Not My First Guess

How do you test a blood testing business, when none of the co-founders come from a clinical background? What happens when your entire investor pipeline disappears overnight? What do you do when customers just aren't buying?  And what's it like scaling a health tech startup from 0 to 130 staff, and over a 100k customers?  The person to ask is Eliot Brooks, co-founder of Thriva and former...

What do you have to do to make your customers love you so much, they'll get a tattoo of your logo? Especially when it's a "boring" B2B tool for writing better cold emails... Lavender's founder William Ballance may not quite have gotten his own head around why customers love them this much; but he's certainly cracked building a product and brand customers rave about. ...

Design thinking is a buzzword we hear a lot in the startup space- but what is it really all about? Should you be trying it? Is it too late to get started? And how might it speed up your route to market and loyal customers who keep coming back for more? In this episode, Hattie is joined by Nirish Shakya, a design thinking and user experience design expert. For the past 15 years, he has been helping...

After earning few thousand euros selling toasties at school, you may think founding a company would have been Anieke's first stop post university. But a horrendous hackathon experience initially put her off the no sleep, stinky side of entrepreneurship. Instead, she started out in the corporate world, though quickly made her way into Venture Capital, where she invested in Social Impact ventur...

This week's interviewee, Emily Cummin, is carving out a new industry- not quite Death Tech, but Grief Tech instead. Her platform, Untangle was founded to help people dealing with big loss, whether bereavement or divorce, to cope with the emotional and practical fall out.  Untangle are still pre-revenue, but are just about to turn on a series of income streams, having already built a more than...

How do you unlock the opinions of a generation? And what does it change when you can tap into qualitative research at scale? The person to ask is Jay Richards, co-founder of Imagen Insights, which helps big brands like Amazon Prime, Sky, Puma, the NFL, Pepsico and many more, to access thousands of Gen Z opinions, within 48 hours. Not coming from a traditional marketing or research agency backgroun...

Venture Capital claims a lot of Techcrunch headlines, covers our Linkedin timelines, and eats months of our lives and runway, as founders fundraising. But, it can be hard to separate the celebrations of fundraises, from whether Venture Capital is really right for you as a founder, what it will cost you personally, and what is going to increase your chances of success if you do choose that path. Wh...

What do you need to know as a founder raising early stage, pre-seed or seed funding?  Who are angels? What do they care about? How do they make investment decisions?  What should you be asking of them? And what can you do to increase your chances of a successful raise?  In this episode we meet founder of entrepreneurial community Dffrnt, Ash Phillips, who became an Angel investor with Ada Ventures...

Many founders dream of the moment their company is acquired. But no-one imagines that post acquisition they may be forced to fire the employees who helped build the startup over 10 years,  watch the company they built lose millions in value, and ultimately, have to buy it back to save their legacy.  That was Sach Kukadia's journey in Secret Sales. Luckily, he was able to build back some of th...

Ideas often come from experiencing frustration first hand. That's exactly what happened to Ellie. While giving up alcohol for a month, she got fed up with the lack of options available in lieu of her traditional G&T. That, coupled with career frustration, that she couldn't get a job building a consumer facing brand, led her to create her own. She launched Caleño- a non-alcoholic drin...

Episode #1: Meet Devin Hunt Devin is a serial founder, investor and startup mentor.  His first startup was accepted onto Y Combinator, on a cohort with Dropbox, Songkick and Disqus, but ultimately failed. His second startup Lyst is still going strong, raising a pre-IPO round of funding at a reported $700m valuation in 2021.  But Devin, having burned out and left the company, also went on to found...

Episode #2: Meet Sophie Meislin Baron   Sophie is a first time founder, who launched her startup after experiencing the pains of going back to work after having a baby, and finding no good options for easy weaning. She grew an incredibly engaged community by sharing candidly about parenthood, including  her own lack of fulfilment when she had her first child. So far, Mamamade have built a communit...