Making 8 Figures Building & Selling a SAAS Business - Alex Packham | Midnight Podcast Episode 23

Right then back with episode 22 of the Midnight Pod. I think this is going to be a fucking interesting one. One of, in my opinion, the most impressive entrepreneurs we've had on in terms of shit you've actually done.

Thanks, dude.

Alex Packham. It is, as they say, a second name.

Yeah, yeah, you got it right.

Content Cow, which is a software company. We can dive into all that in a minute. I actually first met Alex, well one time four years ago in San Diego. I think it was when we were very drunk.

Yeah. Random.

You had fairly recently started the business.

Yeah.

And he recently got acquired by Adobe, which is fucking. That's like Champions League shit for entrepreneurs, I think. And yeah, I was going around the world in my drop shipping days. Yeah, I remember not paying tax probably properly at the time. And yeah, it's good fun. No, I think I was there. You went to like la, then New York and a few random things.

I remember speaking to you thinking, damn, this man's living the dream.

Yeah, it was, in hindsight, to be fair, it was, it was good. I was 22 at the time. Getting fucking old now. But yeah, Content Cal.

Yeah.

You built a software company over the past, what, six years?

Six years, pretty much all in. I had an agency before and then ran social for two corporate businesses as well before that. But yeah, I'd say really the journey, I always reference different times. The whole thing is 10, 11 years, like my career so far.

You're how old now?

I'm 31. So you think you're old? Yeah. True.

You've made a shitload of money doing something you like, which I feel like that's what every fucking entrepreneur watching this shit.

Yeah, that's the goal.

That's like the fucking golden trophy. But I guess first question as usual, and you've kind of already dive into it, but just five minute rundown, who you are, what you do. And then I try and keep these like fairly chronological, I suppose, and then dive into like the start at the end currently.

Okay, cool.

And loads of shit that I want to know because yeah, it's fucking fascinating.

No, go for it. Yeah, so I mean it's typical entrepreneurial background, selling stuff in the playground. Very, very focused on concept of. Or getting a lot of fun out of the concept of making money for something. Basically from like 14 years old. I'm going way back. But like very, very typical background from entrepreneur perspective. Always doing something in the playground or selling sweets or whatever.

Yeah.

Studied business and always for whatever reason which runs through my family in some ways, like there's quite a few entrepreneurs and stuff like that in my family. Just fascinated with business. Like growing, growing teams, building products, selling stuff. Not so much tech in like my younger days, but like, just the concept of running your own business was fascinating to me. Then skipping, like, obviously a few years forward when I was at uni, which was. Jesus, like 11 years ago. No, way longer than that, actually, like 12, 13, 14 years ago. God, I'm getting old.

Yeah.

I realized basically that every purchase decision I made was based on something I saw a mate do on Facebook. And this was when Facebook wasn't new new, but it was newish and certainly popular. But Twitter was pretty new. There was no Instagram, so it was early social days. And it just literally hit me like, I am literally going to that bar because I've seen that person there on Facebook. I'm going to that restaurant cause I've seen that person there on Facebook. And I'm buying Abercrombie and Fitch because I see my mates wearing those. Yeah, exactly. So, like, it just literally hit me like a train that this is a very exciting way for companies to market themselves. And then I went in like a deep, you know, typical research hole for like days and days and days of like, what. What is social media marketing? Before it was really a thing. Early days. Gary Vee. Very early days. Gary Vee. Mari Smith, if anyone's come across her. But. And she's worked great, we work with her. But like just super early stuff. And then I realized that businesses had no idea. And it still don't in reality, many of them don't anyway, but had no idea how to do this. Like just literally create a Facebook page, post on it every day, post content. Why would I do that? Why would anyone be interested? So I started to monetize myself by managing Facebook pages, Twitter pages for small businesses. Did that for like two years.

While you're in uni.

Yeah, while I was at uni. And then made good money. Didn't make like loads of money, but made good money for uni. Like, was able to basically more than sustain myself and have fun. I was way, you know, more enjoying that than I was doing any studying. Although I did graduate. Didn't drop out.

Yeah.

And then I got a job as the first social media person at Odeon. And I was probably one of the first people with a social media job in the uk. I put myself in that bucket of people. Anyway, again, this is like 11, over 11 years ago. So people were getting like social media manager jobs, but people would take the piss and be like, you get paid to go on Facebook all day on behalf of Odin, which is weird. And then did two years there, had a great time, learning all the typical stuff you'd expect like in a job. Was super passionate about social media marketing. Odin, you know, cinema is a great brand to work with in those.

Where were you based at this point?

I was in London. So yeah, grew up in Winchester University was Cardiff. I went home for two weeks and then had the job at Odeon. Like I was straight into work, no gap year, no nothing. Like very focused on getting the job and cracking on. So I was in London, typical stuff. Living with mates, having fun as well. It was brilliant. And then left Odeon. Cause there was no real place for me to go there. Like I did two years, I was like, right, time to move on. Went to Now TV. Everybody knows what Now TV is in the UK anyway. Exactly. Sky. But when I was there, 50 people in a room Now TV was like, it wasn't a product, it was like a website with a few, few videos on there. It was like a startup within sky and they invested so heavily in it. And I was there for two years. It went from 50 people to like nearly a thousand. So it was like being in this scale up within this corporate environment and I just loved it. I was like, if this is what a startup life is like. And I started like reading about like the Lean Startup Tim Ferriss for our work week. Yeah, like studying that life. I was like, if this is what it can be like, I'm ready to start my restart my entrepreneurial journey. I was always going to do a company. I never was going to like work in what type of corporate life? In my early 20s for a long time I just wanted to get the experience. Left sky after two years, had a great time, started an agency, Odeon and Sky first two clients, got loads of SME clients built up and then learned how to run a business. Bought some people in who were more experienced than I was, but built a team and built, built a proper business. Doing social media, like doing social media for companies.

Is that like paid ads or organic shit?

Organic ads, websites, smma.

But back in the day, now everyone fucking does Everyone.

Exactly. And then that's when content Cal was like a true idea. So I'd always had the idea even from Odeon, because you'd have spreadsheets, a hootsuite or a buffer or whatever.

Yeah.

God knows how many other tools you were combining all this stuff together and I was like, there's got to be a Way where I can create content and actually post it and look at my analytics and measure it and all the rest of it in one place without going from like 10 different things things. And then when, when I was working with SMEs, my agency days, it was very clear. You can be sky, you can be a small coffee shop or you can be a mid sized business. Everyone has to publish content, everyone has a process and everyone needs to do it. Just for some people the process is really big, long and complicated. And for some people, they just want to automate everyday scheduling. And that was really where we were born. We were probably one of the first tools to do that in like a calendar way where, you know, everyone was doing it in like a queue, which sounds really basic but like user experience and softw. So important. And yeah, we just started a separate business but like separate to the agency. Raised 150 grand from friends, family, couple of connections from sky days, built a prototype, sold it to sky and Odeon, sold it to all of my agency clients, did an accelerator. This is this. Save the like the longer version but like merged the agency software business together after this accelerator.

How big was the agency when you started?

Yeah, I could talk about that. That was like people wise, 20ish people, probably our peak. 30 over a million in sales. Yeah, decent size, profitable. Yeah, good clients, good. All of it was retainers, so it was all consistent, which was sick. And then, yeah, merged the two together. Raised a million and then another million. So did two rounds of like angel funding. So like 2 million over 18 months to really like turn the agency into content cal. Which was a tough journey, like going from agency to software business, which is one of the questions I get all the time from people building businesses now like that is hard. Switching business models is tough and people and stuff like that. And then I'm going like random time this start. If you think the start of the journey was sort of 2015, when I say I went to the accelerator, that was 16, so 2017, 18. We'd made the pivot, if that makes sense. We were a software business. So really 18, 19, 20, 21 is when we properly ran it as a SaaS company. Content cow.

Yeah.

So it's a messy journey, but like no journey in business is clean. So yeah, definitely ride.

Yeah. And so you were 25, 26 when you started?

I was 24 when I started the agency. Yeah. 24, yeah, give or take. Yeah.

And then was it like, were you. You have like a techie software background. I know because for example, if I went to start, if I wanted to start software, I wouldn't know to start myself.

My background was very organic in it. Like, I just thought I could do it. Like I built websites and in my sky days got exposed to tech a lot.

Yeah.

Because I was like, the team was all on one floor. It wasn't like tech was in like another room that everyone was together and I was always fascinated by it. And I read the lean startup and that gives you like the mentality around it. But I'm not attack. I don't build, I don't code, like, I don't care. But if you're building a product, and I would say if you're natural at like sketching stuff out, which is I just scribble out user experience stuff, which I didn't even realize at the time was a thing. I was just drawing what I thought would be useful and good. When you start speaking to designers, they're like, do you know user experience? I haven't got a clue. I just know that this is what I would use. Yeah. So that's it, really. It's all like raw and organic and then you learn it over time, that you've got skills and stuff, that it actually fits in a box.

And did you, like, how long was the transition from agency retainers and all that to a finished product that you got them onto? And then. And then secondly, when did you like, cut off the agency retainer stuff?

Good question.

Was it gradual?

It was quite gradual, but basically I would say from like, from zero product to some sort of decent finished product and then actually having clients use it and stuff was probably a year. But like, people would come. Some people are more tolerant of like slightly ropey software than others, if that makes sense. In the early days, if they're a believer in you and they like you, they'll use software which is a little bit buggy after a year and you're like known in the market even a tiny bit, people have expectations that it's always going to work. So. And this was before software was consumerized, like Slack. You don't get any problems with Slack. Right. And most software is now flawless. Whereas even five years ago there was still a lot of like, okay, software.

Yeah.

And so it was gradual for that. But it was about a year before we got like, proper, what I'd call like software stuff.

And was this before buffer and Hootsuite off camera? So I've used Buffer and Hootsuite. I've never actually used Content Cow.

You gotta use it. This is Way after them. I mean, Buffer would have been around, I don't know, five years at least before. Yeah, hootsuite the same, if not longer, maybe. I don't know which one was first.

So did you consciously come in thinking, yo fellas, quick one. First bit of promo for the pod. You may or may not have heard I released a fucking ecom course a few months ago. Basically spent like six months making it because I was in between businesses, as you probably know. If you follow my shit, I must say, 12 hours long. It's fucking quality. I was going to drop it at like 1500 quid with some bullshit guru y webinar and all that rubbish, but as you know, it's not my main thing. I'm working on a new brand right now, very, very fucking much in the trenches. Which is why I think it's actually a better course than everything else out there because it's built on real experience of my brands in the past and my current one. I think it's super, super valuable. If you're interested in E comm, you're already in E comm and you wanted to get into e comm 0 to 1 starting a brand from scratch, then definitely worth investing in. Link is in the bio of this video or podcast, Spotify, Apple Music, wherever the fuck you're listening or watching, podcast and enjoy the rest of the pod, you know, was the intent to try and do something different, doing a different market, like. Or were you just like it? We'll just join the party and do something similar and try.

We get like us so many times. Like if I think about it logically now, like I said about the calendar, we were, we were until really recently the only product centered around a content calendar. I want to post this much in a week. Exactly, yeah. That's what it says on the tin. Literally. That was as. That was our USP for ages as a calendar. You could see stuff in the way that you wanted to plan it. It wasn't a queue, you know, it was built like a social media content calendar. And so it wasn't that we wanted to go out and destroy either of them or like some anti competitive thing. It was like we think. I thought people want to work in a calendar because I worked in a calendar and like that's the way to be done. And it turned out that they all ended up building calendars funnily enough.

And you think you're just building it for you primarily to start with.

Yeah, for sure. But knowing because I was very plugged into the social media World that lots of other people work like me. Not everybody, but lots. So that was our like usp. We built loads obviously off the back of that. But yeah, it's a funny one. But like the put to your agency point, we had to fade it slowly over time because it's just tough. Like it just takes time to change business model. But there does become a day, especially if you're morphing, you have to be.

Like, yeah, the agency like Lili to seven separate businesses. So how did you view it?

They were at the start they were totally separate and then when I did this accelerator, we merged them together.

What was that accelerator? Sorry, more details.

Called the Accelerator Academy. It's London based. If you ever like doing a seed startup like from scratch and you haven't got that much experience, they are awesome. I've raved about them loads on LinkedIn and stuff like that. Yeah. Run by a guy called Ian Merrick's. Yeah. If you really are starting from ground zero and you just want to learn how to build a tech business from scratch, raise capital etc, definitely worth looking into.

Is that where you got the funding from initially?

Now I got 150 grand initially from friends, family, contacts.

Yeah.

And then all the other angel rounds came off. Meeting people through that and then meeting people like from intros and stuff afterwards. Yeah.

How much equity are you giving away at this point if you're raising 150k? Because I feel like, I mean like I was saying to you, I've done similar size, slightly bigger recently and I didn't really know where the fuck to start.

Yeah.

Some people were telling me to value this thing at 50 grand and I just said, well, it's not gonna work. And other people were saying push as high as possible and yeah, somewhere in the middle. So the end.

Yeah, there's no like right or wrong. And some people might say that having the highest valuation is right. Well, not always because if you don't get the traction after that in the early days, you might end up doing down rounds or flat rounds and that doesn't show like progress and VC land and stuff. So I probably gave away. And again, this was a different era. I think 15ish, probably, maybe even a bit more, can't quite remember but like I could have gone higher even then, for example. And again, it just depends on how you run your business.

