The Journey to Building a £££ 9 Figure Brand at 26 - Hugo Tilmouth | Midnight Podcast Episode 43

Anyway, we plug it in, put it on the bar and just go and sit. And the bar is like, completely dead. And I'm like, freaking out, like, pacing up and down. Like, just spent a year of my life, like, building this thing and, like, no one's gonna use it. Suddenly the bar starts to fill up. You know, a few people kind of come in and then just some random dude just walks up to the station, like, looks at it, gets out his phone, downloads the app from the app store, and then just rents the battery. And it was like. It was that moment when I was like, oh, God, we're literally. We're onto something here. Like, this is. This is gonna be big.

Right? Fuck it. We're back with episode, I don't know, Episode one, Season two of the Midnight Pod. And we have Hugo Tilmuth. As usual, I've done fuck all research about my guests and I like to get to know them on the spot. You might notice we have a new setup which I've been getting gassed about for the past half an hour. Beanbags, new light, the OG Neon beach sign.

I'm super comfy here.

Yeah. And two new blue neon Esque bars. This is probably the vibe I always wanted with the Pod. Never quite got it right, but I feel like this is where ko's in.

Before and sun's going down, neon's going up. Love it.

This is exactly the vibe. Yes.

It's actually 11 months almost to the.

Day since the first ever episode, which is fucking mad.

Wow.

And that was the Neon beach episode, which I think you have to watch now because Hugo said he knew about the brand but didn't know about the scandal, which is actually probably a nice compliment for once regarding that business. But yeah, I guess to dive straight into things, you're not on Ecom Founder, which is a bit different, but I'm.

Trying to have an experience of Ecom, which I'll tell you about.

Yeah, just pull that mic a little bit closer. Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, about that. Sweet. But yeah, I'm trying to expand the pod. Lucy is now booking, if you're watching. Thanks for booking Hugo. The first Lucy's Legends. Yeah, great. And yeah, trying to expand into, like, different founders. As with a lot of founders in London, we feel like we probably have a lot of mutual friends, network etc, etc. And yeah, I'm just interested to hear your story, really, because raise a shitload of money, have a cool business. You're only like three months older than me, which fucking makes me feel either very unsuccessful or very old at the same time.

Likewise.

Yeah, it's all relative. But I guess first question, as always, is who are you? What you do? And we'll dive into a billion things. Yeah, and just tell me everything. Hopefully you can fill up a good hour plus of content because I'm rusty after two months. No podcast.

Love it. So a bit of a. Bit of a crazy journey so far. Synopsys is five years ago, founded a business called Charged Up. Phones run out of charge when you're out and about. So we solved it by bringing the Boris bike model to phone charging. You rent a power bank in a pub, bar, wherever, pick it up, it's all charged, ready to go, plug it into your phone, drop it somewhere else and yeah, launched that business, scaled it to over 3000 locations all over the UK, internationally, etc. Covid hit tried to kill us. We built a sanitizer brand doing a million quid a month, sold that business and now we founded a third business called Served up, which is basically doing payments in hospitality, making it easier to order a pint, pay for it. And yeah, that's basically the journey so far. It's been a wild five years. Lots of learning.

So three things primarily.

Yeah.

The phone charging, sanitizer temporary business which you exited from.

Yep.

And then you've got the. The EPOS stuff.

Yep.

So how does that. How does that even come about? Because Ecom, for me, like, how I got into the shit I do was always very like, I used to design logos, then I had a T shirt brand, then I had another brand and sort of just developed gradually. But like, where'd you come up with the idea to get into something which sounds very like tech and money heavy. Yeah, I would imagine compared to other stuff, you know, it's different to starting just a Shopify store and sort of gradually scaling, which is why I did initially.

Yeah.

Like, where's that come from? I saw something online about it was like a uni project. It kind of was a tiny bit of research.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's a weird one. I was at uni, I was doing masters in renewable energy. I was like, I was studying like how batteries work and all this crazy stuff. I realized pretty early days that I didn't want to be an engineer. Like, I always wanted to do something in tech. I interned at a lot of companies, like tech companies. One of them was company called Tilt. Doing payments, like allowing you to pay back each other. Yeah, super cool company. Eventually got acquired by Airbnb, but I learned like loads working with those guys. I built like A, you know, ambassador network at my uni and, you know, had a great time learning about basically how tech companies work and off the back of, you know, that inspiration, another company as well. Um, and I basically was like, I don't know, it seems, it seems like there's very low risk at just trialing something. You know, I'm, I'm coming out of uni. What's the downside? Like, I can either go and get a real job now or go get a real job in a year. So why don't I just try this thing and if it works out, you know, I can, I can, you know, live my dream and build a company and what have you, and if it doesn't, I'll go and get a real job like everyone else. And yeah, I guess, like, five years later, I haven't had to get the real job yet. But yeah, it was, it was, it was a bit of a. Bit of a kind of rogue one to, to just go straight into the tech world. But I think it all came originally from. I was basically running out of charge. Like, the original story is I was at Lord's cricket ground.

Is this a real story?

Is this actually a legit story? Slightly twisted for pr? I'll tell you the twist. But yeah, I was at Lord's cricket ground and I was waiting. I was, for some reason I thought I was going to apply for a job at Microsoft. Like, terrible idea. Anyway, I was waiting to hear back from them for this job and my phone was going down and down and I was waiting for this email to come through later in the day. And I ended up, basically, I was too paranoid to let my phone go out of charge. So I went out, bought a power bank from some random shop and basically paid 20 quid as a student to charge my phone for one day. And I just had. This is like six months, maybe a year later, I had this light bulb moment of, you know, surely, why, why would you pay 20 quid to charge your phone if you could just borrow a power bank? Like, you know, I was using Boris bikes every day going around London back, back in the day when they didn't have, you know, sharing scooters and all this stuff. Yeah, they're great.

Like, they're going right downstairs.

Yeah. But like, this idea that you can just like pick up the bike, use it and then drop it off somewhere else, I just thought that was super cool. And it's obviously better for the environment because everyone doesn't need to, like, own a bike themselves. It's way more Convenient. And you know, this kind of usership model, it wasn't really a big thing back then, but it's obviously come in and become huge with like birds and lime and you know, these like scooter sharing Zipcar. You know, there's like, there's loads of companies jumped on that kind of sharing. Economy model.

Yeah.

And I basically wanted to bring that to batteries. You know, I thought power banks, it's way cheaper products. Like it's 10 pounds for a battery or whatever, you know, and then you put them in a little dock or something, build an app, the app shows you where it is and then allows you to release a battery. Built all of that stuff, you know, with a, with a team out in India for the, for the development stuff. And then you know, flew out to China source, found a factory out there, like had some crazy times doing all of that.

Yeah, China, it's chaos.

It's. I love it, I absolutely love it. It's so cool. But yeah, it was all kind of very like makeshift, like I didn't know what I was doing, you know, and it was just kind of, you know, asking people questions, googling, just figuring it out as you go along. But yeah, somehow we, we managed to get a product to work and launched it.

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Commerce course and let me know what you think. I'll be glad to have you in there. Let's fucking go. How? Because one thing I initially think and it's obviously wrong. Like as iPhones and stuff have got better charging, did that become let. Like, did you ever think this product is becoming potentially more redundant?

I think like long term, like surely they have to figure it out. But since we started, like, obviously if you buy like the iPhone Max plus, you know.

Three of them.

Yeah, if you buy that one, obviously it has great battery like for a year, but most people aren't buying those. Like the majority of people are buying like a secondhand one or they keep it for like three, four years, whatever. And you know, the data shows it from our network. Like our rentals per site have only gone up over the years. Like people continue to use it. So yeah, Apple keeps claiming the batteries are getting better, but like I don't see it yet.

Yeah, interesting. And where did you put them initially? Like how, how much of a business was this? Like straight away? Like, what was the pipeline? Had you finished uni or what?

Yes, I finished uni. I had like 300 quid to put into the company. Like literally nothing to, to start this thing off.

To register a domain name.

Yeah, exactly. And we first bit of money actually came from like the uni. I went, I pitched to X to uni and was like, guys, I want to start this company. And they, they gave us five grand or something to like kick it off and we had to like prove a load of stuff, write a business plan, all this kind of stuff. But like it was enough to get us started, which was, which was amazing. And then, you know, then we won a couple of competitions.

Who's us is there co founders?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some original guys who unfortunately no longer working with us. But yeah, like super helpful in early days.

Is it just you now then of.

The, of the original, original three that started from unique people obviously, you know, so it's, it's all. Everyone has their different paths and yeah, like the guys are going on and smashing it in other, other fields but, but not in the kind of startup. Startup world. Yeah, but, but yeah, so, so we kind of started that and with like literally no money. Like we were, we were like really kind of, you know, strapping it together. We, we were like sticking stickers on batteries and like numbering them so that we could then like rent them. It was really janky. Like it wasn't good but you know, you got to, you got to like figure out a way of showing that people are going to pay for your products. Like, I think it was actually the dude that I pitched for the money at my uni. He was like, read this book. It's the mvp. The Lean Lean startup model. It's like, it's actually so good and, you know, it's. I do genuinely recommend it to so many people now. Like, if you can very quickly figure out how to like prove if your business is going to work with as little money and as little time as possible. Even if it's like full concierge mode. Like we went to a festival with 200 batteries with stickers on them and we were able to make three grand over those days, like renting out batteries and it's like, okay, so if we weren't there and if we just had like a unit that rented those, maybe there's a big business there. And it was like doing those little tiny tests that kind of proved not only to other people, but even to us, like, that this was a legit business because no one did it. Like the closest thing to it was like little charging lockers in Westfield or whatever.

