Raising £7M for Femme-tech: 200 Pitches, One Yes | Behind the Growth with Peony Li

0:00Every day in the office, we talk about pee, we talk about orgasm, we talk about the bladder. So many things that you wouldn't think you would talk about with your colleagues.

0:09Laura Donadio: Did you ever worry that you would struggle finding people that would want to talk about your brand organically? All the time. All the time. What are you looking for when you build a team? I've made so many mistakes. Probably most founders would tell you that this is the hardest thing to get right in a business. And it changes every season because people change. We're fluid. it. It's a process that really teaches you a lot about rejection. You have to handle a lot of no's before you get your yes. I actually had to pitch to more than 200 investors. One out of those 200 that said yes. And it just kickstarted a whole new network for me of yeses.

0:44You just need to get one yes. I'm Peony, founder of Jude. You might know us from Dragon's Den, where I rejected three dragons. We are here to break the taboo of bladder health. And this is Behind the Growth.

1:00Laura Donadio: We always ask our guests to introduce themselves first and we always ask what are you known for? So go ahead introduce yourself. Well I'm P &E, I founded Jude about five years ago and I guess I'm known for being the woman who break the UK biggest taboo. Yeah I love that but before that you had a career in finance right? You moved from Hong Kong to the UK at the age of 15 which is really young and you just started to start in finance is that something you personally wanted to do or did you feel any sort of like family pressure to get into that um actually the family pressure was for me to be a doctor okay um and i've i've really enjoyed biology uh but then there's a different type of pressure because at university i was i was reading economics and a lot of my friends um studying economics wants to go to finance and want to go into banking because that is just the highest paid job that you'll get into like full stop.

2:01And so with that peer pressure, you just thought that this is also something that you want. And that is something that is going to prove your worth straight out of university. So I think at that time, I really wanted it. I really wanted to go into investment banking just to prove myself that I can.

2:20Laura Donadio: I understand that. I think especially when you move to London, you realize the cost of living. and having the appeal of a life that, you know, is really easy where you make a lot of money. I can get it. I said that because I think it will probably relate to a lot of students that are looking for a job. But there isn't just that one job. There's so many other things that you can do. And I think really is a year in that I realized that like, actually, I'm not cut out for a corporate job. I'm just not. I get that. And that's something it took me a lot longer to realize, but I appreciate it. And I think now that I've left my corporate job, I don't think I could ever go back.

3:03Laura Donadio: But, you know, that's a different story. What made you want to build a supplement or, you know, a health and wellness brand? So I think that traced back to my family. And then when I was 15, I was moving over to the UK. I had a UTI and that triggered a racta bladder and incontinence for about a decade. So I have to live with what I think is a very debilitating, stigmatized health problem. And I think it's with those things combined that made me feel very, very passionate about supporting women, lifting quality of life for people, but also looking at the things that people don't usually look at.

3:45Laura Donadio: How did you feel about building a brand that is centered around such a big taboo? Because this is not something that women proactively talk about, right? I think there is pros and cons. The pros is actually incredibly fun. Like every day in the office, we talk about pee, we talk about orgasm, we talk about the bladder, we talk about so many things that you wouldn't think you would talk about with your colleagues. And I think sometimes it's quite good to be different to what all the other brands are doing, because you really own your own tone of voice, your own and authority. I think on the flip side, it is actually quite hard.

4:23Like you feel like you're pushing a rock up the hill on your own because you're creating a new category. And so when you're looking at more shiny, quite fashionable brands that are doing things that everyone is talking about, like it just seemed a lot easier. I guess I picked a harder harder route but less competitive one as well I think so when you started did you ever worry that

4:49Laura Donadio: you would struggle finding people that would want to talk about your brand organically yeah all the time all the time actually I think it was only the last year where people start to think that our brand is cool honestly it has been four years of really trying so hard to pitch you think pitching to investors are hard actually pitching to people who want to work in your company is even harder even harder because I think on the flip side you're asking someone to not just put their money but put their like every day almost put their bet their lives on an incontinence brand and that wasn't something a lot of people wanted to do at the time but I do think our brand has and a lot of the work to destigmatize this issue.