Yeah.

And also if you're second time, third time founder, business person, you're always going to be able to raise more money and therefore to get the optics right, you know, you typically don't really want to give away more than 20 around. So first time around, you might raise 250, 300 grand for 20, say whatever the number is, but next time you might literally better raise 10 million for 20%. That's just the way the game goes. Like, when you've got record and getting.

That 150, do you think. Was that because you had the agency business and, like, there's incredibility from that. Like, do you think you could have done that, you know, straight out of uni, for example?

No, no, no chance. I think, because again, even. Well, that was nearly 10 years ago, eight years ago. Like, it was a different world. It would sound so ridiculous because that's not that long a time. But, like, people weren't seeding businesses for even 150, 200 grand here, there and everywhere, whereas now people are doing it multiple times a day. At the end of the day, you know, I mean, there's hundreds of businesses, if not thousands been started every day seeded with a couple hundred grand.

But you think even now, for. I mean, assuming someone's. Because a lot of people watching, I know, will think this, yeah. Say that. I don't know, 21, 22. They haven't really built a business yet, but passionate about, I don't know, whatever brand, whatever it is.

Yeah.

Do you think someone like that can raise money or is it now?

Yes. Yeah, now, yes.

Like, and does that have to be from Network or is that. Do you think you can actually get money off, like.

Yeah, you can get one. No, for sure. There's some funds that literally will do it on a numbers game. There are some. Probably not so much in the uk, so they'll come in time, but in the States, I can't remember the platform, but they literally will go. As long as you put us a deck together in this format and you provide us this type of forecasts, which is not like, it's relatively basic stuff. We will just wire you $100,000.

Yeah.

There's no questions, there's no due diligence. They just do it on a numbers game. They've got hundreds of millions to invest and they just know that it's going to work. They take 8% flat, wherever is. There's no deal. It's just like, this is what we take. We give you this crack on. So I think now the game's changed, I think the world has embraced the concept that the more people that start businesses, the better. Whereas it was reserved for people who really knew, like, the legals behind it, the Structures like we were talking about this before, like now you don't even need a lawyer to start a business. You go and see leaders.

That's why I said, yeah, exactly.

So the what is commoditized starting a business, which is a good thing because the more people do it, the better and the more chances there are successes. So I think you can definitely do it nowadays. But yeah, 10 years, even six years ago, they're just not. Not quite as easy.

Yeah. And 150 grand then starting a software company, because I'm very ignorant to software. Where are you spending that and how long does that. How long does that last? Is that. Did that get you to a decent product? We could actually start generating revenue or.

Yeah, but it's again, different era. So my world, when I was doing it, 150 grand gets you what I've called a decent prototype slash minimal lovable product. Minimal viable. Nowadays it needs to be loved. Yeah, mlp. Exactly. And it would do that. Right. And you could do. There are two ways of doing that. You could do that in three months, you could burn all the money and do it in three months. I did it over the course of 9ish months, give or take. So more iterative and building product at any scale. Small, big is all about user feedback and looping that feedback and those suggestions into your product. Like again, whether you do that in three months or nine months, it can't. It's got to be a little bit of intuition, a reasonable amount of intuition. But from that point onwards, when you're out, you've got to get feedback and get all those features and functionality building. But you can get decent product for that. But it is prototype territory. It's not going to scale, but you're going to have to rebuild it at some point. Yeah.

And if you've got an idea, then say, I've got an idea for certain app and I've got 150 grand to spend. What am I doing tomorrow morning to make that happen? Am I literally going on upwork and hiring an Eastern European developer or is it.

If you're doing that tomorrow. Yeah, good question.

What's the best way to start?

I would say if you're that way inclined, which again, we were talking about this. Sketch out roughly what you want. It doesn't have to even be remotely perfect. But if you've got the, like, whatever the expertise you're trying to build the app as. Yeah, sketch out what you want. First of all, find. Don't know any developers, find UX UI designer that you can partner with that can build you a designed clickable through prototype. So, you know, like, basically take your scribbles and turn into something you can click through. No tech whatsoever. Take that, take that to 50 to 100 people who are potential customers. Show them the designs and iterate in designs because you're not building anything at that point. And it will take three hours to get 20 design amends. Whereas if you start with tech, you're building a technology product which you don't even know is.

Yeah.

To do everything in design for as long as you physically can. And then when you get enough people going, I would pay for this. Just looking at your design files or clicking through your prototype.

Who are those people at this point?

Mates, customers, networks, Introductions. Yeah, Anyone who you think would buy or use the app, basically. And then you. They will give you their time, like proper time, not like flick through for 10 minutes. Yeah, I think it's all right. Like, I will look at this properly for you and give you some proper feedback. I don't like this button here. This doesn't make sense as a feature. This is amazing, whatever that is. And then once you've got to a stage where your feedback is overwhelmingly positive, like 70, 80%. Yes. This is like, great. I would use this or buy it. Then start talking to developers and say, right, I think I've got. Well, I think I've got the scope of what I want to build. Whether it's upwork, whether you go to a web agency, whatever. Only build it once you've validated it and designed. Because you can do that for like 10 grand.

Yeah.

You can design an entire product which is fully, like ready to be built. 10 grand sounds like a lot, but it's better than not spending the 150.

Yeah, yeah.

And then throwing it away. So that would be my advice, like, start loose, start flexible. Only build when you really need to, when you're ready to build it.

Yeah. Do you think, I mean, we're going to software as well? It's like one point. I think I'm, I suppose, in like ecom, which is the world I know, and probably more people watching this than software.

Yeah.

It feels like, well, certainly maybe it's not the best way to do it. It's how I've done it. I'll put something out into the market and then get the feedback and change it. But obviously. Yeah, but that's because you can build a product for, you know, if you're drop shipping, like, nobody even need a product. And even if you're making Your own product, you can do it for like a few grand, which most people can do obviously in software. Like you're saying it's a bit different. Very much kind of the opposite.

You, you can test the concept. Yeah. It is expensive. Yeah. You can, you know me, you can, you can test the concept.

We can edit that.

Yeah, yeah. You can test the concept of a software product without even building it though. Same as you could with drop shipping. So website, email, sign up page.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't even have to buy anything pre order if you want, type thing or put a. Put a deposit down. I mean you don't do that software but like some sort of validation of the concept. But I. Because software is so expensive to build.

Yeah.

And if you get it wrong, same with anything, you lose people straight away.

I've got. Mate, actually, I'm just thinking.

Yeah.

Out loud, you should probably speak to him. He was on my podcast.

Yeah.

Guy called Adam Reed, unplugging him. Now he's starting a software. He's trying to raise a load of money actually.

Really?

You should definitely speak to him, put him in touch.

Yeah.

Because I was speaking to him about this and he's made a lot of money in econ, but now he's building software for print on demand, which is the model he's used to build his econ brands.

Yeah.

But he was like, fuck me, it's going to be so expensive.

It is like, okay, Jesus.

Yeah, that world.

The thing is like you have to think of it as R and D which not many people can get their head around. Like building software takes huge amounts of research and development. R and D, there's loads of government schemes as well where you basically can claim back 30%, give or take of the cost.

Yeah.

And you also have to get around the concept that you're not going to be profitable for a long time. In reality, that's just the way a software business typically is.

Yeah.

If at all, like if ever. And it is just fundamentally got this massive sunk cost. Whereas an E Comm. Well, you know, way better than I do. I think you. I guess you can be profitable pretty quickly.

Yeah, you'd hope so. Yeah. In most cases.

What would you try and run a profit model on pretty quickly? Within the first three months?

Well, yeah, I mean straight away for this new brand I'm launching. Yeah. Like I would hope to be like break even from month one in terms of like, like yeah, granted you'd have to put a bit of money into stock, but in terms of like operating profit or whatever. I'm not a fucking accountant. Yeah, yeah, as in like I'd want to spend 50 on marketing, roughly.

Yeah.

20 on COGS, 80% gross margin and then another 10% on overheads, 5% on bullshit and shoot for a 10, 15% net margin. Hypothetically.

Yeah, yeah.

And then if you scale in, maybe a bit less.

Yeah.

Which is what happened with Neon beach. When it was going well, then it went.

But still though, you cannot do that. Building a software product. Yes, fundamentally, I would say impossible. And if you were trying to be Prof. To a month one, you're probably in the wrong space. Like, it's just unless you've got some massive enterprise order of like a million quid building custom software or whatever, but like proper scaled software SaaS, that's not possible. Yeah.

So how did you get first customers, then beyond kind of network and people that you already had?

So. Yes.

And how finished was the. How good was the product? Yeah, she shipped it, so to speak. Is that the term?

Yeah, shipped it, yeah, it was out. Yeah. No, so it was up. Yeah, it was live. So after network. So firstly standard, like you said, basically is network, like everyone you know, etc. I'm not sales background at all, so I'm very like what they would call subject matter expert, founder, I understand social media content, etc. When I did the accelerator, one of our first investors literally said that to me, sat down, sat me down and said, you're a good relationship salesperson. Like, because I had an agency, like, people want to buy from you, Alex, and believe in your expertise.

Yeah.

But you selling software, which is quite transactional, there's no real relationships, like, do you want this software? This is the price bang done. He was like, you're not that person, so you need to bring someone in. And so he introduced me to a guy called Andy Lambert, who is part of Content Cal's like founding team. Like, great sales background, wanted to also join a startup at this stage where he can make a meaningful difference, but bring his sales skills, but do other stuff as well. And he's just a brilliant guy, but like very customer focused, very people focused. And to be perfectly honest, what he did was he like downloaded my LinkedIn, took my email inbox and then went like two layers around it, you know, I mean, about people that were connected.

So is this B2B primarily at this point?

All B2B? Yeah, all B2B. And he just ran what you would pretty much now call like typical outbound process. Just built emails, got meetings, mostly asking for feedback. In the early Days, because we needed feedback. And then he would, you know, at the end of lots of meetings, be like, do you want to buy it? And people would say yes. So it was, it wasn't me, if that makes sense. That's one of the key things which we, again, we were talking about offline. Like, that was one of my first realizations or journeys or steps in the round that you've got to bring, like experts in certain fields that are better than you at whatever that is. And Andy got us our first, what I would call true 100 plus customers. And it was hustle. It was literally LinkedIn meetings for like 50 quid a month. So bear in mind.

Yeah, I was gonna say, so how much were they paying the first customer?

Next to nothing. Yeah, Ten quid a month in some instances. So like you, there's this always famous phrase, do this, do, do the unscalable in the first instance. It's so true. And it was like magic to witness him do it. He was caning meetings constantly shout out to Andy for that. But you've got to do that to get the traction. And then once that gets repeatable, then you start bringing more people in, you invest more in marketing. Again, you know this. But like, once you start getting some brand value, people start recognizing who you are. You become like a name, a mini name or a mini brand. SEO credibility, all of that stuff starts to come into play as you raise more money and spend more. But like the first hundred customers, old school, proper old school stuff.

Yeah. So at this point, because, like, how quickly would you run out of money? Because I want to come up to billion things around that.

But. Yeah, yeah.

Like, is that scary or is it. I mean, how does that work in software? So you raised 150 grand? Yeah, you mentioned then there was two. You raised another 2 million over time.

Yeah. Was that two years, give or take? Yeah, yeah.

Is that two years later?

Yeah, over two years. So like 150 then, give or take a million a year, like nine months after the 150 was gone. So I had a million quid, which is good. So that's like. That's a year's worth of cash and then again probably another million, which last us, give or take a year again. And then we did another round, we did like a couple of bridges and then we did a couple of VC rounds. So this is, this took me time to learn this basically. So building your business where your sales can go like that but your cash goes like that is a really hard thing to get your Head around. So.

Yeah, right, yeah. For me as well. Yeah. I'm not in software but this isn't.

This is by design.

Yeah.

So you are designing a business that sales look fucking awesome but your cash looks horrendous and also with investors obviously who might have come from a different era where that doesn't make any sense because you think most companies sales go like that and profit will continue to go a bit like that whereas you're going like this and there's no cash.

You.

It's a very hard thing to learn. And then it. Yeah. Like you said, is it nerve wracking? Yes. In like in my early 20s watching your cash balance like go from high numbers to next to none in business terms.

Tell me about it this time last year.

Exactly. And what I would say you learn much later and as you go like again through like the process and I bought in an FD at some point, can't remember when but like that was life changing. You realize that that is a, that is part of the plan, it's part of the process, it's how you build software and as conveyed in the right way to the right people. That is logical. It sounds ridiculous to say in some ways but it's logical that you can build an amazing book of revenue, burn a lot of cash in the process. But once you've got that business in the right place and through all the relevant like accountancy things as well, that is worth like a lot of money to people plus the IP and everything else. So it is absolutely terrifying regardless on a human level to be running out of money constantly in your business. But when you get your head around it and know you've got to know when you need to fundraise, allow six months for that process to get cash in bank and factor that into your cash flows and models and stuff like that. But again at the first instance mate, I was just going out raising money from people being like can you put, give us, you know, give us this, give us that. We're raising 600 grand, I'll give you 20k. Cool. Can I have it now please?

Yeah.

So yeah, it's just again it's just back to the hustle stuff but year.

One then of content cow, what were the numbers like and, and then, and also how much had you raised at that point? Yeah, to give like an indication of scale.