Yeah.

And it's quite a nice moment when we ripped them out and put our units into the Westfield in London. That was quite like a nice full circle thing. But. But yeah, like you got to do these like tiny little tests to I guess see if your business is going to work. And being super young at the time, um, you know, you, you can't, you can't spend a million quid building an app and, you know, building a load of hardware to then figure out that, you know, no one cares about it.

Yeah, very true. So timeline wise, you dropped out. Well, you finished uni, you completed the degree or whatever. He's going to jump onto you in a second. He's in every episode.

I love it.

He's like the co host.

He's so cute.

Did you have like, obviously you got five grand from the uni.

Yeah.

That doesn't strike me as enough to start a business and like pay yourself and shit and not alternative income. Did you have a job at the time? Initially, like, so.

So I was the plan at uni going back even further. I, I basically founded an events company at uni, which was like proper kind of, you know, startup lessons, like trying to hire people, you know, events is crazy. Like, it's such a mad industry. Everything's last minute. You know, the dude with that, you, that you like, got to do DJing tonight. He'll just not. And then you like, find someone in five hours.

I never got into that in uni. I went to all the events, but.

I never, honestly, like, I never became.

A promoter or anything.

Like that, yeah, it's the, it's kind of the, the like natural thing to do at uni because it's where most of the money goes is like no one has much money. The money that they do have they spend on drinks and events.

Girls and money.

Yeah, so. So yeah, basically set up the, it was called immersion events. It was great fun. We were like running the parties for most of the societies. We had like a weekly like club night and then we threw these like big parties like once a term. And that's where the real money was. Yeah, but it was, it was like, it was sick. I'd save some money from that so I didn't have to pay myself.

Yeah.

And I was able to do on like real scrimping. You know, I was living with the parents. Like. Yeah, not making, you know, it wasn't, I wasn't living lavishly, but I was able to do about a year with no salary. So we, we didn't pay ourselves for the first year which is, you know, part of the reason why one of the guys wasn't able to like stay with it for, yeah, for a full year because, you know, it's quite tough. But. But yeah, I was able to save a bit of money doing that and then yeah, basically go into it and just like full on ramen lifestyle. You know, like taking, taking the train and then switching stations so that you could like, you know.

Yeah.

Figure out how to reduce your ticket bill, you know, all of that kind of stuff and. But you know, you got to do it if you, if you believe in this thing and you know, there's no other route. So either either you prove it and you know, get to a point where investors will give you money or you're making enough money from it. And we definitely weren't going to get to that with a, you know, a tech company that was like super small at that point. And so it was like, yeah, we just got to, got to figure this out. And we were able to. Obviously we won some more competitions, like startup competitions and stuff, getting like 20 grand here, 30 grand there, whatever. And then eventually we actually got some investors who somehow backed us. We met them through this virgin crowd boost program which we joined and they introduced us and then for whatever reason they saw something in what we were building and decided to back us for 200 grand. And yeah, that was kind of, that was like validation I guess that like we were, we weren't just like, you know, some kids in a, in a made up stuff.

How long into the business at that point. Were you like, in terms of.

That's like one year. So we'd already, at that point, we'd already built most of the app out. It didn't like fully work, but we built most of the stuff on that and we'd. We'd already sourced the factory in China, partnered with them, gone out there and been able to like actually get a product that, you know, worked. Ish. We need to do a lot of stuff to make it actually work. But yeah, we managed to like partner with those guys within the first year before we raised like some money.

Was that still like all founders living at home, working from home? Scrappy stuff?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like proper, proper scrappy stuff. I think we, I think we had an internal at that point as well, but it was like, you know, no one was paying themselves. It was, it was, yeah, it was, it was pretty crazy. And then, yeah, I guess once we had that money and you think, oh my God, we're set for life. You know, got 200 grand in the bank, pretty quickly disappears, especially when you've got a hardware business. Like, you know, if you want to, if you want to order hardware, like most of the money that you get for the investment has to go out straight out the door into China as.

A business model at that point. How did it work? Again, my ignorance. Being an E comm.

Yeah.

How does it look? So you're buying the hardware, the charging stations.

Yep.

Then renting them effectively per hour on an app.

Yeah. So it's. It's a bit of a weird one. It's like our customer is like the venue. So we do a deal with, you know, the local pub, whatever, the guys downstairs.

Yeah.

We. They will host the unit for us. So it sits in, up on the bar, plugged in. It has like a 4G SIM card in it, so it's connecting up. But the person who actually pays for it is the. Is the dude in the bar or girl in the bar who's like, you know, one of their customers. So it's like B2B2C. Is the. Is like the.

You getting paid regardless of how many people use it?

No, no. So the end guy who goes into the bar, he's paying one pound an hour to rent his battery. But the, the guys that we do the contract with, you know, the venue themselves, they don't pay anything for it.

Right.

It's quite a weird model in that sense. So, like, there's two customers, but only the end guys are actually paying for it, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. So like, how quickly Were these blocks. Batteries actually paying for themselves so quickly?

Like, on a unit basis from day one, like, the very. It was actually a crazy, crazy day. Like, we. We. Our first venue was in Shoreditch, just on Brick Lane. It's great venue. And we. We basically, like, we went there, I think, at like 4pm or something, with the unit still, like, talking to the tech team on. On Skype or whatever, trying to make sure that, like, it was actually gonna work and doing all these tests and stuff in the office, you know, just trying to figure out if it was actually gonna work in this bar. Anyway, we plug it in, put it on the bar and. And just go and sit and the bars, like, completely dead. And I'm, like, freaking out, like, pacing up and down. Like, just spent a year of my life building this thing and, like, no one's going to use it. And then suddenly the bar starts to fill up. A few people kind of come in, and then just some random. Some random dude just walks up to the station, like, looks at it, gets out his phone, downloads the app from the app store, and then just rents a battery. And it was like. It was that moment when I was like, oh, God, we're literally. We're on something here. Like, this is. This is going to be big. And we'd done, like. There was no marketing. No one had ever seen something like this before, but people just intuitively get it. Like, you're in a bar, here's a little charging station. Just rent the app and download the app and then rent a battery. Like. And it was. I think we did 10 rentals on that one station that night. Which is. Which is great. Like, that's. That pays for the station a thousand times over. So it's. Yeah, it was kind of. It kind of worked from that very first night, which was quite weird. It was like this. Suddenly it just, like, clicked. And then, you know, it's like, oh, my God, how do we get 10,000 of these things out on the streets? And. Yeah, yeah, super. Scale it.

And how do you scale that? Because, like, again, my approach is always paid ads. You know, spend one pound, get two pound back at scale, effectively.

Yeah. Yeah.

Is it remotely similar?

No.

In a hardware business?

No. Well, I'm sure.

Was it, like, cold calling bars?

It was literally like. Like, we had. We made these backpacks. They were super cool. It was made out of, like, old drone. Remember, like the old drone backpacks, like the GoPro Karma.

I used to have one of those.

That kind of was.

Yeah.

And we basically, like, cut out a Thing on the top of it. And basically the. The guys could. The sales guys could go in, open up this battery, this backpack, and then a little charging station would be in there with the power bank, like, running the battery, running the station as well. Um, so they could go in and do demos for people. And they were just. They were just like, cleaning up. Like, it was actually very easy sales because if you're a bar owner, like, you have a load of people going up to the bar being like, oh, I need to charge my phone. Can you put it behind the bar? All of this. At the time, Weatherspoons actually banned it, which was, like, amazing for us because we just used that. It's like, oh, you know that your pub could burn down all this kind of stuff. And, you know, it worked. It was actually a very easy thing to sell to venues because no risk, just plug it in. Like, it costs you, like, a quid a month in energy. That's like the only thing. And all we ask is when people come and ask to charge their phone, you say, like, go, go over there and use that thing. Like, download the app and use it.

How much of a percentage of the bars, like, venues taking then? They don't take anything. It's just a convenience thing.

Yeah.

And they keep their customers there for longer who buy more drinks.

Yeah.

Oh, shit.

Yeah.

I would have thought they'd take a percentage or something. Yeah.

I guess, like, um, in other markets where this thing's gone way bigger. So in China, this is huge. Like, the. The company, the biggest company in China, they listed on the NASDAQ for this.

And they don't think about things like that. I know, it's mad, like, silent businesses.

Yeah. They. They've deployed like a million stations across China. It's insane. Like, it's so big. But where was I going with this out there? There's so much competition. Like, basically, people are, like, bidding each other up on how much revenue share they'll give to the venue. So one dude will go and be like, I'll give you 20%. The other guy goes, I'll give you 40. Apparently was getting to, like, 70% at one point. And then a load of them in Covid, obviously, like, fell by the wayside. Like, as should. We have probably fallen by the wayside. But we. We did some pretty rogue stuff to. To make enough money to keep going. But. But yeah, it's. It's been a mad time so far.