5:35And I think that a lot of different people, influencers, celebrities start to talk about bladder problems, UTI, and actually started to make this topic a much more accessible topic. And I think you will find people who want to make an impact, who believe that the company is doing something right.

5:55Laura Donadio: You went from working in finance yourself to being a founder who was asking for money. So the other side of the coin. Actually, after finance, I did quite a few career stints before I started Jude. So I went into investing in startups myself, becoming an investor. So I actually got quite a big network of investors that I know. And then I then went to work for a women's health startup as well. And I just see it from the other side. Before starting Jude, I started another business. I distributed about 6 million pieces of PPE during the pandemic to frontline workers, to carers, to a lot of like founders of care homes.

6:41And so I think it's those culmination of experiences that made me feel confident I can actually make that leap into being a solo founder myself. I don't think that made the investment or fundraising process easier. I I actually had to pitch to more than 200 investors. And I think it was one out of those 200 that said yes. And it was after that one yes. And then it just kickstarted a whole new network for me of yeses. And so I think that early fundraising experience taught me, you just need to get one yes. Yeah.

7:22Laura Donadio: I've heard that it's a process that really teaches you a lot about rejection, very similar to a sales process where you have to handle a lot of no's before you get your yes. Do you feel that your experience having been on the investment side of things actually taught you the things that you would want to see in a pitch yourself? I do. When I was an investor, I see women pitching and then I see men pitching and they pitch in a very different way. Unfortunately, we're still looking at startups and investment opportunities, I believe with a male gaze and with a male lens. So I do have the reverse engineer.

8:04What would these investors on the other side of the table want to hear? How do I phrase the market size? How do I pitch myself, essentially, that it would come across as trusting, come across as ambitious? And I think when women pitch, they just hide their best assets And I think it's that perspective shift of being an investor and hearing so many different types of pitching that made me realize how do I do this fundraising.

8:37Laura Donadio: So do you find that the main difference between men and women pitching is confidence? I think it's confidence. I also think it's about the way you talk about yourself. And I do think founders and entrepreneurs have to sell themselves, have to be the best PR, actually. Like you can't say something that you're not, like you have to say that there's something that you're not great at, but you have to say it in a way that also mean that you're working on, that you're conscious about your own weakness. And I do think, and this is like a huge generalization, but women are generally less comfortable in selling themselves.

9:18Laura Donadio: Yeah, I can absolutely see this. It really is, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I think we shy away a lot more from putting ourselves first. And, you know, I think we always call it, you know, the white middle-aged man's confidence. Like we just see it as like a different level than a woman in general. So no, I was laughing because I couldn't see it. Particularly with Asians, we're just so not great at talking big about ourselves because our culture is such that we should be humble and we should do everything, execute on everything and talk about the result. And when you're raising a pre-seed round, there's basically nothing you can talk about apart from the dreams and the vision.

10:01You have to sell the vision, yeah. Exactly, and you have to sell yourself. So in this conversation, if anyone that is listening who are thinking to start a business or might feel like they're shy or introverted, I felt that is just the thing that you want to reframe.

10:18Laura Donadio: And having been an investor yourself, did you ever consider bootstrapping it? I did I did because the first business that I started I actually bootstrapped it okay and honestly bootstrapping in the short term it's actually much more fun and in the long term depends on how much you want to do in the business it starts to get a lot less fun but I look at founders who bootstrapped and built a massive business with such admiration because I just think it's so inspirational how much control you can retain in the business and you can build so much. The moment I decided to fundraise is because I felt like I was onto something massive.

11:06I felt I was, and we are creating a category. We have to invest in science, invest in clinical trials. We have to invest in marketing and awareness so i just thought it would be very difficult actually for me to bootstrap it i would need some initial capital to get it started so it was to fast track growth more than anything it was it was and then throughout the five years there are change of thoughts on if you know i'm building this business in 2026 i probably would do it differently what would you do differently so So it was two people. We just build a whole new website in two weeks. And we push the code into our CMS without needing any developers.

11:55And so then, you know, you look at the news and look at like companies like Men Go to Mars, just building this gigantic business with just one person. Like it's totally possible. It actually is the best time to start businesses today.