Yeah. Can't go into loads of details but like high hundreds of thousands like in terms of revenue in the first few years. I can't remember exactly but. And bear in mind it's recurring revenue. So yeah, the compounding effect of recurring revenue, like compounding in general is like the miracle of the modern world. But like you don't start the year from zero, you always start the year from a base of whatever your last months and your recurring revenue was. So that's one of the most like blessed things, software. You've always got cash coming in no matter what, so you can always run the business. Theoretically. You can't never not run out of money, but there's always an amount coming in. So you can be quite sensible with cash flow.

More.

What I can probably go more into is like percentage in growth terms. So we always did 100 to 200% year on year growth. Yeah. And that's actually, to be honest, way more important than what the actual numbers is in the early days. Like can you grow that quickly? Can you continue that growth as the numbers get bigger? Obviously 200, that's tripling every year. So say for example, your million quid, that's basically getting to 3 million quid. That's hard. That is really hard. But basically maintaining those levels of growth means you should in theory be able to raise money. And that was always the goal. Again, like it's not about necessarily revenue target, it's growth in order to raise the next round. And that's again a very different way of running a business. It's not like growth for profit. So I can fund X, Y and Z for my own cash flows.

Yeah.

Can I burn X to get to 200 growth so I can raise a million quid or whatever the number is. So you're building a business on that type of metric and then all the other stuff around it. Yeah, but planning for a business like that, like I said now feels incredibly natural to me. But unless you've been well versed in it, it's like makes no sense logically. Like I keep saying, like burning cash just makes no sense. Yeah.

Right. So coming on to, well, expanding on that like software because. Yeah. Like I always think about E Com. I look at E Comm acquisitions all the time. Like you read about, I don't know, like valuations and stuff. And there seems to be like two buckets, there's like bedroom brands which set which sell for an EBITDA multiple.

Yeah.

Or like slightly bigger ones which sell for a larger EBITDA multiple. So instead of maybe like a 3 multiple, they sell for a 10 to 15x multiple.

Yeah.

And then you get these mad ones where they sell for 5 to 10x revenue and they're losing Money and typically from my understanding that's because they're bigger and it's a strategic buyer, like I don't know, the Hook group or fucking PepsiCo buys them. Yeah, but that's E Com which by the sounds of it's quite different fucking software. And like is there any software business which is actually like profitable like at least early or is it literally just the unwritten or written rule? Yeah, that, that's how it goes.

So I would say the way, one of the ways to think about it, there's no right, there's no like right answer to this by the way. There's no one like golden way but like enterprise software which would really mean you're selling to big businesses. So you're selling like 100 grand plus contracts. There's no, you know, they pay and.

Like Salesforce and shit.

Yeah, like Salesforce. Yeah, exactly. HubSpot or not so much but like there's loads of versions. But enterprise sales which makes me average contract value is 100k plus and you have to pay up front and normally it's multi year deals. So say for example you're an enterprise software and they provider of, let's just say is a sales tool. You've got a two year deal so it's 200 grand and the customer has to pay you up front. Yeah, there's no way out. That is a very solid way of building what I would call profitable SaaS business. It's gonna jump because you can literally generate 200 grand of you know, basically recurring revenue and it's a two year contract and normally they'll automatically renew as well. So unless the customer literally cancels within three years at the end it's going to automatically renew. So if you think about that and you're an enterprise salesperson and you can do 10 deals a year and then you've got 100 plus sales people doing those types of deals. So yeah, like yes, you can build a profitable business because this is where the magic of software comes in. Once you build like a mature product with whatever the features are. Yes, you need to continue to innovate obviously. But there becomes a time in the lifespan where if the market's big enough, there is no supply issues because you've got the software, it literally exists. Yeah, it doesn't cost you any real money to create the next instance for the next customer. So you can literally duplicate your product 100 times in the same day and there is no movement, there's no product going anywhere. You're charging 200 grand a pop. Let's just say, for example. So when you think about those maths, absolutely, you can build profitable software, but it typically happens later in like the life because you've got to build the product. Obviously if you take more like low end consumer style businesses, whether that's SaaS or consumer products, nine pounds a month, $10 a month, whatever, that's harder to get profitable because you still have to spend a similar amount of money, not the same, but a lot of money to build the product. And then if it's month to month contracts instead of annual or quarterly, there's this thing called cactor LTV ratio, like customer acquisition cost to lifetime customer value. Really it actually gets like super complicated maths and then you get like cohort analysis. Like every month you look at the individual customers by month, like there's a whole structure around it. Very, very hard to make that profitable in any short space of time. So you're building really to your point around like a strategic purchase, building a product which is like a great solution for a problem. That's the key thing. You're building a model which definitely still generates revenue, but it might take you two years to pay back the customer acquisition cost. Say it costs you 600 quid to acquire the customer, but you're only charging 10 quid a month. I can't do that math off top of my head. But you're talking like two to three years to get the money back.

Yeah.

So you're building up a book really of great software, loads of customers in volume and eventually, yes, breakeven profitability, but really burning money and losing money for a long time and then the play really for that type of model, most instances, is that because your software is so great at fixing this problem and you've proved X, Y and Z in terms of customer points, revenue points, whatever big company comes along and says we need that, we don't have like that software solution, we'll buy it for a premium, thank you very much. Give us the software, give us the team, we'll integrate it. Rather than you having to spend another $10 million like marketing this for your next round.

Yes. By the economies of scale, we got.

25,000 customers, Bosch, and typically those like deals that acquiring business once they get the integration done and stuff, will make what they paid for you every year. So it makes sense. But like there's no, like I said, there's no one way of doing it. Like it's just different. Different ways, different tactics, different strategies. And I would say that again with hindsight now, given like the process I've been through building this like IP style deal, this similar to what we've done really like content cows bought to be scaled. There's great like stuff in that because you can build a fantastic product, you don't necessarily ever get to the stage of profitability but you get bought into like a brilliant business to go and fulfill your dream and mission. But it kind of like fulfills, not fulfills it for you but it gives you the scale like you said, at the click of a button.

Yeah.

But if you go down the tree VC route or whatever you need to do to raise money, there's great stuff in that as well. And theoretically you can build a bigger, more valuable business but it's going to take you 10, 20 years kind of thing realistically. So like I said, there's no right or wrong but it's cut. Like I said, it's a weird unique business model basically.

Yeah. There's so many questions I'll ask off the back of that I'll try and do one by one. But going back to scaling a SaaS business then because obviously like E Comm typically like now you'd probably say a mix of Facebook, Google and TikTok ads.

Yeah.

Maybe a bit of brandy stuff if you're above 10 million revenue. Like influencer, like crap. What's the approach with SaaS? I mean ultimately same principles and you get someone to a landing page and they're putting their credit card in. Like is it similar, Pretty similar media buying.

I'd say the biggest differences are you need. How to phrase this? Reviews and like advocates probably earlier. So I wouldn't say it's similar to influence marketing for consumer or ecom, but you need like reviews on G2 Crowd or on blogs like Captora on a Terra. Exactly. Yeah. But there, believe it or not there are like bloggers who review social media tools. Like there's, there's a niche for everything.

Yeah.

So like you need to work with those characters and those people and get their support and make them believe in what you do. Even when you pay them. We all know what influencers, good ones still even if they're getting paid only back the stuff they like. So you've got to get those because you've got to get the credibility. SEO I would say is probably more important in software than potentially an econ, particularly in the early days. Like you do need to try and rank for a couple of key terms because otherwise you just, you know, you put in social media tool or something like that, you're going to hoot, see hootsuite, you're going to see HubSpot, it's going to be Salesforce. I mean even Content Cow is still quite low on that scale.

Yeah.

So I would say SEO is key for a couple of key terms and then it is trying to get the paid media model to work. But the golden thing in software is recommendations. Like driving word of mouth. They call it product, everyone calls it product led growth. Now it's word of mouth marketing, which basically is building an unbelievable product that people want to tell people about. So if we were working together and I was the social media manager and you were my boss and I was like, matt, I need to use this new tool. It's called Content Cow. It's literally saving me three days a week. You'd go, all right, cool, for 50 quid a month we'll do that.

But I'll put an affiliate link in the. Yeah, exactly.

Just ching. Thank you very much. But then I go, brilliant. I'm now going to tell all my social media mates about it first, like, I don't know the first hundredth user of this cool new platform. I need to tell everybody because that makes me look cool. Yeah, that, that is where it all comes down to. Like word of mouth and recommendations is priceless in every business, but in software, massively, definitely your fellas.

Quick one. You may or may not have noticed there's been a bit of merch, so to speak, in recent episodes. We've got two different things. We've got some of the retro style OG neon beach posters that designed like four years ago. You may have seen that on my Instagram. And then we've got some of the best selling OG viral style neon signs that basically did start that entire craze about two years ago now. So, yeah, if you want to add something to your home, office, your living room, just anywhere, sick, basically that you want to add that extra thing to and support the channel, then you can check that out. Link is in the Bio Midnight Co shop. And yeah, just an aesthetic item to complement the process, I suppose. Cheers for watching and enjoy the rest of the pod. In terms of then who's like, what was the team like in the early days off the back of that? Because I've worked with like agencies on a media buying perspective for Ecom and a lot of people do all these SMMA companies. But then I also hired someone in house which ends up being a nightmare. He's probably not watching this because he blocks you on everything. But how, how did that work for you? And what was the team like in the early days? Off the back of that?

Yeah. So I've always been a believer in building teams. I would say my best skill is building teams. Now it takes time to learn that obviously, like managing people and it's like reverse engineering what you think is the right thing to do. So when you're younger, you think that being a specialist and being an expert in something is what's going to make you get a promotion or level you up or what you want to be known for. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's what we've all got to do. But what you realize is when you get to a stage of management is that your role is about getting other people to fulfill their goals, like manage their output, get them to feel and be successful. And that is how you in turn are successful. So it took me a long time to learn, I would call out the art of management and like motivating people. But empowering others to achieve their goals within like the context of work is, I would say, the most important thing in building a business. Again, talked about delegation. So building teams and bringing people in for me has always been key and that is always around finding the best person you can obviously afford within budgets and stuff for marketing, for sales, for product, for development. Not trying to be the expert at everything. Taking the absolute opposite view. Almost like reverse saying, I know nothing about that. And if you don't, even if you do great, but even if you do know coding, let's just say, for example, whatever, stop doing it and learn how to become a manager.

Yeah. To be honest, I'm probably asking this because I've really struggled with this in the past. I'm struggling with it again now in a different context. It's like firstly, and there's probably a lot of people who can relate, like, particularly because I've come at E commerce from like, I'm a creative at heart more than a business person or whatever. And I've kind of, you know, built a basic understanding obviously of fucking P and L and cash flow and like the more boring stuff in my opinion.

Yeah.

But for example with like kind of front end stuff, I almost don't want to like even in the past when I've actually had revenue compared to my new thing.

Yeah.

I don't, almost don't want to delegate because I feel like I could do it better or like it's my thing and I know that's wrong and I know that's not scalable.

Yeah, yeah. So.

So there's that and then secondly, like now, so I've raised a bit of money for this new thing.

Yeah.

And I'm probably more conscious of not overspending because of what happened in the past business. But then it's like, yeah, who should I hire first? Because I can technically do it on myself because I'm pretty.

Yeah. General, resourceful guy. Yeah.

Particular, like front end stuff. Like I could launch, I could build the brand, the website, everything, myself and get it going. Like, even the product stuff.

Like, yeah.

But then I'm like, at what point should I. Like, if I had to, off the top of my head, I probably think the first person how would be just a general marketing person that would nail the social media strategy, blah, blah, blah. But then it's like even within that niche role, it's like, well, should I hire someone that's 21 and you can pay him 21 grand a year or should I be looking to hire someone that's like, worked in a fintech startup and do you know what I mean?

I know exactly what you're doing.

Where's the tipping point between hiring to grow but also not overspending? But then at the same time you can't be like scared of spending.

Yeah. Because otherwise you get nowhere.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That's like 5 million questions.

There's those. I can break the couple of those down though. So firstly, if you start a business, you have two jobs, like two very, very, very distinct jobs. One you're going to do straight away and one you really have to learn. And founder and CEO people, some people like take the piss out of that. But like, there is a big difference between being a founder and being a CEO or whatever you want to call it. Managing director. So as a founder. Yes, you should be frugal. Yes. If you can do something, well, of course you should do it as an entrepreneur. That is the core of it. Like, yeah, you can do a lot. Exactly. So do that for a period to the point where not even necessarily where like you know that someone else could do it for you theoretically, but like where you know, there's a breaking point that you can see you're gonna have to do five different things. I, I think most people can only do three things really well, like as in not doesn't learn them, but like three things in a day max, that could be running a workshop, it could be running Facebook ads, and then it could be doing invoices. But like, you won't be able to do more than that in a day. Well, over time your brain just won't be able to.

Yeah.

