Sam Stoffel and Outplayed: Betting against yourself to make millions

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0:47I'm placing a bet on something to happen and betting against the same thing to happen. If I can teach other people to do this, then surely there's got to be a business there. I was a millionaire within one year. I had to learn every element of the business. people obsess over all of this and business plans and you know financial analysis didn't have any of that didn't didn't do it just literally just jumped in just start just starting is way better than worrying about all of that and so i learned that you know it doesn't matter to what heights you climb you can still lose everything if you're not careful with managing your cash

1:28I'm Richard Harpin and this is a business leader podcast where we look at the stories and strategies behind modern businesses today my guest is Sam Stoffel the founder and former CEO of Outplayed a business in the betting space we explore how he spotted a business idea as a student grew it in his 20s and sold it for a multi-million pound sum in his 30s. What lessons can he share for other entrepreneurs?

2:00Welcome, Sam. Thank you very much. Very glad to be here. Where did it all start? The business ideas came about in uni when I was a student looking for ways to make money, as you do. And I came across this idea called match betting on the internet. And I was like, just seemed a bit complicated. And I kind of read about it and just put it off, put it off, put it off. And then eventually I finally sat down and did it. And in a nutshell, it's basically signing up to a bet thread. They're giving away a free bet. Going to another bookie, they're also giving away a free bet. And placing a bet on something to happen and betting against the same thing to happen.

2:32So you've hedged your bets, basically. So you're taking away sort of the risk. Exactly. Yeah, it's a risk-free bet. But because bookies like to give away free bets to kind of rope customers in, if you're savvy you can use those free bets do the same thing again lock in a profit and then run for the hills as well that's was anybody anybody doing that at the time yeah so there was like no one was doing it on like a big a big level there were like websites kind of set up discussing it on forums but no it it was quite a complicated process back then what no one was doing was uh monetizing it in a way of teaching other people how to do it which is something that I then kind of came into a few years later in life, which gave me the idea for the business.

3:12And so how did you go about doing that? How did you teach others to do it? And then what was the sort of the breakthrough moment of saying, I want to take the plunge? So it was about five years after I first started match betting and I'd finished uni, did a film degree, which was a complete waste of time. And couldn't get a job. And I was basically broke living on benefits. This was at Leeds Uni, I think. Yeah, so well, yeah, it did lead to uni, moved out. And yeah, so he couldn't get a job. He was literally living on benefits. And I was like, how do I make some money? And I was reading every autobiography I could get my hands on.

3:48And I was like, right, what do I know? I was like, I know matched betting. And everyone wants free money. Like, everyone wants free money. So I was like, if I can teach other people to do this, then surely there's got to be a business there. And at that time, someone had set up the very first matched betting business. But I thought they were doing a terrible job. So it kind of worked, but there was no marketing. The product was from 1990. The service was terrible. And I was like, they're making this much money. I know I can do it better. So I'm going to copy their model. I'm going to change it, make it better, make it improve.

4:21I love that word copy because we're taught at school, aren't we, that copying homework is bad. But I think in business, as you do, that copying, improving, market research, really, really important. It's so important. Isaac Newstrom said, if I've seen further, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants. Basically, every business iterates on something that came before. Every idea is copying something else and just putting a spin on it, making it a bit better. And that's all we did. And just going back to, you talked about reading every autobiography. Which was the one that you took that sort of inspiration from before you came up with that match betting idea?

5:01Richard Branson's biography was the first one. I've always been a Branson fan. and so I read his book and just I just wanted to understand how can someone go from not having money to having lots and lots of money so here's one I was a big fan of Dragon's Den and The Apprentice so again every Dragon's Den book I could get Lord Sugar's book all just all of those things just to try and get a picture of it. So you've taken the plunge you've done tell us a bit about the market research that you did. Coming from a background of not having any kind of business experience i didn't do a huge amount of market research it was more just i've seen someone else doing this they're doing apparently reasonably well i saw on companies house they had about a million quid in the bank so i was like like a bit of that yeah and so it was and because i knew the product so well i knew how to make it better and also i'd been studying marketing so i knew how to market it better and sometimes that's all you need you can have the same product or even an inferior your product.

5:57But if you can market it better than everyone else, you're going to win because no one even knows they exist. And just talk us through that sort of the first sort of year's journey. And I think this was a bootstrap business where it was your own cash. And then at what stage did you have the courage to take on your first employee? I did out of necessity because in the very early days, bearing in mind, I didn't know any of this, I had to learn how to code enough to build a website back in WordPress. I had to answer all the phones myself. I had to post the content to the website myself. So I was literally doing everything.