So up to Covid, then, where did the business go up to that point? Because I know you mentioned the hand sanitizers and stuff. And we'll get onto that. But you raised the 200k after that. Like how long before COVID was that? So where does that bring us to like 2018? You're trying it.

It's really good.

Just trying the rainbow dust at 8, 9pm, quarter past 9, product placement here. It tastes like a Nesquik. It's like a magic.

It's really chocolatey. It's really good.

Well, yeah, some of us say it's too chocolatey.

No, I like it, I like it.

Yeah, it does taste good, to be fair, given what's in it. It's very healthy. It's got like 20 calories. So I could work on that. Could be calorie free. But that's gonna keep you up till fucking midnight now.

At least that's what I need.

Keep you speaking till midnight. Yeah. So up to Covid, like time, timeline wise, that 200K comes in, when was that? Like 2018?

Yeah, I guess two years before COVID So, yeah, 2018, we were kind of like, like, it was, it was like a legit business at that point. It was no longer just like some kids, you know, playing with some hardware. It was, it was like a real thing. We had investors to answer to, you know, quite quickly after we got the 200 grand and launched, we then went out and actually raised 1.2 million, which it was. It was like a big step up.

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Support the fucking pod. Let's go, boys. Where were we? Yeah, so 1.2 million comes in.

Yep.

Real business. You're probably what, you were 23 at this point.

Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got investors, investors to answer to. So, yeah, in order to get that 1.2 million, we were doing some crazy stuff. Like, you know, we've got these investors on board, like angel investors. It's very, very different. Like ball game. Yeah. So we've raised this, this, this 200k and we are like, how are we going to get some more money to do this? We need, we need some serious cash in order to buy hardware in order to properly launch this business. You know, it's all very well having, I think we've got 100 sites at that point. So, you know, we had 100 locations across London that were really liking the product. Users were naturally discovering it when they went out to bars.

Yeah.

And you know, it was, it was working like the early traction was there, but obviously it needs to be in a lot more places. So we, we basically, we built this like bot on LinkedIn that would go through and like search for anyone with investor in their title and London as the location. And it would, it was running on like four of. I think we had basically like a few of our like linkedins just adding people and like doing a connect message and just being like, yeah, okay, so you know, little teaser or whatever, if you're interested, you know, we'll send you some more details or whatever. And we were just running this thing like 247 and like 1 of the people it connected with ended up being Jam Jar investments who are like, they emailed me. No way.

I had a call with them. They are told I don't need the money. I said, speak to me in a year. So if you're watching, speak to me in a year and give me five million quid. Yeah, it's funny. Small world.

They are, they're sick. Like, they are probably the best consumer VC like in Europe.

Yes. Richard Reed's a fan.

Yeah, Richard Reed is the innocent guys like Richard, Adam and John, like, they're three guys who again, kind of came out of uni. Love the story.

Look at their portfolio. It's like every fucking brand that.

Oh, it's insane anyone would know. Yeah, I actually just invested in that, the second fund. So technically that's like investing in yourself. So have a tiny, tiny portion of charged up in the via their fund, which is good. I think they're going to, I think they're going to kill it again. Like they, they did a great job last time. So I'm big, big, big fan of the, the Jam Jar guys. But anyway, so we're, we're like adding all these people on LinkedIn, trying to figure out how we're going to get some like investors on board. And anyway, we get into the Jam Jar guys, you know, we, we also then an event bumped into some guy and then he connected us to someone else. It's all like, you know, real like, you know, we didn't know anyone, so it was, it was like trying to figure out how we were going to get to these people. And yeah, so we ended up getting the garage soho, which is John Hegarty and Tom Tychman, amazing investor and, you know, kind of brand like Legend, which is, which is Sir John. They decided to lead the investment round. So they kind of did a whole load of due diligence into us. Every single element of the company was checked. It was crazy. But off the back of that, that kind of gave us the stamp, like, we've got some good investors on board for this round. Then we started pulling in more angels, we got some other cool people involved. And then obviously JamJar came in at the end and it was just kind of all came together very quickly and it was, you know, it's quite stressful at times because you're like, we either have like 1.2 million or we have nothing. Because it all rested on everyone coming in. But at the end of it, managed to get the money. And those guys have continued to back us since then and continue to support us. They joined our board, you know, we created a board off the back of that and they've been super helpful and obviously, you know, in the first sense, in the money actually allowing us to buy units, to be able to expand. But then off the back of all of that, like, actually also, you know, advising us, you know, being kind of mentors and connecting us with people, connecting us with venues. Like, it's, it's great to have like this network of people. And you know, if they've done that well, they know a lot of other cool people as well. So the network expands and it's like networks is just a, it's an iterative thing. You know, you, you just compound over time and you know, you, you will, you will continue to grow that network and, you know, over. Over five years, I now know quite a lot of investors. And it's, it all started with a LinkedIn bot, but, you know, you gotta, gotta hack your way right at the beginning.

I did an episode with a guy called BN from POM Dating. I don't know if you know them, he raised a few million off of LinkedIn.

Oh, no way.

Yeah, it's a dating app. And yeah, he's like, he's only like 23. Mad impressive, but that's sick. I'd never gone down that route because, I mean, like I said, it's the first time I'd ever raised money prior to this bootstrapping like Neon beach, which horrible story. Which I'm surprised you didn't know about. But then, yeah, it was like. It was an interesting process because I. Probably the opposite to that. I had a really good network, but I'd never raised money before, so. So I was just like, oh, do you. Do all my mates want to fucking put money into this new thing? Because they're not all mates. Some of them are more like contacts and stuff. But ultimately they're all mates. I've probably been pissed with all of them and that's generally how the best people in my network, I've got to know them. But, yeah, it's. It's definitely. I've seen massive benefit to having. Obviously, money is one thing. That wasn't the main thing I wanted, though. It was to not do it alone.

Yep.

Because I'd always been solo founder prior to that. And that's great when things are going well, maybe, but when things go wrong, it's very fucking lonely. And that's what I learned the hard way. But then, yeah, just having like that mentor aspect from people who've been there and done it.

Yeah.

To that next level, whether it's E comm or not. And in my case, some of the guys are in E comm, some aren't. But, yeah, it's just been a game changer. Me, even. Even in the first four months since launching this, just like. And it's like you said, like, you know, network is like a spiderweb. There's like, if they know someone that knows someone that knows someone. And every problem is solvable through a network, I think, ultimately.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's the. It's the number one question I get off the back of this pod is how do I get a better network? And I'm always like, fucking hell. I mean, I don't know. Like, I think do something interesting and try and be a decent person. It's probably a good place to start, but that's Probably a good LinkedIn bot is another place to start. So it's interesting. Yeah, the podcast has definitely helped, but just funny how you can do. Do things different ways.

Yeah. 100%.

Like, most people just wouldn't bother. They'd probably say, you know, I need money to start a business. Where do I get money from? Rich parents? Well, neither did most founders.

Yeah.

In reality, yeah. I think a lot of People jump to that conclusion of, oh, your parents gave you money or whatever it is.

Yeah.

But actually you can make a LinkedIn bot.

Yeah. It's. You got to hack your way. And that's like the founder mindset, like 101 is, you know, that there is. There is this, like, set route to success and then you just find some, like, rogue way of doing it that is. Is either cheaper or, you know, it just cuts out, like five years of graft or whatever you like. If you. If you wait for everything, it's. It's just. You're going to be waiting forever.

Right.

You got to figure it out.

Very fucking true. So you raise all that money. The business is growing, I would imagine, after that.

Yep.

Covid happens.

Let's.

Let's bring it up to that. Like, how did that. I imagine that that fucked up a lot of businesses and it made a lot of businesses a lot of money.

Yep.

How did it affect you and what was the story?

Think we're.

We're a battery business.

We're in all of our businesses in hospitality and, like, places where people couldn't go in Covid, like, instantly. And it's batteries that, like, everyone touches. Like, it's literally like a surface. And everyone's like, right at the beginning of COVID everyone was so freaked out about touching stuff. Like, it was all about gloves and.

You know, to the gym.

Yeah. Like, all of this kind of stuff. And obviously, you know, we kind of. Initially we thought, like, everyone, this is going to be around for like a month or two and it's going to blow over. And then we started saying, like, you know, this is probably not going to be a month. Maybe this is going to be like six months.

I remember that. And so weird.

Yeah. Like, I remember. I remember saying to the team, like, it's all good. You know, we. We had this kind of. This whole plan where we'd like, you know, we'd taken as much cash before COVID as possible, cut a lot of our expansion. We spend, you know, didn't launch some. We actually, we pulled out of a couple of markets in Europe as well that we just launched, which is kind of frustrating. But, you know, we basically made it so that we had enough money to see it through for 12 months. And even if, like, you know, basically we had no. No revenue.

Yeah.