And then over time you should be doing less. But like, as a founder, you should get everything that needs to get done in the early stages, because that's exactly what a founder should do. But over time, you've got a creep in almost percentage wise. If you think of it like, firstly, you're 100% founder. Month two, you're going to be 10% CEO. Month three, you're going to be 20% CEO, whatever it might be. And if you look at CEOs jobs, they're not there to do anything. You are not there to physically do a task. You are there to lead people and process and projects. You're not. You don't do invoices, you don't like. You don't do a task, basically. So if you creep in like your two job specs together and basically figure out like, okay, I'm putting my CEO hat on this afternoon, theoretically, yes, I'm supposed to do invoices. So break that down as a task. Okay. That is a percentage of time, whatever it ends up being. Maybe depends on the context. Again, but you hire a finance manager to do invoices and then suddenly you hire a good one who can do invoices, but they can also do modeling, they can also do cash flow management, they can pay the bills, they can give you advice on stuff that you have no idea about. You creep in these other people over time and it could be social media, same thing. Basically, you bring someone in initially to do organic. It just happens, they pick up paid, then it happens, they pick up analytics, whatever it might be. Like your job as the CEO is to basically get other people to do things that they are good at and specialist at, and scale them, make them successful within the organization to the point where you're basically doing, let's say doing nothing. Your job becomes a hundred percent leading.

Yeah.

That's the key basically to like think of it in that way.

Yeah. Because another way of dogs going fucking mental. Another way of phrasing the question. And it's something I think about a lot, especially with this new business, because I'm like, fuck, right? So someone just feels different about this one. I'm gonna get this one right. Mm. And I think there's a. There's a lot to argue that should. More experience, etc. But like, what is the main thing from day one in your experience that I should think about to make sure. To make sure that it's not another bedroom brand where it's ultimately just me getting paid a lot with a bunch of freelancers.

Yeah.

And actually it can become, you know, potentially 100 million pound.

Yeah, yeah.

Exitable business. And everyone says 100 million, but yeah.

So repeatable scale internally is key. You are, you have X hours where you can be productive, which is you are not repeatable and you are not scalable. But if you bring people in and you coach them and like I said, depending on. I can't like it'd be hard to break it down without going into the detail about what you should bring in first. But you need to think within. I would, I would actually argue for most people, especially if they've raised money and their plan is to raise more after year one you should be doing no foundry driven stuff as a no found. Obviously you are still founder and you need to put your hat on every now and again and do that. And probably you have one work stream which you really take over. Like for me product was always, it's always been. I'm very close to it, I understand social media but I don't do it. I don't do product at content cal. Like I've been very active in it. But by the end of year one or 18 months or whatever it is that you have a. Someone who runs finance, someone who runs sales, somebody runs whatever insert other department here. There's a role for everybody. And if based on your experience, because I know the background, you need to push yourself out of your comfort zone to do that. Because you sound like someone who would very naturally slip back to doing the stuff that you know you can do.

Yeah, definitely.

Whereas learning how to manage and also getting imposter syndrome.

Hiring people.

Yeah.

Because I did with the last business.

Yeah.

I went to hits up.

Yeah.

Hire a few actual PAYE employees for the first time. But that was massively like I felt like a like frog. I was like, these people are older than me.

Yeah.

Two of them are older than me. One more than that.

Yeah.

And I was like, I almost felt like awkward telling them what to do.

Yeah.

Because ultimately they wanted guidance.

Yeah.

I don't know that that was really hard to get around.

It is hard to get around. No, there's no. Yeah. I mean I've been. Yeah. But most people I've worked with are probably, almost certainly will have been on some point in my life older than I am. Which in reality, like when you actually boil it down is not relevant at all.

Yeah.

Age is not important in reality. I mean experience is important.

Yeah.

But Mark Zuckerberg, this is like very like obvious choice but like I don't Know what is he 33, 36, something like that?

Yeah.

Has 25000 again making up the numbers. But thousands of employees, how many of them are older than him? Most probably. Or a huge point anyway.

So don't care.

No, exactly. But like it's not, it's not relevant. It's not, it's just not important basically. So it's more about challenging yourself to learn how to lead and manage well, learning that as a skill and realizing that that is the most important skill you can probably learn in business, in my opinion. Because if you're starting from something from scratch like you said, if you want to build 100 million plus business, that is, that is all you'll do every day if you're successful or, or change your job, be chief, product chief, tech chief, sales, whatever. Have a niche role and hire a CEO. Hire someone who has built a multi gazillion dollar econ business, pay them a proper salary, give them massive share package and say I need you to run the business and I'm going to do that.

You definitely think for the first year at least is full founder hat in the trenches even when you raise a bit of money?

I think so. Like I said, over time it's not like months, 10% but percentage wise slowly start to decrease it. But realize like what, what also what drives you like being CEO or being anything like in general management has loads of ups and loads of downs at the end of the day like there's loads of pros and cons to managing lots of people if you get. No, if it really doesn't, you know, you get dragged down by managing people and working with them constantly and actually managing people's tough. Like then that role isn't for you. Like maybe you are the creative, chief creative officer or something like that instead. There's nothing wrong with that, that's a good thing. But just bring someone in who knows how to do the other stuff basically.

Yeah.

And that's what it is is check checks and balances on your own skill sets. And also what wakes you up every day basically. Yeah, you've got a reverse engineer. The goal if you want to get to 100 million, you will not get there by yourself.

Yeah, because I was listening to a podcast. Fuck it, I'm not crying. I've got bloody hay fevers. Me chewing. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I think it was the. My first million podcasts or whatever. I don't really listen to that many to be fair, but it was when I was on the plane come back from Dubai recently. Like, it was one of those ones. I think I'd had like three drinks on the plane. Like, you get in that mo. Come on. And it was on about starting at the end.

Yeah.

And I'd always thought about that a bit, but I was like, I've never done that enough. So then I basically made a fucking spreadsheet. And this. I want to come on to the fundraising thing in a minute. I made a spreadsheet the other day and it was called like four to five year. I don't know, like, set for life plan or whatever it is. The nine figure plan. Yep. And I put in, you know, hypothetically, what that looks like as a founder. Equity money raised, the numbers required. Probably.

Ish.

Very broadly speaking. It's obviously easy to put numbers in a spreadsheet.

Yeah. That's the right thing. Yeah.

It was like, raise the 250. We're now done. We've done that.

Yep.

Do a million in revenue the first year, break even, whatever. Like for 2022. So, like the first nine months, which I think I can do. Haven't done it yet, but that's the plan.

Yes.

Then it was like, like, it was like, raise a million quid in a year, then get it to like 10 million revenue, then raise 5 million quid. I take a million quid out, whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

And then at the end it was, I have 40 and we sell it for 100 million.

Yeah.

So I made 45 million. Or, you know, hypothetically sell it to a strategic buyer.

I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah.

And at that point, it's doing 30 million run rate, you know, 6 million EBITDA. It's the next big thing.

Whatever. Yeah, yeah.

And then I was like, all right, you get all hyped. Fucking hell. Whatever. This is great. Start showing my flatmate, he's got his own spreadsheet. And then I thought, okay, fine. At least I've got a bit more of a plan.

Exactly.

Than before.

Yeah.

But then obviously that takes time. That takes. Well, it takes a successful business. But the fundraising part, particularly in software, from what you're saying, it space, it sounds like it's required. Almost definitely more than E Comm. They're obviously in E Comm. I think you can.

You can fund it. Yeah, yeah. Free profit.

It's like two questions off this, but, like, firstly, what was the process after that more informal initial round, which is what I've just done as well.

Yeah. Literally.

Fortunately, I've got a good network as a result of the other things, which I guess I got Fucked financially, another thing. But I got a good network, so that network is now paying dividends in another way.

Yeah.

So what was the process? You've got the first year, whatever, basically. And who did you go to?

Well, almost like. No, no, I get it. Yeah. So once you've gone through what I would call like your family and friends version rounds, which is where you are basically, and then you might have done, you'll probably do one more of those, I reckon, before you do a vc. That's my best guess. I did a few. You need someone who taps you on the shoulder and gives you a friendly bit of advice and basically says whatever your next like fundraiser is going to be or whatever your next stage is. And this is when you're definitely generating revenue. Like you have a bit of a business, whether it's half a mil, a mil or whatever. Like you're up and running basically. But you're planning a raise for someone to say you need a finance director. Like you don't need a full time finance director. You need someone two days a month who's going to basically put together your financial model. They're going to make you understand how that works. They're going to challenge you on all of your assumptions. So you go, I know that I can generate this many customers off this Facebook spend. Okay, well let's theoretically plan in 10 inflation on that for the next five years. You go, no, I don't need to just let them do it. Like let them play with the model, let them tweak it. They're called sensitivities. Like again, this is two days a month. This is again partly a learning exercise for you, but also putting in these new structures in place, which will seem weird at the start, but you're putting in like what people want to see, I. E. Investors, rigor, basically. And also entrepreneurs typically by nature are very optimistic. Like we always put the.

I call myself a cynical optimist.

Well, there you go.

It's a term I've coined recently.

I love that. But like this is so that I found this so hard, like when I first working with an fd. They're pessimists and they are paid to be pessimists.

And all those people give me the worst outcome.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I love numbers.

But when you go to raise money, you want to over perform, you never want to underperform.

Yeah.

That typically means. And getting into the habit of baking in a non optimistic view, which as an entrepreneur is hard. So get that person in, whoever they are, find a really good One that you can gel with and listen to them and build in a proper financial model for five years.

Yeah. How do you find that person?

I. Mine through network. Yeah, mine through networks. Very similar to what you've just said on fundraising. If you go to someone who's invested in your round, I mean, I would say any like reasonably sizable business, they have a part time or a full time fd.

Yeah.

Find a portfolio fd. There's also this thing called the FD network. I've never used it, but there's like loads of them available. Basically. Mostly it's about finding someone qualified in like a financial accountancy thing. I never know what they're called but like there's some things you have to do and then someone is just recommended or someone you've interviewed heavily and be like, build me a five year plan. And then go through it many, many times over and that plan will underpin your pitch to your investors. So the funny thing about VC investing or any other investment round, whether it's Mega Angels etc, is that five year plan is like the guiding, solidifying, persuading document that you have thought hard about what you're trying to do. Tick. Don't need to go into any more detail on it. Thank you very much. Your pitch, your deck, your story, your narrative, your vision is what categorically will get people to invest, which is almost like the separate exercise.

It's like the heart and brains.

Exactly that. So the deck is all about build the biggest, get one excited vision. You can get people on a zoom call nowadays or in a room and get them absolutely buzzing at the thought of your business and you as an individual.

Yeah.

And then be like, boom. I've also got this like awesome 5 year plan. Have a look at that stress, test it as much as you want and ask us whatever questions you like. I'd like a million quid, please. Like that's the way, that's the way it is. And I just talking about this today, someone, your pitch is all about building the biggest, best business you can. You don't even need to get there. Like if you're gonna raise money, that's obviously the goal. But if you get bought out along the way, you're trying to build a billion dollar business and someone buys you 50, 100, 200, whatever.

Yeah.

An awesome outcome.

Cry selflessly.

Exactly. Yeah. So it's like I get really passionate about these things, so I've had to do so many rounds and like there's like this amazing relationship. You just said it like heart, mind to A certain extent. But like model financials, vision, debt, creative story, they have to work hand in hand through the process. And so geeking out of this but having a great relationship with an FD is like lighting the fire under the investment story. Yeah, that's what I would, that's what I would always do. And I would almost start a business from scratch. Now that probably the first consultant role I would hire even at your stage would be like, find me a portfolio FD one day a week.

And typically just pay them a day. Right. Are they getting a stock options?

Normally day rate, but then if you like them, give them some stock options as well. Vesta, over four years, they don't. One year, Cliff. They don't stick around for a year, they get nothing. They stick around for a year, they get a tiny percentage. And if they stick around for four happy days, basically like ours was, is amazing. Like, become a good friend. He's like, but we're so different personality wise. But like if I was starting a business, I'd be like, hey, I need a model, can you help me? And he would know exactly what I need because he knows I'm used to, I'm used to that area.

Yeah.

But like I know how important it is to like growing the business basically, basically in funding it.

So when you've got that, then so and for myself, hypothetically, in years time, if I go and try and do like a more formal round, whatever you want to call it, Series A, whatever, blah, blah, like are you typically going to XYZ fund to pitch or are people knocking on your door saying, we've got a shitload of money, we need to deploy, blah, blah, blah, you'll get both.

So you get the automated, slash non automated inbound people coming to you saying, hey, love what you're doing. Can we talk?

Yeah.

What people forget, and I was rubbish at this at the start, is that you now need to qualify them. I mean, I was getting like PE firms that only invest 100 million coming to me for content cow and I was like, well, I'm raising 10. They were like, well, this is pointless conversation because we only rest 100 million at a time. So you need to qualify all of your inbounds because most of them are automated. And to be honest, an inbound investor, unless it's like actually introduced, like a random cold inbound, very unlikely to come off. In my experience, just my experience, like you get random emails if you get like a, hey, me introducing you an investor, that's because I know there's interest. So that's different. And then I would say real rounds or most rounds come from those types of introductions. So you go out to your network and say, here's my deck. Don't never send your financials up front, just the deck. Never, never send any financials up front. Not even in the deck. Like just the idea. Because if that's what piques someone's interest, like then you've got them on the hook for like the core reason of the business. Financials need to back up the plan. They're not the plan, if that makes sense. So get like warm intros and get lots of referrals, have loads of meetings, be prepared for like 90% knows 95%. That's just the way the game works. And you're looking for a market of 1. You only need one investor to say yes because realistically once one is in, maybe they'll fill the round or they will bring in two or three others basically. And so yeah, you need a process though. So there is a, like there is a bog standard process to raising money. I was watching the podcast the other day with the guy sells businesses. It's very similar to that. Like build the book of people who might invest, do the outreach yourself.