12:10Laura Donadio: The entry barrier to starting businesses, we've discussed this many times on other episodes, is lower than ever. It really is. And social media, like, yes, it's competitive. It's hard to grab eyeballs. But like, there is a channel there for you to amass your audience. Do you think this is where building a business with a purpose like yours is where you can then differentiate yourself more from the other brands? I think it's purpose. I think in categories like health, you have to have purpose. plus you need to have action to back up the purpose. So what I meant by that is you have to have university partnerships.

12:46You have to have money that you invest in clinicals. You have to have evidence that you own. And so we work with two universities. We're working with another one in 2027. We've invested more than 3 million now in research and development. And we are just starting to publish those research. and it takes years for these things to come up. And so, yes, the barrier of starting businesses are lower and lower, which means the competition is going to be more and more. And so purpose is a differentiator, but then I think a lot more needs to come for your business to be truly differentiated and defensible.

13:25Laura Donadio: It's really difficult to back your claims and navigate all of the marketing around it. How have you found it, building Jude? It was hard. It was hard. I think actually the tension is between backing up your claims when the claims are too good to be true you actually lose trust and so you almost have to understand what kind of endpoints you want to design about your claims and go and build and create the evidence and it lands in a space where you believe that it is trustworthy you have evidence to back it up so it is a multitude of things I think at the end of the day it's whether that is accurate is true and it's believable and you've talked recently about Tinexing your business in the next two years right what do you think gets worse as the business gets bigger so we've already Tinex our business in the last like two years.

14:26And I'm already seeing what gets you to 10 million is a completely different setup to what gets you to 50 million. And there's this kind of chasm that you have to cross. And actually there's a really great podcast called 71770. And it's by this fund called Piper. So it's seven is team size, 17 is team size. So from seven to 17 is a different mode of operation. You have to set up systems and operate in cadence differently. And what I learned is from, you know, one to 10 million, I can just like brute force it as much as I can. And I am a workaholic. I think most founders are, and I can do so much, but actually from like 10 to 50, you need to start getting your team in place and you have to architect like a team that is senior enough to help you make decisions as well as they can dolphin into also executing but not losing the big picture and I think that scale is what gets trips trips up most companies how do you hire people what are you looking for when you build a team I've made so many mistakes with people too many and I I think probably most founders will tell you that this is the hardest thing to get right in a business.

15:57And it changes every season because people change. We're fluid, like individuals. What we want, like a year ago, is different from what we want now.

16:07Laura Donadio: And they're helping you build your business, not their own. Exactly. And then how do you balance giving feedback whilst empowering them when the business is doing badly or well? I think it's really hard. um what i look for in hires i think number one like attitude and passion um especially when it comes to i guess more junior to mid hires you really need to have that curiosity and hunger to learn i think at this age especially like we want someone to be all hands on ai learning as much as you can because that is going to duplicate like in our team now we're basically calling claude and ai like their personal assistants like they are leading virtual members of team members on their own to multiply the amount of work that they can do in a week and the ones who are willing to go that extra mile to learn themselves and like i'm hearing from our designer that she's learning like law design like in the weekends and I think that is just something that you can't teach I don't think and you can't train you can't force either I think and then second is um we used to hire generalist and then we shifted into hiring Dominic expertise and that didn't work out that well okay especially in marketing which is so interesting tell me more about this I'm really I'm really curious because there's always a big debate around, you know, specialism versus generalism, especially across marketing.

17:42I think it's particularly this time of change. Like the algorithm changes so much 2025 to 2026. Like the algorithm was said to be changed in 2025, but the changes really only kicked in, I think, in 26. And then with AI, with hyper-personalization, what matters two years ago doesn't matter anymore today. And so if you have specialized skill set that was set on what they knew before, minus the curiosity, minus the hunger and attitude. They got stuck. You're just not going to get anywhere. And so we've made that mistake as well. I think generalists that are hungry, willing to learn, they will trump more than hiring a really expensive specialist.