6:33I used to track how much time I spent. And I was doing 100 hours a week at the start just to get it running for about six months. You've got to, haven't you? And if you learn every aspect of the business yourself, it's good grounding for then growing it. I think it's really important because I talked about this the other day where a lot of people say you need to have a co-founder because you need someone technical and you need someone marketing. I didn't have that. So the only thing I could do is I had to learn every element of the business. Just not that I could go and write a whole application myself, but I can challenge a developer when he's pulling the wool over my eyes and all of that sort of stuff.

7:10But the very first hire I made, customer service agent, just so I didn't have to answer the phones anymore. Basically, I think the problem most entrepreneurs start with is they try and wear all the hats. So they're doing the marketing, they're answering the phones, they're doing the admin, they're running the operations of the business because they think they can do everything. And then eventually they realize, actually, you need to be focusing all of your efforts on getting more customers, making every customer worth more and delivering an amazing product so that they're happy and they keep coming back.

7:43That's all you should be focused on. So everything else you've got to delegate off. And were those the things that you enjoyed doing that you were good at? I am very good at marketing. I wouldn't say, so I'm quite kind of creative behind the scenes. But so marketing felt a bit alien to me to start with. But I've kind of grown to love it. Like, I feel like you can fall in love with what you do. And because it's the thing that delivers the results, it's the thing that separates a good business from a bad business. It's just naturally what I spend 99 % of my time doing. And so I do enjoy it now. So you take on this customer service person and then talk about the journey.

8:22You didn't need any cash. You were cash positive early on or how much did you need to put into the business? I probably put in about 100 quid, you know, hosting for the website. Because I did everything myself, I didn't need to hire anyone. And by the time, you know, we started getting sales, I just posted it on my Facebook. Someone signed up. It got referral. What I did do that was really helpful is we had an affiliate scheme. So anyone could sign up and refer someone else and they would get 50 % commission. But we only paid them after we got paid. And so the cash funded the acquisition afterwards, which is perfect.

8:59Did that come about by accident? No, it was very much intended. Use somebody else's cash. Exactly, yeah. I'd seen other affiliate programs and I was like, genius, I want other people to promote it. And I was very generous with it. we go 50 % away, which is a lot for an affiliate scheme. But it just attracted hundreds of affiliates to come and promote our business for us. Back to copying the affiliate model from others. Exactly, yeah. What was the sort of the breakthrough moment when you knew you'd cracked the business model and it was really working and accelerating? Probably, so our very first pass of the business, it was£27 one-off fee.

9:37And people would pay and they'd get a ridiculous amount of value for that. like they'd pay us 27 pounds and they could make five grand off the back of that and pretty quickly i realized that i just horrendously underpriced what we were doing so i was like right i'm going to change this to a subscription model just on a on a whim and i've always been very willing to just experiment and just try something different which is something we'll talk about in a minute uh and that just completely transformed the business because suddenly instead of just getting one payment people are paying every single month and just explain a bit more about how that subscription model actually worked so what people paid us and back back then it was 15 pounds a month and they would get access to all of our tutorials our software um and our forum and our support basically so just a monthly fee and then after launching that month one we did 3 000 and then you get more customers in and they stay and then it went to 10 000 and then 30 000 and then 50 000 and then there was a millionaire within one year wow and when did you when did you know that you got a retention rate that um was working that you kept a a lot of those customers it to be honest it was more just the fact that the just numbers just kept growing like again i was quite naive in the start because i was just learning as i went so i didn't have metrics about churn rate and all of the things i would have today didn't have any of that it was just we seem to be we're spending money customers are coming in and the numbers are just going up and up and up and so we just thought we'd keep people talk about the key performance indicators and having a dashboard and looking at all that sort of stuff.

11:09How far into the business were you before you sort of said, I better have all that stuff as well? Five years. Literally, people obsess over all of this and business plans and financial analysis didn't have any of that. Didn't do it. Just literally just jumped in. Just starting is way better than worrying about all of that. My step two in how to make a billionaire is get an investor. You didn't need to. I think I would struggle to have worked with an investor because I am somewhat of a control freak. I'm very clear what I think the business needs. I don't always get it right. But what I do is I experiment a lot.