And obviously that. That felt like it was going to be more than enough. If we just kept it at that, we would have run out of money because Covid, obviously, it continued for whatever it was. You know, it's Kind of still, still like knocking about. Yeah, but, but yeah, so we, we had this plan very quickly. Like, we put into effect all of that stuff to kind of save the company for a while, try and like, make sure that we were able to see it through, which was super stressful. But obviously, you know, we managed to put all of that stuff in place in a couple of weeks. And then after that it was like, okay, so now we know we're going to be fine for a bit. Let's start thinking, like, creatively about what we can actually do because we can't sell more bloody phone charging. Like, no one cares about this right now. All of our customers are either going to potentially lose their business or they're going to shut down or, you know, they're going to get sick and all this kind of stuff. Like, literally phone charging is like the least of their problems right now. So we, we, we went like super kind of back to basics and got out a whiteboard and we're just like, let's just throw any idea on this whiteboard. We had a, we had an office in Shoreditch at the time. I remember it like, we were, you know, actually, no, it can't have been this must have been later. Anyway, we were, we were like throwing all these, these, these ideas down and, um, you know, and it was like, okay, maybe we'll, we'll help people, like, sell food out of their pubs or, you know, we'll do, we'll do like beer delivery or, you know, all sorts of like, tech company ideas, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Thank God we didn't. Anyway, the most rogue one was basically to, like, we'd seen what was happening in Italy and how, like, people were like, massively struggling with sanitizer and all this and basically like, no one can get hold of sanitizer. So what, why don't we just figure out if we can make it and that. Like, I genuinely thought it was like the worst idea ever. But anyway, we, we, we, we had like some contacts in manufacturing in the UK and we knew some gin distilleries who were making sanitizer, put two and two together and basically converted a load of phone charging stations into sanitizer stations with this manufacturer. And, you know, this took like maybe like three or four days. Like, it was a really quick turnaround from idea to like, first prototype. The manufacturing partners are absolutely incredible. Like, they're so such good guys. They were like on this journey with us from that very first day. They made the first one. We took Photos of it in the office, you know, and, and like showed people, you know, some of our customers, like basically like showed them renders of it. And then we'd sold 150 of them before, like the end of the first week. Off the back of that 150, we then sold a thousand to like a load of other businesses in the network. And it's like, my God, maybe we're onto something here. And then it just snowballed.

Was this when businesses were allowed to open up again?

No, this was all pre reopening.

It was planning to reopen.

It was in order to be able to reopen. Yeah, all the timelines are a little bit fuzzy. It was a pretty crazy time, you know, in and out of lockdown. But yeah, we, we managed to basically like put together, I think. Yeah, it was a thousand units was the first big order that we did manufactured them. I think it was probably like maybe a week or two of manufacture because it was all in the uk and we had this gin distillery just knocking out like bottles and bottles of sanitizer that literally smelled like tequila. Like it was horrible stuff like bad tequila. And basically like we, we were shipping it all, you know, direct from the factory to these businesses. And then like we started to realize maybe there's actually a business here. Why don't we just lean into this? So we, we kind of hired a few more friends and stuff, got a few of the, like the sales team that we had for Charged up. We pushed across onto, onto this cleaned up idea and basically like the sales were just going mad. You know, we, we, you know, the real big one for us and the thing that kind of turned the dial was when we like very early days we'd been, we'd been talking to TfL, like the tube guys on for Charged up. And so we use that same contact again. Like obviously Charged up would have taken ages to get it in. But when they needed sanitizer, we were like, guys, do you want, do you want to buy some sanitizer offers? And we thought there's no chance, like some massive corporate's gonna take this. You know, they'll have like a cleaning company or whatever. For whatever reason, they decided to go with us. They ordered like, I think their initial order was like 2,3000 units. It was crazy. And that also cemented us as like the legit sanitizer manufacturers in the UK because we had the bloody TFL stamp.

Yeah.

Off the back of that, like Boris Johnson like went and used it and we got a load of PR for that. And then Sadiq Khan went and used it. And we were just getting, like, so much, like, PR off the back of this crazy, like, pivot story, because everyone was, like, looking for good news in amongst all of the, like, crap that was going on. And we were there, like, you know, making all these units. And it was amazing. Like, you should have seen the factories. Like, they were just these enormous warehouses just full of all these little dispensers. Like, it was like this little army of dispensers, like, and they were all being shipped across the uk. You know, there was the period. The craziest period, though, was, like, the weeks leading up to the reopening because we basically. We had a great relationship with the guys at Diageo who, like Guinness and all of those kind of drinks brands. They obviously wanted all the pubs to reopen successfully so that people could go back and go and drink, you know, on whenever it was 4th of July, whenever that reopening was. And off the. Off the kind of initial relationship that we built with them, we said, why don't you guys pay for a load of units and then round them up and give them out to all of these pubs? And again, we didn't think it would go anywhere. They ended up coming back to us and ordering 25,000 units and said, guys, like, if you do this and you can get them out to the pubs before reopening, like, we'll give you the deal for whatever reason. We said yes, and then figured out how to do it after we set up this entire, like, manufacturing thing. It was nuts. Like, we were. We were manufacturing, like, 10,000 units a week. We had seven factories across the UK making them. @ one point, we were like. I think it was 25% of. I forget the name of the delivery company, like TNT or DPD or one of these guys. Like, we were. It was like, 25% of their network for those weeks, because we were literally. We had, like. I think it was like, six or seven trucks, like, arriving at the production facilities every day and then just delivering them to venues across the uk. It was the most mad time. Like, we. I think we got through 30 tankers worth of ethanol, like, just ethanol to make the sanitizer. It was crazy. Just. It was a bonkers time. And, like, obviously through all of that, it was all. It was all, like, crazy, but learned a great deal. Like, you know, had a great time doing it as well. It was. It was a great distraction from what felt like the end of the world. You know, we were just there busy making our Sanitizer and you know, just cracking on but, but you know, like with a lot of good things they, they come to an end. And unfortunately I think we sold everyone in the country sanitizer in the space of about four months. So you know, it was. We had all these grand, grand visions of like, you know, we registered H, what's it called H A S like not SAS but like hand sanitizer as a service and we were going to do like subscription sanitizer and all this stuff. We were going to launch a consumer brand. Like all these crazy.

Ideas. Did you ever think you'd go back to the main.

Business? I always hoped so, but I thought it may. People might not want to use it just because of the whole like everyone was saying the effects of COVID would stick around. Like there was all of these rumors that you know, people were never going to want to like touch stuff again and all this crap. But yeah, obviously none of that played out, thank God. But, but I didn't, I just had no idea. So it's like let's just, let's just crack on and you know, make hay and all of that kind of stuff while we can. And ultimately it ended up saving the company. We were able to keep everyone in the team. You know, we had a team of like 30 odd people then. Oh yeah, you know, pretty expensive to keep everyone and you know, we didn't have to do any of the furlough.

Stuff. Did you manage to use all 30 people in a hand sanitizer.

Way?

No. Or was it.

Like. No.

No. Just getting paid because you didn't want to get rid of them?

No. So like the, everyone was bit was, was kind of working on the business except the tech team. I'll explain what they were doing after but I guess to, to kind of round off on all the sanitizer craziness that, that like went from zero to doing a million quid a month, you know, for the first like six months or it was obviously a ramp up period. But it was, it was very quick. It was like instantly a huge.

Business and.

Then obviously dropped off a cliff when people started going back out and realizing that they don't really care about using sanitizer. Yeah, but it was amazing. You know, built the Shopify store to sell it all in like you know, a couple of evenings and you know, launched it super quick. Learn loads about like performance marketing and you know, all the stuff that I find super interesting about your businesses. You know, we were kind of learning that in like days on the.

Job you gotta do it.

Sometimes. Yeah, that's it. But yeah, no, we had a great time doing that. At the end of it, we, we sold. Sold that business. It wasn't a huge.

Exit. But was that structured as a separate entity then from the.

Start? No, it was. It's a, it's kind of. We hived it off and did it that way, but it was a slightly, you know, non conventional sale, but it allowed us to basically focus back on, on, you know, the core tech businesses because obviously the sanitizer was never going to last forever. But it kept us afloat, kept us going, and obviously, you know, had a great time doing it as.

Well. You just reminded me, I think three episodes ago, the Purdy and Fig guys, they run. It's a clean cleaning.

Brand. I spoke to those guys. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. They had a similar ish sanitizer pivot during COVID Yeah. Which, yeah, I recorded with them like two or three months.

Ago. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, I definitely, I can't remember if we did something with them or not, but we definitely spoke to those guys back in the day. Crazy sanitizer.

Days. It's funny. Yeah. I guess everyone pivots in different ways. So back to you. Sell that business off. How did the main business, the previous business, charging stuff, look at that point? So it's. Covid's calmed.