18:29but I have learned that the hiring process do have to be quite rigorous and I prepare so much before each interview because actually each interview just gives you more and more signals about the person and you really only have what like four hours max to get to that decision which person you want to hire in the pipeline and so within those four hours you want to ask as many questions as possible but as precise of a question to get you those signals that you want yes and I often go back to like what are the biggest challenges and they're like so open-ended but you want to hear what those challenges really are if those challenges are something that we face every day then probably probably not if those challenges like you've heard so many times that like you know when a person grew up if they have done like like elite sports or being in sports team or actually have overcome quite a lot of struggles of different size and shapes but they have gone through gone through or like adversity um those people are inherently better problem solvers they just have a different perspective on how to navigate challenges i think so

19:49Laura Donadio: um speaking of challenges do you feel like you had to personally sacrifice anything for the growth of the business yeah so many things I don't see it as sacrifice um Judas Judas my baby and it's really I think when you look at it as sacrifice you're going to resent what you're building and when you start a resentment your motivation of building it start to get lower and lower so you know every every person every founder would have those moments of resentment towards their business um for me it's about reframing it i'm sure every founder build a business because they want multiple things they want to make an impact whatever size or shape or form right like even if it's not an impact driven business you're still impacting your team um you want to have financial sustainability or success but if you're only anchors on that it's going to be quite hard so for me it's also about the process of better bettering myself do you feel like your definition of success has changed a lot over the years not really i think my version of i wouldn't say success but for me like if i ask myself if the question is is it worth continue building jude and the answer is am I still impacting one more woman today in a positive way if it is then I can keep on going yeah that that would be my like limous test of is this worth doing and you still have a lot of women you can impact you've already impacted a lot too many so many well in fact 50 million women in the UK are having these issues.

21:34Laura Donadio: So that's still a big, a big number to, to go after. Yeah. Women in general, going back to the investment, the fundraising process, do you feel there's anything that we don't tell women to prepare for what they're going to go through with their fundraising? Do you feel like there's anything that we need to raise more awareness around i do think so and i think no one wants to talk about it in front of camera or in the public but you are pitching mostly mostly to men and investors usually are individuals who love pattern recognition and so if you recognize this type of startup this type of founder does well it returned my fund previously they would just look for a similar mold of that person and so because women usually are not funded and don't have like breakout success to return funds we just need to emulate some of the wordings some of the ways we talk about again like talk about ourselves.

22:47I have had feedback from investors about the way I dress. I have had feedback about the way I speak and the way I pitch, that I'm too fast, that I cram too many words in my pitch, which then means I lose clarity on the most important things. Me as a woman hearing this, I could hear it as you are discriminating me, right? You are commenting on my outfit. This is so inappropriate. But I could also see that as you're giving me constructive feedback because I want to sound precise and I want to have a clarity of thought that I can transfer to you so you can imagine my business in five years, what it would look like.

23:38and so I record all my pictures and I then go back to listen to like oh yeah I really speak so much here I really speak so quickly I think for me um it's it's gonna be a bit of a losing battle if you think about yourself as the women that were in a disadvantaged position we are in a disadvantaged position for sure like the stats tell us so but I think it's about how we get out

24:08Laura Donadio: of that cycle of thought yeah absolutely yeah so this could be controversial no I love that I would agree with you on the constructive feedback equally I think the comment about how you dress do you actually think that's relevant to how you pitch so the truth um of what I did that day was that I was in a hurry and I didn't dress very well. You know, I was probably in a hoodie and yeah, most men probably pitch in a hoodie. But because of pattern recognition, a lot of the women who went to pitch dressed themselves very well. And founders, investors just love shiny things, unfortunately. there are many more comments that are just obnoxious okay yeah good so there are obnoxious comments um and then there are some that i was like if i listen to this feedback would i benefit from it and if it serves me i'll take it yeah yeah that's how i like having that filter of why it's constructive versus what is just plain obnoxious yeah and there are a lot of them i I don't know.

25:25Laura Donadio: Is there a part of your success that didn't make you feel as happy as you would have expected it to make you feel? Probably not. I mean, it's a very low bar what I said. If I can benefit one woman, I'll keep on going. Obviously, there are days that are just terrible. Like I don't even think it's attributed to like success or not. And I think the word success is such a hard term to like even wrap your head around what does success even mean for for everyone it's different absolutely I think for me it's a very low bar um and I actually think that is gonna give me the biggest happiness um I often think you know when I first started the business I was only 26 I was quite young and so I set like huge ambitious goals like my first goal is like 1 million revenue and then my second goal is like 10 million revenue of course um and then i guess it's just you're chasing the goalpost yeah and actually the journey and i know this sounds really cliche but like actually it's the journey that matters the most and if you just keep chasing it's one is 10 is 50 is 100 and i know that there are examples of founders being able to do it in five years and i think that's amazing but i do think the story is quite detrimental to entrepreneurs because most huge businesses don't get built in five years.