I've literally through the process, a Google spreadsheet. I've just quite literally it's, it's split by rich people, I. E. Angels and funds, particularly in the UK and a lot of them in London. Yes, that's where you are.

Yeah.

And it's just like, it's just like a hypothetical list. Like when I get to that point where I want to raise my more money and you know, I can go to XYZ or maybe they'll come to me hopefully. But it's just.

Now you want to go to them. Do you think you definitely want to go to them back around 100. Yeah. Because you have like. So most inbound that will come to you will have already got terms in their head which probably aren't the best ones. They have sized you up against competitors or they've sized you up against, you know, deals they've done before. Yeah, of course this is like, I would say this is like, this is my typical view. There's always anomalies who come to you and they're like the best investor ever. But you haven't even sold to them. But you haven't told them your story. They've just made an assumption based on what they've seen. They haven't come and heard your 10 year vision or 5 year vision. I haven't you know, they haven't sat in a room or a Zoom call and got the tingles and gone, oh, my God. This is unbelievable.

Yeah.

Have you. Have you heard of this? Like, so that the process has, my opinion, has to be driven by you. And you've got to bear in mind if you're an angel who wants to be found or you're a fund that wants to be found, your business is investing, you make money from investing, so you want these opportunities.

Yeah.

And I didn't know that at the start. Like, when people gave me money, it was like quite an emotional, like, oh, my God, I'm gonna do this thing.

Yeah.

But you got to realize, like, if someone's invested in you, they can afford to lose the money, and it's part of their way of making money. Like, they're gonna get another hit if you don't make it kind of thing.

Yeah. I was speaking to Jack, who founded Wayflyer, who very fortunate to have as an investor in my new thing, and he was just telling me, I wonder if you agree with this. He said, in layman's terms, the first bit of money is fucking hard. It's like pulling teeth even from your network because there's still an element of, you know, you still got to convince them, etc.

Yeah.

And you've got to have the network, and if you don't, it's even harder. Exactly. And he said, the first formal round with funds or whatever. Very hard.

Very hard.

And then he said, it gets easier.

For sure. Yeah.

Is that. Have you found that? And do you think that's because it's almost like social proof of the funding? Like, if they X, Y and Z is invested. All right, we'll invest.

Yeah.

And it's like jumping on the bandwagon and momentum thing.

Yeah. 100%. Like, the first formal round. There are. There's some stats around this, but it's. It's such a low percentage of your chances, even if you get a referral. So. Yeah, I mean, I fully agree. When we got our first institution around Fuel Ventures, you should have someone from Fuel on.

I should DM them.

Did you? Yeah.

And they replied, to be fair, they were one of the very few that applied. And they said, we like it, but we've got. We have some.

They've got quite a lot of E Commie stuff.

They said it would be a conflict of interest.

They got a lot of ecommerce stuff. Yeah.

Because they post, like, memes on LinkedIn, which I thought was quite hilarious. Quite an interesting Idea.

I'll. I'll intro you to someone there and you should try and get someone actually.

DM me because I put on my story, which I never do, asking the questions for the pod. And by the way, I'm not using any of them because I don't even know why I asked. But someone did say, I think they're a founder or something. And they said, what's it like working with Fuel Ventures? Because obviously new.

Yeah, they're amazing. Yeah, they're amazing. I'll. They're just brilliant. They're like. I won't go into details on people, but they are all awesome and they are very, very raw. And with all relationships, I wouldn't say I've had ups and downs, but there are some challenges. Obviously, that's just the way it goes. But like, they're just awesome. Yeah, they're cool.

And.

And Guinness, who are other VC investors, were world class as well. So, like, you can get bad VC investors, there's no question. I've definitely heard some horror stories as well. But the two I had were just amazing. But come with the original question was.

Like, no, they can. Was there only ever two investors?

There was. There was loads of angels, but that was the only two big ones. Two big ones, yeah. Yeah, definitely.

So, yeah, the question was, does it get easier?

Oh, it doesn't get easier.

Yeah.

Typical first institutional round is like so unlikely to happen. And I remember when Fuel said yes, I was like, this is life changing. And it was obviously it was life changing but like, it's just hard. They, they have, they're. They have to be so brutal. Not because of any personal reasons about what they invest in. They have to make such like serious returns for their investors because their risk capital, like, yeah, the people that if I put money into a VC fund that is risk money of mine. If you've got, if you put 100 grand, a million quid, whatever, you kind of written it off basically on the hope that obviously one or two of these funds that they put money so businesses they put money into will come off. So not written off, but you know what I mean? So, yeah, it is really hard to get them to give you your money because. Sorry, their money because they've got to believe it's going to be a billion dollar business.

And did they come in. Was that the Series A that was you saying was only last year was.

That Fuel came into my what I called a seed plus round. So like late seed. So they did 2 million into that and then they did 2 and a bit million. 2 million into. Into our Series A as well. And then Guinness did some, and then we had some man jewels and some private family offices and stuff like that.

And in terms of valuations, then, like, I mean, I guess it's probably similar principles with E comm and software, but where are they pulling? Like, so what came first? Evaluation or a number of cash that you needed and then how did, how does negotiations go?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So typically you have a number, an amount of money you need. Right. You need X to get to this stage, whether that is go from C to series A or series A to B or whatever it might be. So it typically starts with an amount of money. And to be honest, rule of thumb nowadays is after seed rounds is 20, like 20 to 25. You're going to give that away? Yeah, because that is the model that again, VCs work in. So if you go in, you do get less. Don't get me wrong, 15 is like, that would be a good deal. But like, let's just put the range at like low end 15. So you're getting an amazing deal. High end 25. Okay. It's pretty standard. Like that's what they're going to take of your business. So if you think of valuations as.

A full round or per fund?

As a full round. Yeah, yeah, as a full round. So you think of valuations in two ways. One is optics. Like if you need 10 million to get to your next stage and you have the fortunate position to be able to raise 10 million for 20%. What's the numbers on that terrible thing? You're valuing your business at 50 million. There you go. Like, there's no. That's just an optics thing. It's not valued at 50. Optics is like the, the numbers just need to work because they know you need to raise more money later.

Right.

They can't come along and buy half your business for 50, you'll never raise money again. So you've got to get like the, just the. Like I said, the optics it to look right. Basically, yeah. And then otherwise you obviously get people to negotiate deals down in terms of valuation and stuff like that, and then it just literally becomes like any other negotiation. Basically. I think it's valued at 15 for these reasons. We think it's valued at 12 for these reasons. All right, meet me in the middle at 13. No, yes, blah, blah, blah. You just get. If they want to do a deal, they want to do a deal. And that's what it always comes down to. They've got to want to do the deal.

And would a founder ever typically take money off the table in. In rounds?

Usually series B on onwards. That's like the rule of thumb. That can happen before, but like series B, you're raising 10, 15, 20, 30 million, whatever the number is. Like you said, I'd like a million quid, thank you. Just for four years. Just de risk. Yeah. And nowadays that is not normal but like it's almost. I would, if I was in the VC shoes, I'd encourage it because people always have the argument or the founders got money, therefore they're not going to turn up every day. Well, no, they're probably like married with kids and have like a life they need to build and they still want to do their business. They just need to pay some bills and they've been paying themselves next to nothing for five years. So yeah, I would encourage it if I was running a fund, like I would say series B onwards, take an amount off the table, which gives you comfort but still encourages you to crack on, obviously.

And just on that side of it, I've got so many questions out for the back of this, but like salaries for founders, when you get like private money involved, like, do they. Because, I mean, even for me, like I was saying to like my mates, I'm gonna pay myself something. I mean, probably literally like three grand a month. I've got savings and stuff but like, I feel like I have to, otherwise it's not indicative of what I would pay someone else. I mean, I'd probably pay someone else more, but I'll just literally cover my bare costs.

Exactly, yeah.

Like, does that, Is that a big part of negotiation or is it is like a rule of thumb? Do they even have a say in that?

Yeah, they have a say. VCs especially some angels will. But like, of course they have a say. Like just budget for it. Just say I need 80 grand a year to live or I need 50 grand or whatever the number. Like you said, I need to cover my costs, have a bit more and then expense some stuff as well. Like. Yeah, yeah, just create. Yeah.

Three grand a month does not cover my living costs.

No. There you go then. Exactly. Yeah.

Probably more like five.

Yeah, but go. But just be transparent about it. It shouldn't be. Again, this touchy subject. People need money to live, like, and nowadays living in London or any major city, I would argue realistically, like, if you're, if you've got like a standard living like you have, you need a decent package at the end of the day, obviously, if people like want to start it and have a lower expectation of salary because perhaps they're starting like at 20 and the only job they've ever had is like 20 grand a year. Yeah, perfect place to start. 25 grand a year is going to get you set up kind of thing. It's all relative. So. But this whole concept of salaries being contentious. Obviously you're not going to pay yourself like 250 grand a year on day one, but you need to be paid a decent amount where you don't wake up every day. And this whole ramen noodle culture like no, that is not right. At the end of the day, yes, you should be frugal, not take the piss. But like you need money. Like this is there's no point bullshitting and put it in your budget and make it a bog standard thing. And that's the other good thing about having an fd. They'll go and say, well I work for five other businesses, the benchmark salary is this. So therefore chuck it on that kind of thing. You need money to live. Sure.

Another big, well just thing is like do you think funds, like broadly speaking to investors, angels and funds are investing in the founder or the business?

More the founder by like a magnitude of 10,000.

Oh really?

Oh for sure. Yeah, yeah. So most funds particularly, let's just take funds if they're investing in a segment where it's SaaS, e. Com, whatever, healthcare, etc. Like they want to invest in those spaces. So they've already decided they're going to allocate a percentage of their investment to that industry and therefore then it's just finding the business. So finding the business. Okay, I like marketplaces, I like E com, I like SaaS, etc within healthcare.

Cool.

Whittle it down even more. Okay. There are only 20 decent companies. There are an amount of companies that are decent in these spaces that are worth investing in.

Yeah.

Okay, let's go meet all of those. Okay, well what's the anomaly that's actually going to get you to invest? It's not the business, it's not the space. Because you've already made all these conscious decisions that you're going to be in. That is the individual who is going to drive the business. And I have spoken to, I don't know, I close to 200, maybe 300 plus angel investors in my life. 100 plus 150 funds at least. They all say we back the person behind it, whoever it is is the founder. That's what needs to work to get us to actually write the check. Because the rest is, I'm never going to say it's like pure tick box but like I said, industry, yes. Space, yes. Fast growth, yes. Cool. We're going to write this check into this. Do we believe this person will get this business to this stage? Yes. Release money. Like after all the legal stuff, obviously they've got to believe in you. Yeah. People we all like, we're talking about teams. If you're going to build a hundred million dollar econ business, you're going to do it through people. You're not going to do it through anything else.

Yeah.

So they've got to believe you can go on that journey in your experience.

What I mean, it's like such a corny question but like is there certain things that you've seen in other founders and yourself that people resonate with, what funds resonate with and like conviction. Yeah.

Whether that's normally it's in yourself, in your space and in what you're trying to do. Like the most of the people when I asked for feedback, like why did you invest or have a chat with them, like have a coffee with them now, they were like, you believed so much in what you were going to do and it was very clear just being around you, nothing was going to get in your way and you were open to learning to be fair. That's probably the other thing. Like you were very, very pro feedback and took that feedback on and made like adjustments to how you operate. Those were the things that really went. I, I was like within three minutes decided I'd invest basically. And then after. Because that, you know, it's like every. If I was investing in the founder, which I've invested in six or seven businesses now, it or business is always the person that gets me across the line. So I've seen it on the other side now, like.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

So it is, it's like you, you know, individual characters are going to do whatever it takes to get something done and go on the journey, which is such a critical phrase. That's what's going to get you to part with the cash, basically.

Yeah. And with. I actually have a friend I went to uni with, I think it was a year above originally. And now he works in a big fund. I won't say his name or the fund.

Yeah.

But. And I was kind of speaking to him because we had like a drink a few months ago and he's now starting his own econ brand which I've been helping him with a little bit. But. And he sees like the inside of all these deals and I just thought it's fascinating.

Yeah.

But the people making the decisions in these funds, like are they just Durham graduates or are they like entrepreneurs? I've always found it like in my limited exposure to that.

Yeah.

Seems kind of ironic that potentially, like, I don't know, a PPE graduate is making a decision on an entrepreneur when they've never been in the trenches themselves.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, yeah. There's mixed bags. So you basically, in some funds, like there are lots of people that have not got a clue even remotely or have literally just graduated college or whatever.

Yeah.

Trying to evaluate businesses and having these meetings. I don't mean this offensively to anybody but like if you have a meeting with someone like that, you just shouldn't have the meeting basically.

Yeah.

And it's not because you're being an. It's just like they are just researching in reality, like they are not there looking for investments, they are trying to meet founders, trying to get experience, trying to find out for a portfolio business who else is around. Yeah, they are just researching and that's exactly what they're there to do.

Yeah. So it starts somewhere down there.

Exactly. Yeah, precisely. So you do get that if you get like quite far into a process and someone junior is a blocker, then you never built up conviction with the person who was a decision making anyway. So never worry about like the junior or the associate. That might sound like a bit like trying to block the deal. You haven't got the main person regardless. Because if the main person, like the principal typically in the fund wants to invest, it's gonna happen. It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of them being your advocate. So there's like complicated things, but like they create these structures because obviously they can only do so many deals a year. So they need loads of no's. Like you need more no's than yeses. The main thing is that whether you're. There are two again, almost like two types of funds. One is founder started. So you've run 1, 2, 3 SaaS businesses, software businesses, E Com successful businesses, and then used your capital to start a fund. You're an entrepreneur. No. Even if you're like Andrea and Horowitz, they're two families.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're not like just. They're not just investors, so to speak.