Down. Yeah. So I guess, you know, charge that was in like hibernation for a long time. You know, we've got all of our ops guys, all our sales guys, you know, working on, on this cleaned up thing. Clearly, like there's no tech to it. It's like a Shopify store. You know, there was, there was nothing for the tech team today on that business. And you know, we didn't really want to invest loads of time and money into the, into the phone charging at that point because, you know, we didn't know if it was going to be a success after Covid. So we basically, we, we'd already started building what. What then became served up, which is payments in venues. Pre Covid, it was like a, it was, it was kind of like a what we call a labs project. So like a super quick, you know, Sprint to build a, like a, a demo effectively for the rest of the team of this concept of being able to order on a QR code, you know, see a menu and order a beer or whatever, have it delivered to your table. We built that like a year before COVID I think just in the, like as a sprint in the tech team. And then that was one of the like Wacky ideas that went back on the whiteboard of, you know, these are what are pubs going to need? What are venues going to need when they reopen? And one of the big ones was this. It was like, you know, people aren't able to go to the bar anymore. Why don't we, why don't we lean into this trend? I'd always been super passionate about, you know, seeing, seeing how payments were done in China with WeChat. Like, everything's so frictionless out there. You can order your food at the table. That was like five years ago. You could do that. I remember going to a burger restaurant and being able to like customize my burger and it was the best experience for me because I can't speak Chinese. I could just do it all visually and I was just like, this is incredible. Like you go to a vending machine out there and you can do it on your phone. Everything is done through the phone. And I saw that, I was like, we have, we are like so far behind in the uk, you know, in the, in west Western Europe. Like the. Just felt like I'd gone back in time, coming back to the UK and returning from China and I guess like off the back of that and then the, the timing of COVID coming, it was like, if we don't lean into this QR code thing, it's never going to happen. Like we are going to miss the boat. And yeah, we got the tech team working on that. We very quickly built a product, launched it within about maybe like six months, something like that. And it's a complicated product. It's pretty difficult to build with OneVenue. Those guys had been our first cleaned up customer actually as well. Amazing, amazing venue that like supported us through it all, helped us build the product as well. And then, yeah, now, now Cleaned ups scaled up, we've raised, raised a round at the end of last year and yeah, like it's, it's now in about 2,500 venues across the UK and that's kind of like the core focus of my time is building out the, the payments business. But it all kind of started with like ordering a burger in China. You know, it's like these inspirations can come from such random places and yeah, that's, that's where. That's where served up came.

From. So you essentially trying to build out like a suite of hospitality tech tools, something like that. One way to put it. Yeah, like a group of, a group of tech, tech SaaS for.

Hospitality.

Yeah. I sound like I know nothing about what I'M talking about saying that but that's kind of my interpretation of.

It. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. So we, we've now split out the company so we have someone, we have an MD running the charged up business scaling that out. You know, it's just launched in Australia, it's continuing to, to double down. You signed a massive deal across Europe. You know there's loads of stuff going on on that business but I'm just not super involved in the day to day anymore. And it's running profitably which is great. You know it's like, it's, it's like a, its own business running on its own two feet, standing on its own two feet now. But I focus all of my time now and have done for like basically since cleaned up was, was shut down on the served up business because yeah, for me that's the, that's the multibillion dollar opportunity. You know we, we've, we've, we've scaled incredibly quickly on it and the, the world of payments. It's, it's like, you know, there's so many people playing in this, in this world and yet it's still so broken. Like we, we're still using. You know you go into 99% of bars, restaurants, even just like you know, supermarkets or whatever and you're tapping a card that you know it's going through like, like these cards have been around since like, like 50 years. Like the technology hasn't really changed and yet like every other thing is. You know if we look at E commerce like the, the, the improvements that have happened in that world are just so significant. You know you can do like one tap and have something delivered to your house next day. Like and the way we order and pay in a bar is the same as it has been for 50 years. Like and I just feel like there is so much opportunity for disruption there and yeah, we're really riding this wave of technology adoption and.

Hospitality. Yeah. Do you know one thing and I don't know if this is something you thought about and maybe it's not irrelevant, maybe it's a new idea as well because you just made me think, saying it's old fashioned. I always think that particularly with hotel check.

Ins.

Yes. I don't know if you've ever thought about.

That.

Yeah. Because I was in Barcelona like a month ago and I was stood at the, waiting for the desk for literally like half an hour and I'm there thinking why can't I just tap on. Tap on my.

Room.

Yeah. With my.

Phone.

Yeah. Why the fuck am I waiting for? Some Spanish lady to make me sign a piece of.

Paper? It's.

Crazy. Like letters. And this is going on a ramp. But, like, why do we get letters in 2022? It's so waste of paper and I don't read it. Yeah, if you want to communicate, send me like a.

WhatsApp.

Yeah. Or an email. You know.

Something. It is weird, the. So many things, like all of these things, like, so many technologies have been phased out, like fax or whatever, you.

Know.

Yeah. But like, some of them just seem to kind of still stick around. Like.

Why. There's gotta be some conspiracy reason why there's still, like, letters. The government are making money off that somehow. I just. I don't get it. It's.

Really. It is.

Strange. Hotels are just one that came to mind. I don't know that's something you've ever thought about, but, like, it's kind of within that realm of. Yeah. Upgrading archaic hospitality.

Tech. Yeah. There's. There's some great companies and we look at a lot of them in the hospital, in the hotel space as well, who are kind.

Of. I think I heard of some mate of a mate of a mate who's got some startup in that space. I think that might be why I thought of it. I don't know what it is.

But, yeah, like, there's so many of these. These industries where the tech is so, you know, entangled in everything that they do, and that's why they stick with the old tech. It's not because they don't realize that it's broken. It's not that, like, the people who run those businesses, like, work in those businesses don't have access to better technology and, you know, have a modern phone that is, like, way better than their system. It's. It's because it's so, like, tangled in with everything that they do that they can't rip it out. And so, like, that's the biggest challenge for us is not that, you know, building a better product because that's super.

Easy.

Yeah. It's actually getting people to switch because it's so painful. You know, think of a pub or a bar. Like, they're open pretty much every day. You can't have, like, downtime. You know, it's like, oh, yeah, sorry, guys, we're gonna switch over your systems, but you gotta shut for a month. It's like, no way. You know, it's gotta work instantly from day one. And so, like, that's been a lot of the learnings that we've gone through is like, how do you like, get into a business and get going like, really quickly but like, also don't disrupt their work, you know, and show them loads of value from day one, like, it's, it's been a, it's been a super interesting kind of learning curve going from what was effectively a consumer brand, although we had, you know, business relationships, it was a consumer product, to building a B2B SaaS company. And yeah, like, I feel like my favorite thing is just like learning new stuff, figuring stuff out and there is so much to figure out in this business. It's so big, so vast, the stuff that we're building and deploying every day and yeah, it's just the most fun.

Business. What do you think the goal is? Is there an end goal for this whole thing? Because it sounds like it started fairly kind of unplanned randomly at the time, obviously five years.

Ago.

Yeah. Have you figured out like, obviously things change, pivot, growth, etc, is there an end game? Yeah, I think, like, for the business and maybe.

You. It depends. It depends which, which kind of like, angle you take with it. Like, ultimately it's a business. I've got investors. I want to, I want to obviously make them and me a lot of money. They've, they've backed me because they, they want to see a big sale or, or a big listing of the company and, and that's exactly what we're going to do. But at the same time, like, you know, for myself, I want to continue to work with like, super cool people that I really respect. I learn lots from, I want to continue to enjoy what I do, continue to just be, be having a great time. And you know, like I said at the start, like, I don't want to have to get a real job and I feel like I don't have a real job yet. And you know, if that flips and I have to do that, then maybe, maybe that's not success for me. But right now, like, I just, I go into, I go into our office and just get to like, have fun and develop new stuff and basically go and like, play every day. Like, it's great.

Fun. Yeah. On the whole office things, I know we mentioned briefly off camera before, that's like a real. I said quarter life crisis and dilemma because I, I've always been the bit of like a nomad character. Like I lived in Bali, did all this and I still like traveling lot. But I feel like as I'm getting old and decrepit at 26, I've kind of started to think about.

Like.

I don't know, like, you can reach, like, certain revenue numbers or, you know, hypothetically, if this business goes really well that I'm launching now, you know, in five years, I'll be really rich, whatever. But then it's like, a lot of it's become. And I was speaking to Jack and my other founder mates about this. Like, I think especially with E Comm. Because you can be so lean and so remote for so long. Like, I think you could get to 2 million a month in revenue and have, like, 10 people that are all just freelancers online, but, like.

100%. Like, you can have no.

Employees. But the problem with that is. And it's always something I battle with, but particularly more as I'm getting older. And maybe I want more, like, consistency and, I don't know, like an actual date, like a work life that isn't. Because obviously, like, I literally do a podcast here. I work from.

Here.

Yep. And it's fucking, like. It's, like a lot of freedom. But it's like, I'm thinking, Christ, like, am I gonna be sat at that same desk in two years? Like, if. Even if, like, the business grows to where I want it to, and it's grown really well already and so on. But it's like, that's something I'm trying to figure out because I would love to have a massive office in Fitzrovia with polished concrete floors and a team of 50 people. But then maybe I just like the idea of that. And actually the reality would be, oh, that's a lot of payroll headache If I need 50 people in an office. And is that what people want in this working world? Do we all want to work from home and track seed bottoms? I'm now convinced that working from home probably isn't the best.

Solution. No, I think it's a flexible.

Approach.

Yeah. Like, that's the approach that we've gone for. Yeah. We don't. We don't mandate anything. I personally go in, like, four or five days a week just because kind of, you know, and going back to what you were saying, like, grass is always greener. Like, always, always greener. You know, I would love the idea of, you know, in my head, the idea of going and working in Bali for six months just sounds amazing. I love that place. Happily go and work in Canggu and just like Changu. But, like, you know, the. The grass is always greener. And, you know, ultimately, I really did not enjoy that. That COVID lockdown period where you get up you know, my mega desk setup, like yours is in my bedroom. You know, you just sat there all day and you're like, is this even a real company at this point? Like, that's how I.