26:53And those huge businesses that get built in five years usually have a really bad ending, especially for consumer brands, especially. Think about the days of Farfetch, Net-A-Porter. Like, where are they now? Do you get what I mean? Absolutely.

27:11Laura Donadio: And I think, you know, it's like it's chasing the quick revenue. I love those brands. Don't get me wrong. No, absolutely. They built empires back in the days, but then they collapsed. Exactly. And so again, going back to that success, what time horizon are you looking? What type of self-fulfillment are you looking for? I mean, it's quite philosophical, but for me, I try to set as concrete, as low bar as possible. And now for me, it's about how many times I can fail, because that means that how many times I can set out to do new things that I'm unfamiliar with I think that actually is a much better way of talking to ourselves you embody my vision of the growth collective honestly I sit here and I hear you talking I'm like this is exactly why I build the business I love it I think it's all about perspective and it's about how you frame how you look at life right there's always that thing of you know the glass half full or half empty and I really like the fact that you've decided you're going to set your bar low but that means that you constantly hit it because you can it's achievable because what's the point of having those like super big goals that then get almost like demotivating because you're not going to hit them because they're too hard or you're going to put yourself through so much stress and hardship to hit them that as you said you're not going to enjoy the best the the journey and i think this is the type of people that then look back and feel like they've missed out on life or they're not happy or you know they've ruined their personal relationships or whatever they might have happened in their lives or most of the times are not healthy in themselves either because they just sacrifice so much to just hit that number constantly over and over again so and don't get me wrong like I still probably don't have a full life um I still probably am lacking you know all the like intimate connections that I want to have with friends but I think it's constant and you cannot achieve all at once you just can't do you think there are any traits that make a founder more likely to succeed or to fail uh I think like you have to be a bit delusional yes just a bit just a bit like a bit I felt like founders are all there to create something from nothing yeah create like make the impossible possible and I think the example of Jude I believe speak to that a lot before we started there is no such a thing as a bladder supplement there's no such thing that you can even like impact your bladder health with nutrition and when we first launched our products I think there was so much skepticism and we just have to make believe with all means possible and when no one believes you then you have to be delusional to make something happen so i do think that trait is really important um i also do think you have to have like this energy of bouncing back like almost on a daily basis like you know this kind of dial you have to return every day i just felt you need to have that because it will be so difficult if you don't what's next for you next um personally i'm excited to start a family okay um balancing that it will be quite interesting i see so many amazing women doing it um and i do think there's more and more conversations about it's actually not possible to do it all um but it is possible to do some so yeah but I did like put a lot of thought and planning towards it so that is the part I'm excited about um and then international expansion so how do I do that with traveling flying don't know but we'll welcome that next chapter hopefully gorgeous I'm very excited to watch it from the sidelines we'll finish you off with a quick fire the first question is the least glamorous part of growth in one word I have like a visual in my head that I just literally went through last Tuesday I don't know how do I say it so it was racing to a warehouse at 80 miles an hour in heavy rain, pick up our samples that was lost in a random depot and load it all manually to my like tiny car, drive back to a Tesco sampling event.

31:54I don't know whether that's one word, but that is just the worst thing ever. So we lost our samples. Operational malfunctions? Operational malfunction. I guess another one is assembling a toilet myself, like a plumber, before Dragon's Den. Spent five hours assembling the toilet because that is one of our prop on Dragon's Den.