11:48So there was a time a few years ago where we were kind of in a shrinking market and our revenues were dropping. And I decided I was going to launch a new product that was 10 times more expensive than our other one, completely untested as a concept. and it transformed the business and we tripled our business in one year off the back of doing that. And that is, that's the bit around the pivot, isn't it? Yeah. Knowing when to change direction and come up with something new. Exactly. But I feel like because it was just me on my own, I could experiment as much as I wanted. Whereas if you've got like VC behind you, I think there's a bit more, oh no, let's consider that.

12:27Let's analyze the risk profile. And I feel like winning in business is about being agile and quick. Yep. So you set this business up, Sam, at age 24. You're a millionaire. You've made your first million within about the first 12 months. What's happened after that? And what were the other pivotal moments on your journey? So many. Most entrepreneurs have shiny object syndrome where you've got a business. It's started to work. You're focusing on the marketing. You've grown. You're doing the right things. You think, right, I'm an entrepreneur now. I'm going to go do something else, which is what I did.

12:59Went to 2017. I'm like, right, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm going to go and open a interior design business and a mobile app company and a property renovation company and I'm going to keep running this business and I hired someone to try and run this for me and all that happened is every single business underperformed because I wasn't focusing on any one of them rather than thinking I'm going to go do this shiny thing on the other side of the grass that looks better over the hill focus 10 times more on what you're already doing like There's this idea that, oh, you can't grow anymore. Nope, your marketing is not good enough.

13:33Focus, focus, focus, focus, focus on one thing. This is the analogy of the fox and the hedgehog, isn't it? The fox is the entrepreneur always looking for the next opportunity, another idea. I was definitely like that and learned that if I'd been more hedgehog-like and learned to move in a methodical direction, put my prickles up when anybody came up with a harebrained idea, maybe home surf could have been worth double what I ended up selling it for. A hundred percent. I think most people are foxes. Even if you think of something like weight loss, it's like, okay, someone wants to lose weight and I'm going to try Weight Watchers.

14:10I'm going to try Fat Finders. I'm going to try keto or a hundred other diets rather than just focusing on eating less and moving more and just sticking with it for a long period of time. So how many years were you into your 10-year journey without played when you sort of said, I've got to stop being Fox-like and get more focused. It was just after the three other failed businesses I launched. So that would have been about 2019. I came back into Outplayed, got rid of the guy we had running it. And then I just said, right, I'm doubling down on marketing now. And quite happily, this was just before COVID.

14:48And at that time, obviously, everyone panicked a little bit. All the sports stopped stretching down. And so our competitors panicked and they cut all their spend and they didn't spend any money. And I thought, right, this is an opportunity because advertising costs are going to be the lowest they've ever been because no one's bidding. And so we went massive on Facebook ads. We went from spending about£100 a day to£5 ,000 a day on Facebook ads. But fully funded because you got the certainty of the subscription model. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And well, there's always a risk that you can spend on Facebook and not get a return if your ad's terrible.

15:22but it was so cheap at the time and I was so willing to take the risk because I saw the upside it just kept paying for itself kept paying for itself and we just kept scaling but let's go back to you said you brought somebody into run out played and you got rid of them in 2019 how long had you um had they been running the business for and how did you know that they um uh they weren't the right person they were in there for about two years whilst I was focusing on these other ventures, there was some stuff they did well. So they were hired to grow the business. And so I knew the reason they weren't the right person is they didn't grow the business.

15:58What they did do is keep it at the same, despite the business declining in revenue, they kept the profitability the same during that time window. So in effect, they kept it lean. But what I wanted was someone that was going to grow it. And I realized that no one is going to care about your business as much as you do. So there's no real replacement for you as the CEO and founder. And how long had you known that they weren't going to achieve that growth that you wanted and thinking, what am I going to do about it? Am I going to keep them there? Or am I going to get rid of them? And how did you have that tough conversation?

16:33I think it was, you probably start having the thoughts, it was probably about a year before I actually got rid of them. It was like, there was the moment it's like, oh, why have you not done this? Why has this not happened? And You start getting more and more involved and there reaches a point where you're just like, I have to step back into this business. So you're sort of managing their to-do list and telling them what to do. And then it's like, why are you here? And so there comes a point where out of necessity, you have to step back in to rescue your baby. And you look back and say, oh, I was a bit hasty there and only waiting a year before I got rid of them.