Felt. That is how it.

Feels. And obviously you, you, you were kind of the same before and after Covid. So it's not as weird. Like I'd gone from going into Shoreditch every day, you know, cycling in and then walking into this office and there's all these, all these like great people have drinks on the roof terrace at the end of the week. And you know, that was like a big part of it for me, was like having this, this team of people that are kind of coming on the journey with.

You.

Yeah. And all of that just disappeared. And it was like every Friday we would have like a get together on Zoom and play some like stupid Zoom quiz or something. It's just, and I just, it was just not that fun. And I was like super craving coming back to an office. And I, yeah, I get the, I get the, the kind of the perks of being remote. And you know, a lot of our tech team, you know, almost never come into the office because that's, they're wired differently. Like they're maybe, you know, they're not as interested in like, you know, the long commute and all of this kind of stuff to go in and sit in an office and get distracted by people. But for me, like, I want to be around people. I want to be like chatting to the team and understanding what's going on and you know, coming up with new ideas and just constantly like I thrive on being around.

People. Yeah, I'm the exact same. And yeah, it's something I think I, I mentioned it in like my last Building in Public episode or whatever and I was like. Because a bit me thinks if you keep things really lean and that, you know, if the business is growing, whatever, if people are remote and that's happy and they're happy doing that, then then fine. But then I also think, but then is it all about just a road, the most profitable or fast growth road to the end goal, which is an exit, which I've said that is the end goal. It's probably the end goal for a lot of founders. But also I guess like the end goal kind of every month is to like enjoy the process doing.

It.

Yeah. And I've just become very self aware that I think I'm actually getting to the point where it is like net negative for the business's growth. For me to just Be sat in a fucking room by.

Myself.

Yeah. When you ever speak to people on Zoom, Part of my flatmates doing the same.

Shit.

Yeah. And there are many pros to that. Yeah, it's lean, whatever. Like, there's like no cost involved and I can just, you know, I have.

A. You can go anywhere, 2 second.

Commute from my bedroom to my desk. And it means I can go to Bali like next week, which I think I'm doing. I've actually booked a flight yet, but. But even that, like I was in Mykonos two weeks ago and Marbella like a month before that. And people probably. It's classic, Grass is green. And I made a video about this as well, saying, like, when I'm there, I want to be back home, like with more consistency. But then when I'm back home for say a week, I think, oh, let's go to Bali. It'd be great to be in Canggu. But then I get to Changu and it's eight hours ahead. The wi fi is not great because I haven't located the perfect cafe and I'm fucking sweating my ass off and there's flies everywhere and you're trying.

To do a load of work.

Yeah. So, yeah. It's just funny because I look at a business like Gymshark, for example, like classic.

Example. Yeah. They have that.

Insane. And I think that would be so cool. But then the other part of me thinks, do I even want to get to the point where, you know, you obviously don't need a thousand people to have an office, but I don't know, it's just an interesting debate and I think I've got to the point where I would definitely rather have that. But then I've got like, I guess like five, six full time people if you include like freelancers, agencies. But then they're. They're not even in the same city. Most of.

Them.

Yeah. So it's like not all of them.

No. Yeah, this is. This is.

It. Like then I think, well, does that mean realistically I should get rid of them and hire people in London and just start again and like build more of a culture. If this is what I'm going to do for the next, like certainly three to five years probably. Yeah. It's just an interesting one because I don't think I had ever taken into account like the, the benefit of having a more ironically like a more typical working environment because I've never had that office, like nine to five ever. Yeah, I've never really even worked in an.

Office.

Yeah. And yeah, it's just so funny because I think, like, people are into like online entrepreneurship, whatever. They're like, I don't want the typical.

Approach.

Yeah. But then as I've got older, I'm like, actually maybe a large part of the typical approach is that way because it makes biological sense and, like, it's.

Better. We're like social.

Creatures. Yeah, exactly. All.

This.

Yeah. So it's just, it's a strange paradox. Whereas, like, now I've got the freedom, or I've always just worked in it in that way that gives me the freedom. I'd actually almost like to have less freedom and have people say, we've got a fucking lease on this office. Stay in one place, focus, get people around you. Do you know what I mean? So it's something I'm.

Debating. Super interesting one. Like the, the co working thing, I guess is one way to get it without having to actually have the.

Team. Yes. I was looking at going to. To 180 house because I've got.

SolidWorks.

Yeah. So I go there anyway, but not for work. But I was thinking maybe I'll just go in.

There.

Yeah. Nice.

Aesthetic. It's pretty nice. Yeah. You go and have a little swim in the, in the.

Morning. Yeah. And then the other part of me thinks I probably just get distracted by some pretty person in the corner and I wouldn't get anything.

Done.

Yeah. I mean, so there's always pros and.

Cons. Sometimes, like a bit of distraction in the day is actually what leads to the inspiration that leads to the next idea. Like. Yeah, you know, being, Being distracted is not always a bad thing as a founder, like, because, you know, that's. That's where the next brand could come from. It could be one random chat with some random person over coffee, you know, over the coffee machine. Or like, you know, it could be anything. Like. And yeah, if you, if you're in the right place. Like, I, I met so many interesting people. We were in weworks back in the day. We've now got our, you know, our own office. But like, I met so many interesting people and just little tiny nuggets here and there or like connections or, or whatever. Like you never know where they're going to go. And, you know, we ended up. I bumped into the person who became our head of ops in a WeWork. Like, and, yeah, like, it just. You never know where these things can go. Yeah, it's. It is interesting this. Yeah. Like you said, grass is always greener. But I personally, I like having the office, but Then at the same time I wouldn't mind just popping on the plane somewhere sometimes, you know, especially when we get into the darkest.

Winter. Yeah. Nah, I definitely agree when it's winter, yeah, it's more appealing to go elsewhere, but I think London in summer is very good to be.

Fair. Yeah, it's a great.

City. How does your day to day look like as a founder at this point? Because you said you raised over 10 million quid now is it total? So significant chunk you got 40 odd employees now. I think looking at your LinkedIn.

Is it more than that? A little bit more, but yeah, yeah, a lot of people and yeah.

It'S growing and you're still pretty young as well. Like, do you find probably a billion questions going to go off? I always try and make it fairly philosophical on the second half of.

Pod.

Yeah. Because one thing I've historically struggled with and I've not raised that much money and it's different business, whatever. But it's just like imposter syndrome of being like a younger.

Founder.

Yep. Because like in the past with Neon beach, actually I'd hired two people that were quite a bit older than me and it fucking went wrong anyway because the business went, it's up. But that in itself was a big challenge. Like how much of your team? I would imagine a lot of them are older than you for a.

Start. Yeah. Like most of.

Them.

Yeah. It's.

Yeah. Something you just have to get over it. Like I feel like I'm slowly getting over it or trying.

To. Yeah. I think even from like day one, I was kind of the youngest person in the team. Like I've, I've kind of always, always had that. So it's never been that weird. And yeah, 100% you get imposter syndrome. But like, I think if you, if you're not having imposter syndrome, you're like in the wrong.

Room.

Yeah. You know, you need to be leveling up and meeting the next level of people and then once you're, you're kind of, you feel like you're acclimatized to that. You need to be jumping to the next level, otherwise you're never.

Growing.

Right. I think imposter syndrome is something you kind of should lean into and, you know, embrace it, like. And yeah, like you just keep, keep, you know, meeting new people, keep hustling and you know, you figure it out as you go and then suddenly you are in the right room and you know, you are, you're what you thought you could never be. And yeah, that's I think that's just. He's got to keep doing.

It. What the Fuck is.

This? Spacegoods spacegoods.com Rainbow Dust version one. My newest entrepreneurial econ brand venture. I spent six months in the trenches building this shit from scratch. We launched six weeks ago. What's it all about? The next generation wellness brand with a long term vision to essentially consumerize the pending psychedelic consumer goods market. Which might sound absolutely ridiculous, we're not quite there yet. The market's massively.

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Subscription and see how you fucking feel. Let's do it for the boys. Spacegoods.com. How does your day to day look like right now? Does it vary a.

Lot? Yeah, 100%. Like there is no, there is no day in the life. But I guess the, a lot of my time now is, is taken up by, you know, investment, getting more funds into the company so that we can expand and you know, go international and all that exciting stuff. You know, doing partnerships, doing deals. You know, there's, there's some, some top secret stuff that we're, we're working on in, in the world of M and A, which is also very exciting, big learning curve and all of that, which is, which has been great but like, I don't know, like involved in sales, involved in marketing, involved in like customer success. Like every part of the business I, I get involved with and, and, and try and help out wherever I can. But then a lot of the time. It's like, you know, the biggest time thing is at the moment is actually hiring as well. You know, getting the right people to come.

In. I'm so bad at that. Honestly, I don't have a clue what I'm.

Doing. Really. Feels like. It feels like you need a COO who can, who can run all of.