32:19Laura Donadio: I was like, why am I doing this? That's so funny. We actually, we didn't touch on Dragon's Den. You turned down three offers. Yes, I did. What was going through your head at that time? honestly I was at the back of the the stage and that was your like I don't know your your your room to think about things it was just me and the war I was so close to the wall it was just me um I just had this one thought that we can't short sell our existing investors um for me like Jude is a business of integrity and so that's why I declined the office fair enough did you ever think about it every now and then I was like oh it would be so good if Emma Greedy is like a shareholder but at the same time you don't know how much she's actually gonna help you you know yeah do you feel like there's anything around um investors that is talked about publicly but then feels very different behind closed doors yeah find investors that are like not gonna promise they're gonna add a lot of value because they never really do add a lot of value because you're the one in the driving seat and you actually want to be in the driving seed rather than your investors um they're here to challenge um they're here to give you new perspective they're not here to look over your shoulders so when investors say they're going to add a lot of value for me it's a bit of a red flag i get it yeah okay back to the quick fire if there was a decision you could go back to and do differently what would it be i would have hired differently i guess everyone said that because i made too many mistakes i think hiring when you're 26 is also very hard especially when you're building a business and navigating everything at the same time it's a lot it is um what's something your parents were unknowingly right about too many things too many things um they were like why are you raising so much money and I was like yeah why did I raise so much money I could do so much with a lot less but I guess you do have to try things out.

34:26And they also live in a very different country. They grew their business in such a different way. They bootstrapped.

34:32Laura Donadio: In a different time as well. In a different time. And everything they sell is at a profit. Whereas, you know, for direct-to-consumer businesses, they're not usually like that. I do think the economy and the conversations with investors are actually gearing more towards what my parents are saying. However, I actually did not believe this way of operating is going to give you category changes. Yeah. I think it's just the fact that you have to have investment for evidence and science and innovation. Anyone who is recycling on existing evidence being built is just going to play on the same level playing field with everyone else.

35:19Laura Donadio: So you're investing for the future? Yes, put it that way. Yes. You're investing in long-term growth is what I'm hearing. Yes. It feels very sensible to me. What is a hill that you're willing to die on? The hill I'm willing to die on?

35:39Well, I'm in women's health. I just think every woman have to pay attention to their health, have to invest in their health. There's one thing that just needs to be there, which is your vitality and your health. That's it.

35:55Laura Donadio: And that's something you can look after at any age. And you can improve. You can actually prevent. And some of them you can reverse. What is something you're still trying to prove and to whom? Trying to prove a bladder supplement actually works. So that's why we are investing in all these clinical trials. and to whom? I think for me, a doctor that recommends Jude supplements is going to win 20, 30, 40 meta ads, honestly. And so we have been presenting our published papers to Royal College of Nursing, Royal College of Ops and Gainese, and all these conferences. And we have now actually trained more than 10 ,000 healthcare professionals on like blood anatomy and jude products and so that is expensive but it I believe it's the right thing to do get long-term growth going back to what you said like did you know like doctors only get two hours of training in urinary health in med school and six hours of training in menopause that's it so I think this explains why when women have UTI and they go to their GPs, they're being met with answers that are non-answers because actually it's not, maybe it's about misogyny, but I deeply believe it's because of lack of quantity and quality of education, which we would love to be able to contribute.

37:33Anyway, yeah, that's the missing part I want to add.

37:36Laura Donadio: Last question. What is something that you believe about success that most people would disagree with? just set your goals embarrassingly low and small so you get to move and get to hit them and once you hit one you hit another one and that I think it's momentum is more important than setting these big goals obviously your big goals have to line up with these small goals right but like I've been in agony trying to hit 1 million and 10 million and there were times that I was just paralyzed with like how on earth am I gonna even hit that second goal that I set for this business when I was like 25 I think that's a fantastic piece of advice because that's really not what you usually hear and we're I feel like we're wired to go after the big numbers because that's what makes it into the press that's what makes it the you know the big shiny success stories but ultimately I think it goes back to the to the impact point that you raised earlier is impact is whatever it means to you success is whatever it means to you and you know building out your own pace building sustainable and building by investing in the future of the business I do think there's a lot of validity and I think so yeah count your failures not your success I guess it's also another one yeah we always start the episode by asking you what you're known for and then we finish it by what do you want to be known for?

39:04I want to be known for the person who have contributed into women's health evidence that's going to stay and actually make a positive change on how not just consumers, but the medical community actually talk about this topic because it is so entrenched. It's just not not just a taboo that is entrenched i think it's well oh do your pelvic floor exercises and then what beyond that what you know like of course we know we need to do our pelvic floor exercises but i'm here to be able to give more options and more valid options um yeah