Yeah.

They know and been. Have been on the journeys, but they also bought in a load of like you said, MBAs grads to build out their functions. But they, they but they, you know, if you get in a meeting with them, they're going to invest based on gut feel because they know you can go on the journey. If you come across someone who's a principal, as in the senior in a fund, but they've never built a business, it is harder to have the conversation honestly with them because you know that they're not stupid, they're obviously very intelligent, but they will look at the spreadsheet and that they'll be guided by the spreadsheet and like I said, like that's where you need both got documents. The spreadsheet gets you ticks in the box, the, the pitch gets you across the line. And so there's no right, there's no like right answer to this or like no like concrete thing. But I prefer if I was working with a fundamental for them to be like from a entrepreneurial background or have lots of entrepreneurs in residents to keep the checks and balances with. Basically people who are really good at spreadsheets and data and these funds themselves.

This is going to be a two hour podcast. I've got so many questions. I find it so interesting. Yeah, these funds, I mean, you know there's one down the road called True Global, you probably know them.

No, I don't know those guys.

They're outside a gym I used to go to.

There's so many funds. That's the other thing. There's so many.

What are the mechanics? If I wanted to start fund tomorrow, hypothetically, which I wouldn't do because I'm not, I've not made it yet, but yeah. Like are they just literally taking money off private investors, institutional larger funds pulling together say 100 million quid. Yeah. And then deploying it for what, 30 annual returns?

There's.

That's basically how it works.

No, like yes, in principle, but no. So I'm not like by far a pro in this, but I can talk about two funds that I know how they work. So EIS funds, EIS is in the UK only if you're an investor as like me, you whoever, putting 100 grand into an EIS fund or any ICE business, you get 30% back in tax relief. So literally get 30 grand back, thank you very much. And if the business goes bust, you get another 25ish percent back. So your downside is next to nothing. But 100 grand in, you get 30 grand back. Back goes bust, you get another 25 back. Again. My mental lithmic's terrible. Less than half is like, you know, gone basically. So an EIS Fund. There's other rules, like ideally the fund would hold the shares for three years because then once the business sells, whenever it is after that, the investors get the returns. Capital gains tax free.

Yeah.

There's no tax to pay on the income. So if you make a million quid off an EIS investment and it's after three years, you pay no tax on the million quid, which is amazing for investors. So an EIS fund will have cycles, so it has to invest before the end of the tax year and then has to raise money again. They will only invest in EIS accredited businesses, which I think there's loads of rules around that. Five years, like not trading for five, then I can't remember. There's like rules around EIS investments. Yeah, they have to deploy the fund within the time period. So if you raise 10 million, 20 million, 30 million quid, you have to deploy the EIS money within the time period and there's like a whole load of rules and strategies around how to make that money work within that tax scheme, basically. And so they will have, you know, criteria around EIS eligibility that they want to invest in. VCT Venture Capital Trust fund. I don't know all the mechanics of it, but basically has its own set of rules around that mechanic as well. Yeah, different tax relief, different time periods, typically bigger amounts of money. But like again, they want to hold for a period because their investors get tax relief and stuff like that. And then you get two types of funds, you get evergreen, which means they're always raising. So like you said, it's not 100 million fund, it's just always. Yeah, being replenished and then you get ones that are actual start and end dates, like fund one, 50 million fund two, 60 million fund three. And they just have to deploy that fund and when that fund's gone, it's gone kind of thing. So those are the ones I know. But like all the money in the uk, as far as I'm aware, is basically individuals. In the States, this is why they've always got bigger rounds because like universities can invest in, in and the university surprisingly, believe it or not, like have ridiculous amounts of money. Yeah, I bet they do. I think, I think Harvard is the biggest investor in the world.

Like they charge Don's 100.

Well, exactly. So like there's, there's more sources of funds in the States for bigger checks basically. And the uk, it's really, I think it's quite regulated. So pension funds in the States can invest through into startup funds, whereas in the uk you Can't. So once that starts to get deregulated, that's when you'll start seeing lots of billion dollar funds in the UK come up. When pension funds can suddenly put all this cash that just sits in like 2% a year gross stuff into startups, basically. So that's like one way of thinking about it, how it works kind of thing.

Yeah. I actually had lunch with a guy called Andrew Sutcliffe. I think he founded a fund called Red Rice and if you had him.

I feel like I know his name.

A year and a half ago, don't know how this came about, but one brand I remember they invested in was Castor Clothing and I think they know loads about. They went in when they were doing, I think you said like 3 million revenues and now they're like 9 figure. Because I saw them on like Premier League.

Yeah.

In the stadiums and I was like, oh, it's mad because obviously, yeah, that'd be a huge return for them.

It'd be massive. Yeah.

The one thing about funds and like I feel like now you read about just like ridiculous multiples like checkout.com, like I mentioned earlier, I was reading about that yesterday, 40 billion valuation. I don't even know what the revenue is, but probably less than a billion.

Yeah.

Like how much of it is just like you want to sell to? Like these funds are just put in bigger numbers and like the value of the fund and the businesses they're investing in is based on the idea or the presumption that a bigger fund will pay more for it and ultimately therefore it's worth that.

Yeah, yeah.

How much is like the businesses they're investing in are actually ultimately like either a going to be profitable in the future or.

Yeah.

Or some other things. Do you know what I mean? You read about some of these businesses and just think it seems like inflated.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure.

Compared to like your typical 2-3x EBITDA. Yeah, yeah. But then I'd rather be the guy that sold for 10x revenue.

Yeah, of course, of course you would. Yeah, exactly. Basically they like, this is my view on this. There's no, again, there's always no right and wrong. Like there is an oversupply of money in the world at the moment by God knows what. The, like the order to a magnitude is for the last, I don't know, 10 years, let's say 20 years. And so that has skewed everything, just massively skewed everything to the point where, like you said, putting a value on a business, I, I Can't remember. I don't know Tesla's numbers. I don't even know if they're profitable. They're recently profitable. Isn't a trillion dollar or trillion dollar business. Yeah, but it's made a profit, I think one quarter in its existence maybe.

Yeah.

But it's an amazing business and shows no current sign of lack of growth. And if you think about it as electric cars, it's the pioneer. Probably has another hundred years plus of quite aggressive growth ahead of it.

Sure.

Okay. The market has clearly priced that in. If you can value a company like that again, whatever the numbers are, multi billions if not trillions, you're valuing on the future potential of that growth. You're not valuing on what it does today. And it's almost. It is made up. I mean we can go very philosophical. Money is made up.

Yeah. I always think this about market cap because. Yeah, like two. Well one question then another point. Like do you think then the most important thing in a startup is growth rather than necessarily performance, I. E. Profitability.

It changes at stages. Yeah. So growth in the very early stages, mission critical. Like revenue growth is so important as long as your market's big enough to support it.

Yeah.

And there's so many dynamics to this. I could talk about this stuff forever. But if you have a very, very big market and it's constantly growing, your business therefore should be able to get very, very big and be very confident that it can continue to grow because more and more people are entering the market to buy the product. For example, like social media marketing, that's going to continue to grow for a long time. There's always going to be new people doing it, therefore there's growth in it. So I would always focus again in a tech startup and most other companies to be fair, in the early stages. Revenue growth, revenue growth, revenue growth. As you get more mature, you then get into what's known as unit economics, as in like reducing the cost to acquire a customer, making them more profitable. Like making sure that those metrics add up, that you can scale in a cost effective manner. Basically you might not still be making money, but not burning at all. Cost. You've heard that phrase, I'm guessing. Burn it all costs. It goes back into the metric around. Like you talk about market cap. What's same as any deal, what's it worth to that individual or that company? So let's go strategic buyer. Like I said, that buys a business that's say doing a million in revenue, but they buy it for 10, 20, 30, 40 whatever the number is. But they know because they've got 50,000 customers who would buy this product. They can make the same money back every year. It's worth them. And they've got cash. They're sitting on dead cash. They've got to spend that cash on something.

Yeah.

Why not spend the 10 million quid, buy the little startup, everybody's happy, they make the extra money every year for the next hundred years. It's just, yeah. Basic maths when you think about it. So that's where it all comes into play and it's noise like do the numbers figure out what works for the business, Figure out what's going to work and that's let that govern all the decisions, if that makes sense. I would ignore like the market caps, the 10x multipliers or the 50x multipliers. Like every deal is so different. There's always a region, a logic to do a deal at the end of the day. Like if you're investing in a business where it's like a billion dollar valuation but they're only doing 20 million in revenue or whatever it might be, you're pricing in the fact that it's going to grow so much to the point where someone like you said is going to buy, buy the next set of shares at the next price. So there is no easy answer to it. It is just like.

Yeah.

A very confusing big. Yeah.

Organism rather be on the side of the. Because there's actually one interesting anecdote back of this again, I won't say her name but this girl I was introduced to recently, she's like. I think she's younger than me actually, maybe my age. Incredibly intelligent. We're potentially going to work together in some capacity on my new thing. But she had a drinks brand which had done. I'm not joking, 20 grand in revenue. She got acquired seven figures cash last year.

Really?

I just, I was like a jealous.

Yeah.

Fucking hell. Like. And it was. Yeah. The definition of a strategic buyer based on what you told me.

Exactly. There would be. Yeah, 100% and yeah.

It just. Yeah. I'd rather be like figuring out how to position a business and a startup from the start to potentially be one of those tracks. Yeah. Rather than just what I nearly did in my previous jewelry business which is sell it for 3x trailing EBITDA and then they try and fucking chop off everything and then.

Yeah.

You're actually selling it for like what the stock is worth.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, well the other thing is around that. Take that business for example. Is that someone else would have paid a different price for it. You were talking to someone who. Value is it.

It was on like Flipper originally.

Exactly.

Bedroom shit.

Someone would have paid a strategic price for that brand. Yeah, but you just hadn't come across them kind of thing. That's. I definitely believe that, like I've got another business I'm involved in now and that is almost happening. And I've been saying, slow down, wait. I know this sounds enticing but like this could really undervalue what you could create and just wait another year kind of thing. So yeah, it's a difficult one but you know, it's just like timing in life and depends on what's going on. But strategic narrative. And that sounds as a real buzzword but like building a strategic narrative for your company, both to the investment market, to potential buyers, to the industry is so important. You're owning a space, you're building a space. And the other thing is truly understanding the dynamics you're operating in. And I'm like, I always sound so geeky when I say things like this, but really studying like the big movements in your space so you can frame your business in the context of that space, where it can go and believing in it is like where value truly lies. There's another really great like thing. I can't remember what this is and whether it's the UK stock market or one of the American ones, something like 90 of the value on whichever stock market is, is what's called in intangible value. It's got nothing to do with the numbers. Nike, Tesla is a perfect example.

Perception is reality sort of thing.

Yeah, it's got nothing to do with the numbers. Intangible value is driving a lot more value, like even in numbers, ironically, than the actual physical numbers on a piece of paper or the cash that they have.

Yeah, it's such an interesting way of putting it.

A great concept. And that's why brand is critical. Like especially in an econ business. Like look at, I don't know, Nike is not a good example. I don't know what a good one is. But like Warby Parker brand value, whatever value is put on that intangible asset is why people go and buy the bloody glasses at the end of the day. Like why do we choose brands over a non branded product and why do we pay literally sometimes like 100 times the price for a watch with a Rolex logo on it than something that is literally exactly the same with a different name? Because we like the brand.

So it's got a nice submariner.

Yeah, that's cool.

But like strap.

But like it's, that's what it comes down to. It's so complicated but it go. Then it taps into like human psychology and stuff like that. So. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. I want to come on to. I feel like we could speak about loads of different things for like five hours, like most pods, but particularly this one because I find it just such an interesting space. So obviously sold the business to Adobe.

Yeah.

What, two months ago? Recently?

Pretty much, yeah.

Yeah. I know you can't speak about a lot of the details, but I feel like for a lot of people watching and myself included, it kind of. It's like, I don't know, entrepreneurially it's like winning the Champions League in a way for sure. Just getting a big exit for a business business that I guess you A enjoy building and then yeah B ultimately get to make a lot of money from and like it kind of makes the worth it, I would imagine.

Oh yeah. It's like the most amazing thing, most confusing thing, most intense thing I've ever been through. Which like probably sounds probably similar to doing Champions League football but like it's very surreal and it's not what you think it's gonna be like. And all the moments, like all the good bits and the tough bits, they're all. They push you to your like emotional and I would even say like weirdly physical edge as a person. But like that's what a tough m a process is going to be at the end of the day. Like, like you say if you get the great fruits of like the labor and the work you've done, it ain't gonna come easy.

Yeah.

Even if you put in years of hard work, like I worked very, very hard and still do, but I worked extremely hard in like the first five years of the company and be up before but like that period, I would say it's like this like the irony comes back to like the software bit. But like the first. Sorry the last 5% is as hard as the first 95. That's exactly how I describe the journey. So it is incredible. I is, I feel very lucky. I feel like, I feel you never feel like go back to the imposter syndrome thing, you deserve it. But then when you reflect you get time to say no, no, I did put a lot of hours in here. Like I had a lot of turmoil to go through this. I feel like I deserve it. And also so many like of our team have benefited and are Obviously our investors who just never get there without investors, like in our journey. It's just great. Like I'm never gonna say not conclusion. It's like a new chapter for the company basically. So yeah, yeah, mad, absolutely mad.