That. Yeah. That's what Alex, who's one of my investors and mentors really has told me. That's probably what we need next because he helped me hire an FD recently. So. Who also invested in the business, which is probably a good sign. And that was the first time I think I got over my imposter syndrome a little bit because he's 50 years old and I'm telling him my vision for everyone, wherever we want to go. But I can't fucking do a cash flow forecast. Whereas he comes in and does this wizardry just like a five year plan. All this. Which stuff I'd never done in the past. Where I got it wrong in the past was fucking knowing the actual numbers. Not just Chad scaling to the moon. Yeah. In a lap. Just me in a kitchen and a laptop, which is what I did. But yeah, like the whole idea of. Yeah. Hiring like a CEO, someone that's like above me in the business, I think that that would be because I'm just naturally like a, like a high risk creative. Like I'm very good at 0 to 1, but I just fucking hate like the operational.

Side.

Yeah. I end up doing most of my.

Days. Typical.

Founder. Because. Because I have to do that and I have to like, it's all very well coming up with like fucking palm tree dust or whatever, which is like a product idea. But then I need to make sure that we actually have stock to sell because we're spending thousands a day on Instagram.

And.

Yep. So I find my, like, the challenge for me as a founder and like an E commerce sector is I always come out from a crate. I get really creative when I'm saying something. Oh, I've like, I did all the, the branding, the products. That's my thing. And then when it becomes a real thing with customers and everything, I get bogged down in 90% of my time being the shit that I wasn't interested in and didn't get me to the point where I could start a business, which was like the creative.

Side.

Yeah. So I think I just need to accept that I'm not. I don't ever really even want to be like a CEO. I'd rather just be the guy that sits in the corner coming up with fucking product.

Ideas. Yeah. And this is it. But you kind of got to, you know, unless you are. You've already kind of, you know, you scaled, you've got the funds behind you, et cetera, you kind of have to do both. You have to be the executor and the.

Visionary. Oh, of course. Yeah. And I very much still.

Am. Yeah. But, but my, I'm similar. Like, I would prefer to sit in the corner, come up with cool stuff and then, you know, magically it happens. But I think like the model to do that is either to, you know, create like a company incubator, you know, where you are coming up with ideas or your team is coming up with ideas and then you're putting in a CEO who then goes off and runs that business, or you become an investor and then you're able to look at all of this cool, crazy stuff but not have to be involved in the, in the kind of day to day. Yeah, that's something I've, I've started dabbling in more recently is like trying to kind of not, not like as a big part of my day or life or anything, but just starting to, to kind of learn that muscle or whatever of, of like investing in, you know, seed stage companies. And it is like, it's, it's so interesting. And you can, you can become like as obsessed as you are with your own business with another completely random thing for like, you know, one hour. And you know, then you get to go back to reality and continue cracking on with the super valuable thing that you're building. But it kind of, it scratches that itch in the back of your brain of like, oh, I want to do this and this and this and this and.

This.

Yeah. You know, you get to kind of chat to people who are doing that thing and hopefully get some upside from.

It. I joked the other week that one day when I've exited from my own thing, I would like to start a podcast fund where everyone that watches the pod, we all start this like, I'd call it like pool party capital or.

Something. I love.

It. Yeah. So I don't know, everyone chucks some dash. I definitely will do something with that later on. That's actually where I think a platform like a podcast like this can actually be.

Interesting.

Yeah. Like beyond just fucking putting sponsors on and shit is it becomes like. Because I think that a thousand people watching this for an hour and we get like 3 to 4,000 views now per one. Which doesn't sound like a Lot. But, but then that compared to say, a million views on some bullshit TikTok that no one cares.

About.

Yeah. Is completely.

Different.

Yeah. And people that listen to this are genuinely entrepreneurs or.

Investors. You're not setting through for an hour unless you're exactly highly.

Engaged. I just had that idea the other day and I was like, fucking, I need to start season two. I need to build the audience and eventually build this like trillion dollar fund from, from the midnight.

Pod. But I love.

It. Yeah. I definitely think.

Yeah. My first million guys do something.

Similar. Yes, they.

Do. Super, super.

Cool.

Yeah. And like the, the brand that they've built off the back of that, obviously selling some companies also, but like mainly that podcast. And like, I think it's. It just shows like if you, if you kind of get that kind of product market fit, like you've got the right audience, you know, the right people are talking to the other right people about the thing. It's. It's super.

Valuable. And.

Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's next for you.

Guys. Yeah. I mean, definitely a few years down the line. I mean, I was thinking that people have DM me about this saying I should do like crowdfunding for podcast subscribers to invest in space goods. But maybe in the future. I think that'd be over complicated things right.

Now. It is not crowdfunding is. Is.

Definitely. I've just closed another round this week of like, I guess it's. It's just an extension to the pre. Seed. Whatever you want to call it, really. Yeah. So congrats. Yeah. Where it's literally closing like tomorrow. So it's just. It's basically the same amount of money again at a big evaluation because I wanted to get two people.

Involved.

Amazing. But I'm also conscious just on that as well because it's the first time I've like I said using seed legals, all that I'm looking at exit.

Scenarios. Yeah. Big fan of.

Seedlings. And in my head it's always a fine line between obviously I'm fucking three months in, so there's only so inflated I can get the valuation or whatever. But that balance between. In the past I was always, I want to own 100% because when we sell and I didn't sell because it went wrong. Had I had investors, maybe I would have dodged those, those errors, which is the point. But now I'm like, you know, in three, four, five years, whatever it is, I'd rather have, you know, 50%, even 30% of a very big.

Pie.

Yeah. And actually have a much A much smoother way of getting there because I've got the help and the.

Support.

Yeah. And more money along the way. So it's just interesting how my perspective has changed because, yeah, I used to be so arrogant to think I have to do it all myself. I have to own 100. I don't want a co.

Founder.

Yeah. Don't anyone telling me what to.

Do.

Yeah. But now it's like, I want people, please tell me what you think, because I now know how much I don't know, which probably took me seven years and a bit of humbling myself to get to that.

Point.

Yeah. So, like, I don't know what the question is really. I mean, is that something you've. Well, again, I guess in tech.

Is maybe you kind of have to. Like, there's, there's very few very big, like, tech companies that have been.

Bootstrapped.

Yeah. Like there are some, there are some examples of it, but it's, it's way, way harder. Like, way harder because you need to spend a ton of money up front. Devs. Yeah. Like, it's, yeah, it's tough to do that. And usually your first customers, you're doing it like, either super cheap or like, you know, it's not, it's not done in a super scalable way, etc. Etc. Um, but like it's, again, it's just like it's. Grass is always greener. Like, I look at these, I look at these founders who are able to sell a business and they own 100% of it and they sell it for like, you know, even 10 million pounds or whatever, that's like 100% your money, you know, whereas I have to get to a much bigger valuation to walk away with £10 million, you know, because obviously I've been diluted over the years by, by selling parts of the company to, to investors. Like, it's the, it's, it's that kind of, you know, it's, it's always easy to look across the fence and be jealous. But I think with tech you just, you got to, you got to raise, you got to raise money, otherwise it's going to be a long old.

Journey. Yeah, I definitely see that. But just on that then as well, because one of my recent investors, who's also like a mentor to me, I guess, who I mentioned before he sold his business last year, he, he said something to me that changed my, my perspective on numbers because, you know, like I've flippantly said on the podcast, I want to build 100 million pound brand yeah, because everyone says that it's an easy number. It's not a billion, which sounds silly, but it's bigger than 10 million. So we say 100 million, whatever that means. Valuation, revenue, probably valuation. But he says to me, well, that should be irrelevant because really what you should be looking at is how much do I walk away with in what time period? Because, you know, you could have a business worth 100 million, but if no one's willing to buy you out, then you ain't got any money. You could be a broke founder. But I'm so true. It's like that Drake Bard, don't show me valuation, show me personal.

Funds.

Yeah. Or something. And it just changed my perspective. But then at the same time there's probably this arrogant little kid inside me that thinks, yeah, but I'd just be so sick to get to like a billion valuation even if I had 0.1% equity. Do you know what I.

Mean? Well, There is some YouTuber I think did that where he actually made a company worth a billion by selling one, you know, one billionth of it for a pound. So, yeah, you could do that too. But no, like, I get what you're saying. Like there is, there's clout that comes with having a business that's worth a lot of money, but you know, ultimately it's still super high risk. Like, you know, our company is worth a huge amount of money on paper and investors have backed us for that amount of money. But like, if we don't sell it, it's, you know, it's not worth anything. So it's, it's still super high risk. It gets lower risk as you go through the, the funding cycle and you know, once you, you go from like pre seed to seed and then series A and series B like becomes more and more likely that you are going to see a big return off it. Yeah, but anything can happen. Like, you know, you never know what's going to happen. So yeah, I don't know what the point is here, but I think.

I guess to clarify my ramble, I guess the question is like, what would be your priority at this stage in life? Is it getting the business? Not necessarily priority, but like what would be the perfect outcome for you? Is it making, is it building, you know, billion pound plus business and you having a slice of it, or is it like de risking and, and maybe you've done that, maybe you're going to do that. I don't know. Yeah, how do you see that? Because my perspective as well has definitely changed a little. Bit on it as I've got a bit older, it's like, oh, it would probably, it would be nice to like De Risk rather than just have this pipe dream of our. I need to make 120mil before I'm.

29.

Yeah. Actually if I could make 10mil by 29, that'd be all.

Right. I feel like, yeah, 10mils a good number for never thinking about money ever.

Again. Because that's the number that people that have made a lot more than that have told.

Me.

Yeah. And that's why I believe.