17:07Or look back and actually, why didn't I get rid of them quicker and have that courage to do it? Hire slowly, fire quickly. That's what I very much live by. If someone isn't performing, it's kind of, you owe it to them to A, tell them quickly they're not performing. And B, if you know it's not going to work, you're kind of doing them a favour by getting rid of them quickly because this isn't the right place for them. They're going to be better off somewhere else. You're going to be better off. There's just no point dragging it out for longer and longer. So you're taking the business back. You were back in control.

17:37Tell us what to happen now. And you were sort of halfway through your 10-year journey by this point. Yeah, I just, I literally started focusing very exclusively on marketing more. And also, one thing that I'd been guilty of before is stressing and worrying about what the competition we're doing. Oh, these guys are this price, we can't be more expensive. They've got this software, we need that software. And then we did a survey and I discovered that 3 % of our customers even knew they existed. So 97 % had no idea there was any competition. So I was like, why am I worrying about this. Instead, we're going to make our prices more expensive because I think we're worth it and we're the best in the market.

18:16I'm going to develop new software. I'm going to charge extra for stuff that they wouldn't charge extra for so that I can deliver a better experience and I can deliver better products. Pricing takes real courage, doesn't it? I would say most entrepreneurs are afraid about putting up their price. And what was it that sort of gave you that courage to charge more? I just thought, again, it's this experimentation mentality. I would rather experiment and try it and if it's wrong i can roll it back it's fine but if you don't try you'll never know you did some a b testing of so so we we split test half of our signups were offered a price of 49.99 instead of 29.99 and so and there was no zero difference in conversion rate wow so i was like obviously we should be charging 49.99 and we just kept experimenting with things like that over time and had we not done that the business would never have been worth anywhere near what it was worth when I sold it.

19:09How many people had you brought into the business by this time? Well, employees? Yes. We had at our peak about 50 employees at the peak. And then it was in around 2023, we had quite a bad year and we had to cut it down to about 35, I think. And was that difficult? Because I think businesses do go through a difficult time, don't they? How did you know that you got to sort of scale back and then move forward? I hate this because it was so foolish. But basically, it's 2022. And I'd never really liked the name Profit Accumulator. I thought it sounded a bit scammy. And so someone else came into the business and came up with the idea of rebranding it to Outplayed.

19:52So Outplayed, that's quite a cool name. Outplayed the bookies. The problem is when we did that rebrand, we disappeared off Google overnight. Because all of our domain authority just vanished. And at first, it wasn't that immediate. but what happened is because people weren't discovering us each month we were acquiring fewer and fewer customers and as people were churning off their subscriptions our membership numbers were just kind of dwindling and it got to about March and our CFO said you're going to run out of money in six months and all of my personal money was tied up in properties so I could I could you can't pay your staff with bricks and mortar and so I got to a point where I'm like oh my god I could lose the whole company because I can't pay the staff because I can't get the money out in time.

20:39And so I learned that it doesn't matter to what heights you climb, you can still lose everything if you're not careful with managing your cash. And be careful about a brand. Do you look back and say, well, maybe we should have just kept the profit accumulator brand and we didn't need to move to a new cleverer name? Again, shiny object syndrome. It was working fine. the upside did not remotely come close to the downside. We shouldn't have done it. I would never encourage someone to rebrand. Is that sort of evolution but not revolution? Yes. Don't do anything that's going to be two steps removed and changing the brand and the online model that you'd got.

21:21Yeah, it's like what was the real upside? There wasn't really, other than I liked the name better. That's not a good enough reason. I learn a lot more from my mistakes than I did my successes. What do you think, looking back, have been your biggest mistakes other than brands, Sam? Of course, a few. All things that we learn from. So in the time when I started those three other companies, one of them was a mobile app company. And I really wanted to make a game because I used to be a gamer. and we partnered with this YouTuber, massive kids YouTuber, millions and millions of followers. If she goes into a shopping centre, they have to close the shopping centre down for her.

22:00That famous. I said, right, we do a game about her. She'll promote it to her audience. Guaranteed success. And we made it. So I built this company, hired some developers, built a game, quite a good game. And she promoted it on her channel and loads of people downloaded it. We got to number one on the App Store. I was really proud. And it was free to play, but you could buy things in-app purchases. In-game upgrades. age i think extra lives and stuff yeah and people were playing but no one was was buying anything and i was like what's going on why not and then i realized that her entire audience are nine-year-old children and they don't have credit cards so uh so that was the that was the end of that that was the end of that because i was like we'd lost half a million quid and this was just never going to pay for itself so uh lesson learned is know who your target customer is and make sure they can afford what you're selling.