So how did that come about then? Like obviously you five years in the business.

Yeah.

You're at a decent scale. I think your LinkedIn says 70 employees.

Yeah, 60ish employees, give or take. Yeah, we were in a good scale, growing fast. We were positioned really well, like brand and product. We would, we were known like. I think one of the things that we did really well and still do is we positioned ourselves like against the hoot suites quite early in blogs and stuff like that. So yeah, we were being referenced against massive players in our space when we were very small. So, you know, we were perceived to be the right business, like at the right time and growing for customers and stuff. And we, to be honest, the key thing is we've got a good product and a good company. Like if you looked under the hood of the company, it's good business. It's a really good business. And so we made the right signals basically for them to reach out. And it was a very like discreet and I don't know, a reach out that basically didn't give away anything about what they wanted to do. It was much more of a discussion. Like I said, can't go into loads of it but like we had loads of just really amazing conversations which turned out to be obviously where we landed. But yeah, yeah, it was very organic. Basically. It wasn't like, like a contrived conversation. It was very, very organic.

Yeah. You said beforehand it was like six months from first contact to completion or whatever. But before that, up to that six month point. Then before that happened, where was your head at in terms of as a founder? Like obviously the business is going well. I imagine you'd maybe have thought about an exit. Oh yeah. But like did you think that was.

Going to be nowhere near time now?

Had you even put a timeline on it?

No, no. So I, I actively would say as a founder, think about exit, probably more than average at the start and in the middle of the journey. Like it was in my mind the business was always built to, to sell.

Yeah.

Could have been, never could have been IPO in my opinion. I never wanted to go down that route. Was always built to sell at some point. Was it on my mind at the time? Absolutely not. We literally just raised like a round of funding, a Series A. So like definitely not. We just raised that to grow I'd immediately started like planning after that our series B. So I was literally in fundraising mode like a week after doing our series A and the team was gearing up for sales like next steps like product development etc. So it was really in like the phase of like growing the company and it just, I was very focused on building the business like very obviously planning for fundraiser, but building the next phase of like the content cal world, setting our vision for like what we wanted to develop, what we wanted to do. Exit was on my radar. But one of the best bits of advice I got like again a few years ago was something, I can't remember the words but like if you build a great business, that's what people will ultimately buy you for and that is the reason you will successfully exit. If you don't focus on building a great business every single day and think a lot about your exit, well, what are they buying? Like there's no underlying like quality under the hood. Basically. You can't get distracted by the thought of someone coming along one day and buying it. So I really like laser focused on building a great business.

Yeah.

If I'm honest, going back to all the stuff I've been saying throughout my most of this podcast, team, team is just team and product is so critical because nothing happens without a great team and no one buys anything without a great product basically. So it's like really simple but like that's what it comes down to. So wasn't on the radar. Definitely came out of the blue and was just an awesome like closing of that chapter and then on to the next one with them obviously.

Yeah, yeah. So you close the series A previously, I think I read that was like.

6 million to $6.2 million. Yeah.

And then you mentioned like that was already working on the series B. Like how quick typically then very quick. Is it like a six month pro? You said a six month process earlier.

I think to raise money. Yeah. So normally what would happen is you'd raise enough money for say a year to 18 months.

Yeah.

But nowadays because growth can be done so much quicker and because of zoom, to be honest, like you can meet Vestas much faster and people just get through the investment process faster. Rounds were like decreasing in time from 18 months to like literally six months and some instances like two months, it was just ridiculous. Much more in America. But like that meant really that you, you would run the business, you'd close your round, you'd put the plan in or you'd have to plan but like you tweak the plan. Slightly you'd get sign off for like the plan from the new VCs and etc. You'd start hitting the ground running, you'd start hiring. Hiring straight away always takes time. So you know it's going to take you three months to like get the next set of hires in to do the growth and then literally after 30 to 45 days you'd be back out. I was rewriting a series B deck, planning the next strategic narrative.

Is that because broadly speaking, you knew you'd run out of money because you're pushing the growth? Or is it kind of like we said earlier, like just a strategic.

Yeah, plan.

Plan. Because you wanted to like inflate, raise the value of the business.

Yeah.

Want to go again, Potential future exit.

Yeah, exactly. Like you just. What's the point of waiting 18 months if you can do the same thing in six? Yeah, that's basically what it comes down to. And that takes a mindset adjustment massively. Like 18 months. Right. You want to hire 40 people. Well, can we hire 40 people in two months? Just need to hire two recruiters to hire 40 people?

Yeah.

It's going to cost me a bit more money and therefore I'm going to run out of money a little bit faster. But like if I want 40 people, I just need to do it faster. I just don't need to wait 18 months. That's hard. But like, if you want to generate 10,000 new leads, back to your like Facebook maths.

Yes.

You can spread that over 18 months. Or I spend it in four months and get 10,000 leads. Like what's the point of waiting if you've got the scale? So it's all about condensing the growth plan. But like I said, going back to the business, modeling your burn is going to increase massively. So you've got to be comfortable with the fact that you're going to burn theoretically what might be seen as 18 months cash in six to nine months. And then you've got to learn how to explain that obviously and stuff.

Yeah. And is the business growing at the same speed that the like payroll is growing?

Yeah, yeah. No, not. No, not at all. Like.

And is it expected to catch up though?

No.

Or is it.

Well, it depends on the business but.

Like percentage wise, objective of hiring them.

Up is revenue growth month on month. Yeah, 10, 20. Revenue growth month on month. Cash burn. There's a ratio you should work to. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head, but like, yes, you should have a controlled cash burn. But like revenue growth, revenue growth, revenue growth and then it's just investor interest. If you have the right investor three to six months after you've done your series A, who wants to invest. And back to our like pricing in, is willing to price in a slightly inflated valuation but wants a slice of the business. Yeah, they just pay the price. They'll just pay. They'll say, I'll give you, you've just raised six, I'm going to give you 12. I don't care if the values tripled in six months. You've got it working, let's carry on. Basically, if you on the flip side, like if you don't hit the metrics and we weren't perfect, but like no businesses, but like if growth is not as fast as you'd expect, then you just slow down. You just say, right, slow down hiring, slow down spending, that reduces cash burn, that buys you an extra three, four, five months. However, you just continually manipulate that.

So the investors giving you XYZ KPIs to hit in other way around, 12 months time, other way around, you are.

Giving them KPIs as to what you can hit with the resources and the.

Money you've got, are they realistic or are they inflated?

For you give a high, medium and low. Yeah, it's like this is the thing, Dragon's Den for like my junior years of my life, which I love the concept of, makes investors look like a very certain style of people.

Yeah, it does. They got the new one.

Yeah, exactly. And Steven Bartlett, to be fair, so I've met him once and like did a zoom thing and stuff. Good guy. Good for him to be on there because he needed a new generation. But like they are not there to run your business and tell you what your objectives are. You are there as a management team to tell them what your think you're going to achieve. You're going to give them a range. Investors are there to give you money to achieve those goals. You're the one driving the business, not them. So like, yes, they can push you and they should push you. They should say you're not ambitious enough. Like push your like high number up a bit further. Cool. Because you want to be ambitious at the end of the day but like you're there to run the company. So you're going, this is what I'm going to achieve within this year. This is why you've given me the money. This is what I'm going to invest. If you want me to achieve 10 times more than that, then I'm Going to need another 3 million quid or whatever.

Yeah.

And if you won't give me that, then I have to go back out to market and raise. There's loads of dynamic conversations like that, but like, the CEO runs the business, the investors don't run the business. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But like, that's the most important thing to remember throughout this. Like, you're in the driving seat, everyone else is here to support and facilitate your mission and that's the way it should be. They might challenge you and they should challenge you, but like, you're driving, you're beating the drum, basically.

Did you found slightly different angle question, did you find it got more stressful as a result of, you know, there's more spending power, more funding coming in, more ultimately employees to pay, etc, or less stressful because, you know, you've gone from ultimately being a very scrappy startup where you don't know if you can fucking. Yeah, eat next month.

Yeah.

To having, you know, millions available to spend, like.

Yeah.

Which was more stressful and why? Or are they different, in other words?

Different. Yeah, different, I would say, if I'm honest. So they're definitely different. But I would say the seed stages are more stressful, but it mainly comes down to experience that you don't really know what you're doing. So, like, again, going back to like basics, put controls in. So create a budget, stick to the budget, tweak the budget if you need to spend more. Like, they all sound like things that are controllable, whereas if you're seed stage and you've just raised like a bit, like you're saying 250 grand and you're not really sure how you're going to spend it. So you might spend a bit here and a bit there and tweak it and dig it. Yeah, I know because I know you're doing it because that's what you're doing. Like create a budget and plan it and then if you need to spend another 20% more, at least you've got something to judge it and challenge it against a little bit, rather than being like, I'll just double the budget because I know I'm going to get the next set of leads. Yeah, that might be the right thing to do. But you're reducing cash burn, so. Or increasing cash burn and reducing cash balance. So creating controls around things and sometimes these are arbitrary controls, like you can do whatever you want at the end of the day, but like something to benchmark yourself against. That's what's important. So when you get into linking that back to your question, to the later stages with the bigger amounts you have to put controls in. Yeah. Like if a VC invests in your business, they will say, you can't spend over 25 grand or whatever number it is without approval.

Yeah.

So you go, I need to spend 25 grand a month on Facebook ads. So they'll say, yeah, cool, spend 25 grand to Facebook ads. You then say, I now only spend 50. They'll go, not spending 50, because I can see if I put that into the cash flow, you run out of money 4 months way earlier than planned.

Yeah. And this is what your FD is doing.

Yeah. So they go, why don't you spend 30 instead of 50? You won't get the same growth, but you're going to have the right amount of money.

Yeah.

And then we can also say, you know, we'll fund the next stage of your growth and we need those three months to raise the money to do that as well. So you're just collaborating, basically. It's way more collaborative than people think. It's not about instruction.

Yeah, interesting. And then on the obviously deal side with Adobe, then, like, obviously you start speaking to him. Whatever. I mean, these are literally like layman's terms questions. That's probably what most people would ask, but like, is it. Does he obviously get to a point where they express interest in acquiring you and you think, oh, potentially you can get loads of money. You know, whatever. Do they literally just, this is what we're offering, or do they. How does that work? Like, in terms of negotiation? Like, whose court is the ball in at this point? Oh, like there's. Or yours.

It's a hard one. Let's remove us and just put it into normal deal context.

Yeah.

It's very, very. It's very hard to predict who truly controls the conversation and the value and the deal. And neither party knows. I would say. So again, let's forget a content call Adobe, but like, let's just think about a deal. If somebody wants something and you've got it and you kind of want something, but you know, it's not really necessarily right now and you're not really sure, but you've got the good thing, so to speak, who holds the cards is so hard to predict. You never know where you stand. And I would say, again, I can't remember which. I was watching one of your podcasts. There was a guy who does a lot of M A. Yeah. Nick, Deal dynamics is the phrase and it is the most complicated thing. Again, I have ever Been part of, like, who's. Like you said, in control, firstly. But secondly, every meeting you have and every new person is introduced suddenly introduces like this new complexity that you've got no idea. Are they. Are they more important than the person I was speaking to? Are they less important? I've suddenly been introduced to this new fd. Do they now get to cancel the deal if they know? They feel like it, yeah. Deal dynamics is what really drives it. And so there's another guy you should have on there actually called Wes who like, advised us on our deal, who's a legend.

Yeah, definitely, definitely get him on.

But like, he talked a lot about deal dynamics to me and coached me all the way through the deal. Like, you're never going to know the answer to your question, basically. So you'll know in hindsight. But like, in the.

Stressful or exciting? Both.

But like horrendously stressful.

Yeah.

Amazingly exciting but, like horrifically stressful at the same time is the toughest thing I've ever done and been through in my life.

At what point though, did you decide, like, mentally and emotionally or whatever to. All right, this is what I want to do. We are going to sell the business because obviously previously you said it wasn't massively on the radar.

Yeah.

Like it was a tipping point. And then when that happened, how does that change how you're running the business? Business. Do you suddenly feel less committed or more committed because you want to get it over the line?

Yeah, well, all of that, like, I would say I've never. I'm a. My personality is. The commitment is always high. Like even now. Well, I still run content cow. Like I own the thing. So.

Yeah.

And my commitment to Adobe and the promises that we've made is almost 10 times higher. Like, similar to when you've taken money. I've promised things to us as a combined organization for our people, our business, that we're going to get it done. So that's all good. But like, You know, it's right when you've just. It so cringe. But like, it will. You'll just know like, and it will be backing towards, like people thing. It's because the people you've met in the acquiring company you feel very, very in tune with. And again, company culture. We haven't actually talked about that at all. That's probably a good thing because that's a minute there's a podcast in itself. But like, like a lot you. If you feel alignment on that front, quite naturally. Yeah, you know you're going to land in a good place. So obviously the money box has to get text and that's not just for you, that's for like all the VCS and like the investment criterias. So you have to get to a price everybody wants to agree to. But really the 20 other tick boxes, culture, alignment, people, plans, market, blah blah, blah, they're the ones that really matter. And the weighting has to go really heavily towards. If those are really speaking to you, you can mentally say like this is just the right thing to do. And that's where I got to. I was very, not quickly but like over time really certain that if I'm honest, like and I said this straight to them even in like pretty much the first meeting. If Content Cow goes to Adobe and that's where its new home is, there is no better, like I said, ending to that chapter and starting a new chapter in the combined world of us. Adobe is a huge organization. I mean who doesn't have something of Adobe's like use it every day. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what a great place to end up.