Them.

Yeah. Because, you know, some kid on Twitter saying it, you get these kids on Twitter, they're like 18 and they're like, 10 mil is not enough. It's like, mate, you've not even made a hundred grand yet. So it's all.

Relative.

Yeah. So yeah, it's.

Interesting. Yeah, I would love, I would.

Love. That's what I've been.

Told. I would love to have that. Obviously not, not quite there yet, but I feel like, yeah, that would be a nice outcome to have. But at the same time, like I'm super young. Like I have so many years to go for this business and then so many years to go for, you know, however many other startups and you know, companies that I build in the future. So you know, I want to kind of shoot for the, shoot for the stars or whatever and go for the biggest opportunity possible. I see what we're building as a multibillion dollar opportunity, so kind of, why not just go for it and then, you know, worst case scenario, you sell it and you make 10 mil at the end. That's still incredible. Yeah, you know, it's. You kind of have to, in, in tech world, especially with VCs, like they are not backing you to sell for 20 million, 50 million pounds. Like they want to see a billion dollar outcome. Otherwise it doesn't even make sense for their fundamentals. You know, they are investing in maybe 10 startups and you know, they know that like, you know, eight of them are going to fail, one of them is going to do okay, but then one of them is going to pay for the whole fund. That's like the economics, like it's pretty simple economics and it's probably what's led to a lot of crazy stuff going on with companies that are, you know, just way overfunded and all sorts of crazy stuff across the startup ecosystem. But that is the model and you know, we've very much leaned into that model and geared ourselves up for, for that kind of.

Outcome. Yeah. It's so interesting. I find the whole fundraising world fascinating and my perspective on how to achieve like an outcome with a business financially has changed so much because in the past I would be like, I need to be EBITDA profitable from month one and maybe we'll get 3x multiple acquisition because we're like a bedroom brand that's doing 3 million in revenue, which is like, which is like my jewelry business previously, but now it's like my focus is very much on like recurring revenue and positioning it to be a potential unicorn. Yeah, which is why I let the whole psychedelics angle, etc, like I was saying before and almost like reverse engineering because it wasn't my first thing and I stuck to E commerce, but it wasn't my first brand, first time consumables. But like everything in terms of the market, where I think it could go, the fact that it's in the uk where there's limited competition, all this sort of stuff, it all lends itself to. Well, I think it could, you know, really interest certain private equity funds, all this sort of shit. It's very acquirable. Should it go to plan? So yeah, I guess like I've got like a three year plan in my head but it's obviously not going to go exactly to.

Plan. Never.

Does. It's already not gone to plan, I've got to pivot and change, etc. Etc. But yeah, it's just funny how my perspective has changed because yeah, I guess I didn't know maybe how like the capital cycle works before. Whereas now having spoken to people that have been there and done that raise all the money, been acquired, like that's better than any fucking MBA speaking to people that have actually done it. And I'm fortunate to have those people backing me now. So yeah, and hopefully we'll do and hopefully I can fucking get them a great return.

So. And it goes back to networks, right? Like that's that you learn from these people who've been there and done it. Like got all these amazing investors, like advisors, people who've come around the business over the years and these guys have like, you know, like I chat like all the time to the dude who he sold Shazam to Apple, you know, and like the, you know, Tom Blomfield from Monzo, all these guys who've invested in the company and you know, supported us over the years. Like they, they've done huge things and like I can just chat to them and run my ideas past them and they can give me parallels from back in the day when they were going through the same problems. Like, you don't always have to solve all the problems yourself. You can also lean on these, these OGs who've done it already. Yeah, I, I've learned so much from that. And, you know, kind of the way you said, it's like you, when you start off, you think you know what you're doing and all of that, actually, you realize.

Nothing.

Yeah. And you know, by getting a load of great people around you, you. You can go so much faster. And same with team as well, you know, hiring people who are way better than you, you know, that's how you actually scale a business. And that's, that's been a big learning for me over the.

Years. Yeah, definitely. What do you think's been the hardest thing over the past five years? You had to pick one. And it can be personal, business, anything. Just during the process, it's a really tough.

Question. There's like, literally, you know, it's the. It's the dude from LinkedIn. I think it's quite. From him. It's like you. You go home and stuff's just like on fire. You know, there is always something that's going wrong. Like, that's the nature of it. But I think probably like that time when we thought we were going to lose all of the three years of work because of COVID like, that was. That was pretty rough. And, you know, we. We didn't yet have a plan of how to get out of it and all of that stuff. We thought we were gonna have to, like, lose the team and, you know, lose all the effort and time that we put into everything. And yeah, that was, that was pretty rough, to be fair. And it didn't look like there was like an exit. You know, there was no, like, light at the end of the tunnel. It was just like, what are we gonna.

Do?

Yeah. But then, you know, you keep. Keep pushing on and then the next, the next day you wake up and you're like, yeah, we've got a solution for it, and just crack on with.

It. Keep playing the game. Right. Final question I seem to have. It's become a typical question I ask everyone now, and it's so cliche. But yeah, it's quite good question because it makes people reflect. If you could give three bits of advice yourself starting out five years ago or even prior to that, but let's call it five years.

Ago.

Yeah. On reflection, what would they.

Be? That's a good.

One. Puts everyone on the.

Spot.

Yeah. But most people come out with something interesting. I.

Think. I think actually one of the things that we were speaking about around like operations and people, you know, you're not a big fan of doing it yourself. I realized after a number of years of trying to like kind of, you know, bash a square peg through a round hole or whatever, that that's not my skill set. And so hiring a CEO was like huge. You know, it was, it was a. Yeah, I think like I should have from the very first day got a kind of super operational, super finance focused, like co founder. I think that would be how I would do it again if I was starting again, because, like, I'm naturally way more into the creative side, like sales side, you know, coming up with the new stuff, products, tech, all of that. But then like the, the execution, the operations, the hr, all of that stuff, it's just, you know, I can do it and I've figured it out, but I don't enjoy it.

And.

Yeah. Yeah, So I guess, yeah, get a, get someone who's like the yin to your Yang or whatever. Don't just find people who are the same as you and have the same skill set. That's, that's one thing. I think another one is like, you know, obviously I did end up just kind of cracking on with it, but like, I think for, for a lot of people who look at founders who have done all this crazy stuff, like, you look at them and you think, like, I couldn't do that. They're somehow different or, you know, some special person. It's like, like it's absolute rubbish. Like everyone just starts from some point where they know nothing. And you know, then you just learn along the way. Like the, like, Internet is the most incredible thing. Like you can learn anything now. Like, and you can just, like, you can start from zero and you can just figure it out as you go along. Like, you know, you've done it as well. Like, it's, you just, you just kind of start one day and you're like, okay, let's open a Shopify store. And then, you know, a few years later, you've actually figured out how to run all of the stuff. You know, you just learn from mistakes and just keep, keep cracking on. So I guess the, the, the advice would be just, you know, just go for it. If you're into, into this world and you love the, the idea of, you know, founding a company, it's. It, you know, might look difficult from the outside, but it's just a continuation of learning and making mistakes and just pushing on, I guess. Final, final thoughts, final idea Trying to.

Think. Now you have to drop something special, something really.

Special. I guess. You know, it's a, it's a long journey. It's not like something that happens overnight. You know, I remember thinking like this was going to be like a three year thing. Going to build it, we're going to scale it, we're going to sell it. You know, these things, if they're valuable, they take time. You got to be, you got to be ready for that marathon. Like, it's not a, it may feel like a sprint and every day may be a sprint because you are constantly like fighting against competitors or running out of money or whatever the situation is. Like you shouldn't, you shouldn't relax on the job. That's not what I'm saying. But it is a marathon and you have to think about it as like a long game because very, very, very few businesses that are seriously valuable are built in like 1, 2, 3 years. Like big businesses are built in like 10 years, 15 years. And it always takes longer than you think. So enjoying the journey, you know, taking time to, to enjoy yourself and you know, not, not also once you have enough money, starting to like actually pay yourself something. That doesn't mean that you're living off ramen and you know, not, not enjoying life like all of these things. I think you, you do at the beginning because you think you have to, and you have to work 24 hours of the day and never enjoy yourself. But actually like once, once you've, you've, you've raised a bit of money and you can, you can start to like, actually, you know, like look to the horizon a bit more. I think it's, it's really important to enjoy yourself as you go along and, and yeah, not get too bogged down in the, in the detail because Otherwise, you know, five years, 10 years will have passed you by and you're, you're miserable in your 20s or.

Whatever. Yeah, that's very true. That's very true. Getting that balance right. Something I think about a lot for sure. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap it up. We could probably go for three hours like every.

Episode.

Yeah. And this is sober episode, by the way. You've been on the Rainbow.

Dust. I know I'm going to be.

On the marathons, so I'm trying to cut the drink down. I'm going for sub 3 marathon for the first time if you want to donate to it. By the way, fucking link in the bio. I think I've got like a minimum commitment. I've got a raise, which I haven't done yet, so I'm probably gonna have to pay for it.

Myself. Oh.

No. It's the only way to get a place because I'm running from mind charity or something. But anyway, yeah, on that note, Episode one, Season two, which I'm now calling it. Cheers for watching. Subscribe to the pod as usual and we'll see you in the next episode. Peace.