22:49How much of all of this is about the characteristics of the founder entrepreneur, hone your character, as I would call it? The CEO really determines everything about the culture of the business. I have been bought into, let's say, rescue another business where the CEO just had completely the wrong culture. It was all very kind of aloof, not in the weeds, not in the detail. This person doesn't know what that person's doing. I think if you've got a CEO who is in the weeds, in the detail, as I would be in any business, they will run circles around anyone else. So in my business, I knew every day how much cash was in the bank, how much we'd taken, what marketing we're doing, what IT was working on.

23:31I had teams of people managing this, but I listened to everything and I was aware of everything. You could ask me any question about any part of my business and I'd know. And I think that's true of any good CEO. Whereas those that kind of just say, oh no, no, I've got a team for that. They don't know what's going on in their business and stuff can come up and bite them and their staff are probably unhappy. Yeah, it's getting the balance, isn't it, between getting into the detail when you have to, but equally that delegation of responsibility and a bit of autonomy. How did you manage to get the balance and did you get the right balance?

24:06There's that Russian proverb, trust but verify. It's like, yes, have a good team, have a delegate, have a team, but just listen in every now and then. Just challenge people. Make sure that you know what's going on. Just keep informed, basically. And I think a big red flag for me, and it was the same with this company I went into, you'd have a meeting and they'd be so focused on trying to paint everything as really rosy. Like, oh, this, we did really well here, did really well here. Oh, great, but your numbers are down 50%. I'm not an idiot. So, you know, tell me the unvarnished truth as quickly as possible and let's fix the problem instead of worrying about covering yourself and making things look better than they are.

24:47What other traits have you got, Sam, that have made you successful and your business? Over the top focus to the point of, or obsession is probably a better word than focus, over the top obsession. So if I am on holiday with my family, by hour six, I'm thinking I need to get back to work. Like, you know, I enjoy watching a Netflix show. I enjoy sitting on a sun lounger, But there is a voice in my head. It's like, you're wasting your time. Get back to work. And so that's a really powerful thing to have because it's this kind of almost delusional belief that you're meant to be doing something more important than yourself.

25:28But also, it's, you know, it makes it very difficult to relax. I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with that, don't they? Getting the balance between work and family and home and advice that you give others. I think it's much easier to build a business when you haven't got a family. So the first time around, I didn't have a family. And so I could just work 100 hours a week. Now I've got two lovely boys. And it's much harder because, you know, I still work from home. I hear them in the hallway and And they're laughing and I want to go and spend time with them and see them. So it is harder to build a business when you've got a family.

26:03You've just got to figure out what stage you are in your life. I saw a great quote from Mr. Wonderful, the guy from Shark Tank. And he was saying he was giving a lecture and a guy came up to him after the lecture and was like, I've got a really successful startup. But my fiance is telling me that I need to stop working so much. And Mr. Wonderful said, OK, which one's easier to replace your fiance or your business? so it's like brutal but it's true like you have to be committed and devoted to your business at the you know your first business completely above everything else so and outplayed was your first really successful business and in 2024 you achieved an exit just tell us a little bit about What sort of, did you plan that?

26:51And how did the exit come about? So it was about 2023. So it started in 23 when we were having this really bad period because I was thinking we're going to run out of cash. And so I approached our main competitor and suggested a merger. And, you know, we had those conversations for about six months, did all the DD. And I didn't like their management team. And because I'm quite a control freak, I knew that I wasn't going to thrive in an environment where I had to get consent from shareholders and all this other stuff. And so I was like, actually, I don't want to merge. And then I've waited a few months and then Labour came into power.

27:31And it was obviously widely speculated capital gains tax was going to go up at the end of October. So I just went to my competitor and I said, look, I'm in no rush to sell. Business is doing great, cash flow positive. I'm happy to just sit here and run it forever. I know you want to buy it. If you want to buy it, this is my price until the date of this tax budget. Because if capital gains goes up, my price goes up. And so that was great because it created this deadline of, if you want to buy it, you've got till then. And so there was a sense of urgency. And that is the main factor in why I sold.

