only buying it because you want to make a statement. It doesn't provide any more functional benefits, basically. And all of LVMH's brands, they don't at all. You just want it to make a statement, you know, it doesn't provide anything more functional. And it's amazing because vanity purchase.

In a way, isn't it? Purely pure vanity purchase, like perception of other people, of.

Yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. It's.

Like. It's pure emotion. And it's fascinating when you think about it like.

That. It is. That's a great point to end on, I.

Think. Cameras are dead anyway. I just got the symbol. So on that bomb show. All right, team, been a pleasure as always. Subscribe to the pod. We'll see you in the next episode. Sam.