Like.

So for me it was like I said, just a tough and amazing and challenging experience but like amazingly fulfilling. And I'm almost like can't wait to get started. Well, I've already started but like carry on what we're doing with them. So exciting, mate. Yeah, it's buzzing.

So, so how does that work beyond the deal as a founder then I mentioned before but like are you locked in for X amount of years to produce X or what and is that typical?

Oh look, there's normally always an earn out like or some sort of deal like that that's just bog standard. Again, forget our deal for a minute. But like there's always, there's always something like that in place and I don't think people should do deals unless they're either want to get out on the day and just part ways or you want to be there and be part of the combined mission. I don't like I'm very like an open, honest person with everybody. Like I wouldn't have done it and said I wanted to stay unless I wanted to stay. So I'm very happy, like put my time in and absolutely get this done and like, you know, fulfill what they want to fulfill as well. And then it is like having a job, funny enough, like, like and I've only been doing it for a little bit but like it's like it's very similar. You think of your new owners as your new VCs, you manage it in the same way. You might have different priorities now, etc. Etc. You just. You just adapt.

Yeah.

And that again, we haven't touched on that. That's a whole podcast in itself. But like adapting, change, embracing that. I like that. So I'm good at that in my head. Yeah. You just have to go with it. Like, I don't put up barriers to what they want to do. You're there to facilitate their plans, just get on with it kind of thing.

So did you get other offers?

We didn't engineer any others. No, no, we could have, but like. Nah, we were like very content with the conversations we had, basically. Yeah, yeah, we had other offers on the journey.

Right.

And we had offers in the process. Oh, yeah.

But no, it was going too stressful.

Yeah, not to that level. Yeah, nowhere near. And we had. We didn't have offer offers on the journey. We had a couple of approaches, basically.

Yeah, yeah. And then lower through when. I mean, I kind of touched on it in. With. In the episode with Nick about M and A. Broadly and obviously can't go into the details of your deal, but I mean, like, how does. I'm just asking questions that I want to know because I want to be there in a few years time.

Yeah.

Like you obviously hear different anecdotes about. You realize that money doesn't matter when. Yeah, you sell a business, whatever. But like, how is. How was that like. Well, just for you, how was that for you? Like, you literally build a business for years and ultimately you end up very wealthy as a result of building something cool.

Yeah.

Which like I said, I think is the ultimate goal for anyone.

Yeah, sure, yeah.

Like, does that change the way you view the world? You like, philosophical question.

No, for sure. I think it can. I think it really depends on the person. So I think for some people it can very quickly go to your head. I think for some people it can allow you to do some stuff you've wanted to. Wanted to do and you try not to let it affect you. And look, for some people it can literally ruin their lives. Like you hear about this with the lottery and stuff. Yeah. I think the thing for me is like, again, person, right. I'm a planner. I had a financial advisory company already in place, ready to do this as soon as it happened. So I wasn't like, okay, I'm going to treat myself, I'm going to buy some stuff. Like I want to buy Tesla and stuff like that, which I'm bought yet. But like, I want to buy some bits. Yeah, cool. Move flat, etc. Etc. But the rest of it is then, right, well again, my personality is not to take this amount and then that's it. I'm like, okay, that is massive achievement. Pat on the back, plan for that, buy some cool stuff. And then how do I 10x? How do I 100x? Yeah, you're not going to do that overnight. You're not going to do that, like by probably not necessarily doing like another company. You're not going to do it by investing in passive stuff at the end of the day, like, you need to take some risk. Risk. So that's how I've tried to think about it. Like, my philosophy again around that stuff is professional, like goals and things you want to achieve, personal toys and adventure, have some stuff you want to fuck around with and then give back, like charity, helping causes out that you believe in. Again, all a bit, like you said, philosophical and cringe. But you've got to give back to the world in some way, shape or form. So lay the groundwork for yourself to control what that could look like and just basically make sure that you, that you, you feel comfortable with whatever your like, next phase of life is. But one thing I will say is like, I'm a very not ashamed to say this. Money matters in life massively, like that you don't need to have aspirations to be a multi gazillionaire. Whatever money means to you, it is important because it funds what we do, how we live, what we eat, what we drink, the social stuff that we can do with our friends, holidays, etc. So I've never been ashamed to be someone who wanted to make money. And I don't think that everybody should. Absolutely, like I said, sit down, think I'm gonna be a millionaire or whatever. But like, yeah, money's important.

You know what? Like, one thing I will say, so I just cut you off, is that I had a profoundly new respect for money when I went from feeling like, you know, obviously wasn't the same level as you by any means, but I was being like, in hindsight, yeah, I had a Ferrari when I was 24.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Financed heavily.

You were 22 though, to be fair.

But like, yeah, like I have a newfound respect for money, which I actually think makes me a much more dangerous entrepreneur now because, I don't know, like, I just, I've had a little taste of it and then I've experienced what it's like when you can lose a lot of it very quickly.

Yeah.

So, yeah, and I didn't have that before. I mean, I came from Normal middle class family, whatever. I don't come from money, but I also, I didn't, I wasn't. Didn't come from fucking starvation. Yeah, probably like most people really.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, I definitely have a much bigger respect for money now when, when.

It happens to you. Even on, even with smaller amounts, so different. You'll be so. Yeah, yeah, like, trust me. So think of it as like an empower. Like you've been given an incredibly lucky and empowered position in life. What can you do? Like you said almost to like respect it and use it for something which is great and have some fun like at the end of the day. So. Yeah, yeah. It's weird though. I mean look, it's also just awesome. Right? Financial freedom is very exciting and cool place to be in life. So. Yeah, don't. You don't want to get too serious. Of course you gotta go and buy some cool stuff at the end of the day, like I said. So. Yeah. But like. Yeah, yeah, it's a weird one. Still haven't got my head around it. I'm still doing it mentally.

Did you. This is like one of those weird fucking stereotype questions, but do you find people that weren't your friends before? Like, is there any of that at all?

Little bit.

Maybe that's not the right way to phrase it. No, no, I know what you mean. People that maybe didn't give a fuck about the business that suddenly become your best sellers business customer, all this xyz.

Not, not too bad. I. I've been pleasantly surprised. We've had, I've had one or two, but like, not as much as you'd think. But at the same time I haven't look at my Instagram and stuff like that. I don't shout about stuff that much so like people probably don't know where my world has landed up, if that makes sense. And I'm cool with that. There's nothing, I've got nothing to like show or hide so to speak, but.

Like got the classic style, like black zip hoodie. Yeah.

From Marks and Spencer's. Yeah. Sixteen quid. No. Exactly. So, yeah, I don't know, like, not yet. I'm sure it will happen. And also the other thing to bear in mind is like I'm in my 30s, I've hopefully got like a long life and career ahead. Right. So like, yes, I'd like to be able to continually build your lifestyle adjusts etc and I want to be able to help people achieve what they want to achieve. But like I'm not like someone who just like give something for nothing. And I've never had that. Similar to you, I'm not from like super mega wealthy family background. Yeah, I've worked very, very hard. I've had some lucky breaks but like worked really hard for what I've got and I've learned so much and that's been a great experience. So I'd like to empower more people to do that.

Yeah.

But, yeah, no, no Gucci yet. Basically.

There's a few points I want to go into before we wrap up because it's been like two hours already. But what was the hardest or darkest day of the journey get into? Obviously we talked about like kind of that succession point. Can you pinpoint a worst, maybe not a day, but a period where you thought, fuck me, this ain't going well?

For sure. My God, countless. Yeah, like so day. But like transitioning business models from agency to software was so hard. People had joined an agency, you didn't want to join a software business. People who are in a software business were like, there was like, it was good when they were running separately but trying to bring them together was so difficult. And then like I said, we referenced offline. There was a period in time where people just weren't paying their bills to us. We're getting very short on cash and I was young and naive around how to manage that and that was so stressful. Yeah. So all that sort of stuff is just now I look back, unnecessary stress. Like always with hindsight, you know how to deal with it. But like, oh my God, I would say there's probably a handful of like five what I would call real moments of awfulness. And so yeah, there's no plain saying that. There's loads of obviously updates and bad days in general attached to that.

But.

Oh, mate, yeah, definitely, definitely like a few things in time where you just think, why was I, why didn't I also help? Why did I do it that way? Basically? Yeah, for sure, for sure.

And what do you think is next then? Because obviously like you said, you're so young. Yeah, well, obviously like content cow for the next few years for sure.

Like make this integration unbelievable with Adobe, work really closely with them and do that for as long as that like makes sense.

Yeah.

And is exciting. That's the main thing. Investing in startups already, like paying that forward, giving that back, like wanting to use, like I said, the capital I've got to accelerate other people's journeys and also part like my wisdom and knowledge, if you like, to make sure that happens as quickly as possible for them. There's nothing more satisfying than watching other people succeed and grow. That's my life thing anyway. Do some like charitable work. Not really sure what that looks like. Yeah, I think that's really hard to just like jump at that. Want to do meaningful things for the right causes. So definitely put some time and effort into that. And then long term I think a fund is potentially in the offing. I haven't really thought it through at all. I've got like the potential name for it and I know like the angles and stuff I might want to pursue. But I think if you want to scale like my journey or what I feel like I've been able to do in the goodness of that a fund is basically. And now I suddenly see why so many people do it. The best way to do that because you can back lots of great people and you'll hear that like throughout this pod if you listen all the way to this point. But like my thing around empowering people to be successful, be good and like this whole like scale yourself, scale management, etc, the ultimate way of doing that is like fulfilling entrepreneurs dreams because when you fulfill one entrepreneur's dreams you're fulfilling like potentially ten hundred, two hundred, three hundred, if not a thousand other people's like career paths, their goals, etc. Yeah, there's something super fulfilling about that basically and does good for the world.

So do you think you'd run another startup?

That one not decided. That's definitely a serious contender. So if it's not a fund it would be that. I think that like that's a bit like you've had a number one album and can you have another one? Yeah, I think that's. I think it's harder than people make out. Definitely wouldn't rule it out but like yeah it's quite. You don't see that. Although like let's take a famous band that's had loads of number one albums, there's a lot that haven't.

Yeah.

So doing another startup, tech like startup Pure play, straight up running it, etc wouldn't rule it out but yeah, got to be right basically to do it.

Starting a podcast so you said starting a podcast.

Definitely. Yeah, that's coming soon. Venture wisely and just want to meet and network and do more stuff like this. Share the journey along the way for the next few years and make the Adobe Vision happen. So yeah like that's the, that's the immediate plan and not fundraise for a bit. Like this will be the first time in my adult life, professional life Where I don't have to actually fundraise.

Get the blood pressure down.

Exactly. Yeah. Try and take some holidays.

Yeah. Geez. I feel like we could have gone in a billion different angles, which is always a good sign when we get to two hours. And I feel like I've asked half of what I wanted to speak about. But final question then, which I always ask now, you could probably say quite a lot is it's cheesy as fuck, but it's useful. Yeah. If you could give advice to your, I don't know what early 20s self, I guess when you got started, broadly speaking, like life wise and entrepreneurship was maybe if you have to pick like three things, what would that be? Because I feel like you're well placed to actually give that advice to my audience.

Firstly, back yourself. If you really, really, truly believe in whatever it is you're going to do, like you've got to really believe it. Not as in I just want to make it. I really believe whatever you're doing is worth doing, go for it. Secondly, cut the ego. You're not that good. Like you're not that good at whatever you think you're good at. And actually even if you are really good at something, back to all the stuff we've said. You need to bring other people in to help you along the way.

Yeah.

And to scale. So just surround yourself with amazing people and learn as much you physically can. And then thirdly would be like be really open minded along the way. I think one of the things I've been I didn't like so much when I was younger and I've embraced a lot more as I get older is other people's opinions on the right thing to do and even if they don't like come out to be the choice that I make and I back myself instead of someone else. Like getting other people's opinions on stuff has opened my eyes up to so many different like learning experiences and sometimes doing things I don't agree with which turns out to be the right way to do it. You just learn so much that way. So yeah, don't be afraid to like embrace other people's points of views that you just don't agree with but you test and learn from it basically. So they would be my three. Yeah. But like business wise, go for it. Like I said, back to my first one. Back yourself. Like if you really believe in something you want to go for, there's never been a better time to try. So give it a go.

Yeah. Fuck yeah. Yeah. Right. Well that said. Yeah Jesus Christ. I really enjoy this pod. This is why I do the. This is why I started in this pod.

Yeah, man.

Particularly episodes like this where, I mean, I get a lot of guests on, obviously, but someone that has actually built an exited a business, which is what I'm trying to do and it's probably what most of my mates are trying to do. A lot of people watching. Yeah, it's sick. It's great to chat. If you like the pod, subscribe, there's plenty more episodes coming. They got a load in the pipeline and. Yeah. Catch you in the next one. Cheers for watching.

Thanks, man.

Cheers.