28:04Had that not been a factor, had they not wanted to buy it, I was perfectly happy to walk away and just keep running it for cash. Really, the only reason I sold was because I had another business idea that I wanted to be singularly focused on, not getting distracted. Because you'd learned that now, hadn't you? Let's sell that off and then really focus on the next business. 100%. One of the questions that gets asked is, did you have an advisor helping on the sale process? No, I really should have. A friend of mine, a guy that sold a company called HiFX was saying, get a PwC to come and advise you.

28:42But I didn't feel like I needed to. I'd had a few conversations about the potential value. I think I achieved a better price perhaps than I could have, than I should have. So I was very happy with what I got. And I was in a quite leveraged position. Yeah, and a successful exit. £10 million I think you got for the business. so um great what was your what was your feeling after you got your that money in your bank account and you talked about sort of your next business idea but what was what were your emotions there there is an initial you know there's there's a 15 minute honestly there's like a 15 minute period of ah cool that's a lot of money but that rapidly changes to okay what's the next thing what's the next goal.

29:30And I think every entrepreneur is like that. It's, okay, I've achieved this. Now, how do I move on to the next goal? But did you pay off your mortgage? Did you go and buy a nice car? No. We'd built our own home from scratch before that. We already had our dream home. I already had a car that I loved. The first thing I did was think, right, I've got this much money sat in one bank account. How do I split it up so that it's covered by financial protection? How do I get it quickly put into stocks and stuff. And I was limited by this 50 grand a day transfer limit. So it took nearly a month to move it all where I wanted to.

30:08So it's just, yeah, get it invested and get it working for me as quickly as possible.

30:15And then your next successful business is Subspot. It's a platform to enable anyone who wants to start a recurring revenue business. If you are a personal trainer, a monthly subscription box, anything where you bill your clients every month will host your website. You can manage your customers, manage your orders, see all your analytics all in one place. Reason for that is me running Outplay for 10 years, getting frustrated because I have to connect Mixpanel or Kissmetrics to tell me what return on ad spend I'm getting from my marketing spend or a platform over here, PayPal or Stripe telling me that I've actually made this much and none of the data correlates.

30:52None of it talks to each other. So you don't actually understand if you're making a positive return. Whereas if you have it all in one place, you've got one trusted source of truth. And that really allows you to grow your company much faster. We both have a shared passion for subscription businesses. That was a whole basis of home serve and getting to nearly 9 million members across 10 countries. Talk about where you've got the new business to. It's early days still. So I've got a developer, CTO, who owns 10 % of the business. He's been working on it behind the scenes quietly. I'm very good at making it great for the customer to use.

31:26So I don't get involved in the kind of behind the scenes technical, but I'm like, this should work like this. This is how it's going to be for the customer. He's going away, making it beautiful. You talked about giving away 10 % of the company already. What was the thinking that went through your mind there? And how important is it to give some equity to great people that you're bringing into a business? Yeah. I mean, this is a guy who I've worked with as a developer for 10 years. I I know he's extremely good at what he does. He buys into the vision. He lives near to me as well, which is helpful.

31:59And you've got to incentivise great people. You'll find a really talented A player very, very rarely. And when you find them, you need to hold on to them with everything you've got. So it was important to me, I incentivise him. And he's basically building the whole product. So I think it was well justified. And what's the ambition here, Sam? subspot could it be a the first exit was 10 million yeah could this be the um the billion pound exit that that is very much the objective yeah i want to be a billionaire and i'm sure that target will keep going up but i see this the reason i sold out played is you know great business really great but i felt like there's a there's a ceiling there that's never going to be a billion pound business this can be because there's so many in every business every recurring business can use this platform and it's infinitely scalable.

32:46And so where I am currently bootstrapping it and I fully bootstrapped the last business, this is one where I may take investment purely so that I can do things faster, scale more quickly and also use it as a benchmark for we did our series A at this and now we're here. So this should be the value today just so that we can go on that much larger trajectory. And have you written a business plan for this new business or you still don't believe in business plans? and have you set those that sort of big hairy audacious goal uh i i haven't written a business plan because i still don't believe in business plans i've done a deck and i've written down the kind of culture of what we're trying to achieve and how we're going to try to achieve it and the big hairy audacious goal but i believe that anything that's more than kind of three months in the future is kind of a bit woolly because you don't know what's going to happen especially in this early stage we might get customers in and they might say we hate this change this and you You know, much like in Outplayed, what I thought was going to be our business model ended up being a completely different model.

33:49And then we changed it again 10 years later. I'm a great believer in second and third time entrepreneurs. Looking back at the first business, what are you going to do differently? What have you learned that you then apply to Subspot? Delegating much earlier is what I'm already doing, even with the content team I've got now. is where before I had this very wrong belief that only I could do certain things. I'll give you an example. We had a marketing blog on Outplayed where we used to try and get organic customers. And I used to write the articles and it was so time consuming. And I hired someone else to do it and I taught her how to do it and she wrote it and it was terrible.

34:28And I was like, I'm just going to give up. Only I can do this. But then I thought, okay, no, I'm going to take the time to do it properly. And I painstakingly wrote down a full SOP exactly how it should be written, what tone of voice to use, how to structure it, what topics. And then I recorded a Loom video of me writing a blog and explaining why I did it and why I didn't do it. And I gave it to her. All of a sudden, she could do it. And so the lesson I learned there is it wasn't that people couldn't do it, it's that I hadn't taken the time to properly educate them on how I wanted it done. So that was my fault.

35:00And in your first business, you'd say, well, I can't do that because I'm in such a hurry to do all these things that you don't have time to properly train people. It's fair, but it's also, it's kind of a misnomer because you feel like, yes, I could do it faster myself, but take a bit longer to train it up this time and then you never need to do it again. And after that, I never had to touch the blog again. So this time, day one, someone comes in, I'm going to allocate a week to training them and I hope they're going to be with me for the next six, seven years. It's pretty tough economic conditions out there.

35:32And you're setting up this new business you put some money into it you're still bootstrapping it what's your what's your view on um setting up new businesses in such a difficult environment i think it's like really important that we're the entrepreneurs are continuing to set up businesses in these difficult times one difficult times often leads to the biggest opportunities because everyone else is running scared number two is i feel like in the uk in particular there is not enough encouragement towards creating businesses. Certainly in schools, we're not taught really at all about business and being an entrepreneur and you don't have to go to uni and get a degree and go and work for someone else your whole life.

36:16You can start a business. And that really bothers me because I hated school. So I would love to try and encourage more people to be entrepreneurs and start their own business and just take a risk. Take a risk. Just like you say you're taught in school not to copy, you should copy everything. You shouldn't take risks. You should take risks. And I'm not talking about gambling your life savings on a roulette wheel, but take a calculated risk with a big potential upside. I really agree that young enterprise and helping school kids to think about a career in being an entrepreneur, really, really important.

36:50I read some stats that 60 % of school kids would like to set up their own business. only 16 % do it. What could we be doing? There should be a module or a syllabus in school that explains, just even just explains how the world works. Like if you have a job, you are working for someone else's business. Everything you can do is a business that someone else set up and you can do a business in literally anything. As long as you're willing to commit to it and you can learn from and copy other people and put your own spin on it. I feel like if that was just a syllabus in school and just more actively taught rather than the kind of presumption that you're going to go to uni would make a world of difference.

37:32You had six steps to a 10 million pound business, which is the one that we haven't talked about that other entrepreneurs could learn from. In the early days, the biggest advice I could give to a new entrepreneur would be know what problem you're solving and who you're solving it for and make sure it's a real problem that are willing to pay for. So when I talk about that, I mean like you watch Dragon's Den and someone comes on and they've got an idea for something that chops vegetables faster for you or a cool little gadget and they look at it and say, oh, that is cool. But would you actually go out and buy it and replace all your knives with it?

38:10Probably not. It's back to that finding the consumer or business demand, isn't it? Doing the research, making sure that it's something that they prepared to pay for that satisfied a real consumer need. Yeah, it's got to solve a painful problem. And you've got to know who you're solving it for. And this is actually a mistake I made with our business. So in early days, fundamentally what we did, we helped people make money. And so our messaging was make money online. But it's very generic. It kind of worked, but it's very generic. And many years later, I realized that our best customers were people that already liked to place bets.

38:47They wanted to beat the bookies. And so we had some customers that were pensioners and single mums and you know, all of this, the students and all of this. When we honed our marketing down onto beating the bookies and winning at betting, again, our conversion rates went up massively and our customers were way more profitable and they would pay more because you're speaking directly to their needs instead of trying to appeal to everyone. It's much better to be as direct as possible so you know who you're talking to.

39:16You've been listening to me, Richard Harpin, speaking to Sam Stoffel for the Business Leader podcast. Please do rate and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. We do two episodes every week. And if you visit our Business Leader website, you can sign up to our weekly newsletter to get more content like this and to find out opportunities for your business.

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