I Thought My Time Had Gone... Then We Built One of the UK’s Fastest-Growing Brands

21:00So that was like the first pass. And then the second pass, I was kind of writing out. I mean, I looked at even restaurants. I was like, could I do food change? That's really hard work. I'm a bit lazy. So I was like, not going to be able to be a bit lazy on that one. And my dad actually tried to open three restaurants and failed at them successfully. So I was kind of like, I don't think I can do that. And then it started focusing on products. And then I pulled out and was like, I do have experience from fast-moving consumer goods. you know marketing and finance kind of blends itself to that so i started looking at consumer good products and then i i love designed products i'm a huge apple fanboy and uh so i knew those were the spaces i was going into to be honest originally i was thinking create a good product sell on amazon and don't hire a huge team and as i started refining the toothbrush idea i was like there was no way for me to not create a team and a brand around this product because i wouldn't give the fuel that it needed to grow.

21:59How big is the team now? 50 people.

22:02Alex Chisnall:Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I remember interviewing Julian Hearn from Huel back in the early days. And he'd come from where I live in Bournemouth and he just sold his business, started Huel. And he was like, I started it because I just wanted a lifestyle business. I didn't want to employ anyone. And he goes, year one, 750 grand. Year two, 5 million. Year three, 20 million. And it was just like that before you I've got a team of 50, basically, you know, when I went to visit them in their HQ. And now was it exit for a billion euros, right? Yeah, wow. I generally didn't want to hire people, even when we took funding.

22:37And it's a similar story. I thought we could do it at 20 people. And then somewhere along the lines, you're like, why are we not doing this fast enough? So I was like, oh, okay, yeah. Forget that. Let's hire people. We'll move faster.

22:50Alex Chisnall:and when you decided on toothbrush category um and i know that could be um one product of many right within within a category um was there like a hit list of you know top 10 the top five top three i think i had a whole bunch of ideas and i really settled on the toothbrush one because i kept on looking at every day being like oh i'm not happy with this it could be better and then my wife bought a toothbrush and I was like oh that's terrible and so I kept on fixating I was like I know there's something here and then I got the share data and I'd love to say they were so bullish they were like let's do it but I was like I was taking a bit back I was like are we ever actually going to be able to break through this market like because in that 25 there's a concentration of many brands that never break out uh and so to the hat so I'd written this 30 page business plan of like how we were going to go after it but I knew something was really missing and the reality was I wasn't talking to enough people because it was COVID.

23:46So we did a lot of consumer surveys. We used SurveyMonkey. 100 bucks to get 200 responses. And they're fast. Like one hour. I don't know how they get them so fast. But people were giving real responses like, shit idea, mate. And I was like, why? Oh, that's why you think it's shit. Okay, good to know. But you want to get that feedback because your friends and family will always say, great idea, go for it. You're going to be great. I've got so much faith in you. And you're not getting the real insights. And so you want somebody to tell you, like quickly like yes no don't like it this is why uh and to get those insights and what was interesting we also we also matched it with some qualitative interviews i think there was a point where we were in a we work and mark was going up to people randomly in the bathroom to ask them about whether or not they brush their teeth if they were brushing in the bathroom um covid was being relaxed then so it wasn't amazing but one of the things we found was that there were people i mean i'm not going to name brands but they were investing meaningfully in the category i paid 100 pounds for my toothbrush okay how often use it twice a day oh wow okay so strong attachment to this product and do you travel with it never travel with it's too clunky the battery doesn't last more than seven days and i take a manual brush when i travel okay so there's an insight would you like a toothbrush you could travel with when you want to yes okay but you would like a longer battery life yes do you use the features it comes with uh it's got seven modes i think i use one okay and um the app oh i never used blue to that there always is one person who did use it and so you've got to learn where you choose but then the one that got me was people would say and ask them okay so what's the name of the brand and this happened so much that we were like there is an opportunity here and people go oh it's the one that does this or it does this i was like you're telling me that what it does but what's the name of the brand yeah and it's almost like what car do you drive i drive a kia no it's a volvo i don't know really i just paid a few grand for it you know and so exactly which tells you there's a strong affinity to the product but it's it's a familiarity affinity it's not actually like my dentist told me to get i don't really know what it is but you use it so much that it's a bit of a concern like you know if you have a iphone or an android phone or a pixel whatever because you use it so much but if you don't know the name of what you're using there is no love there and so we thought there was an angle could we create a products that based on what they are telling us of the features they would like would drive some attachment of love or enjoyment of the product so design as an enjoyment factor not just the way it looks and i guess the silver lining is uh recently we took all of our trust pilot reviews put them into an ai feed and said tell us the sentiment words you know keywords the number one word love um which i mean how many people love brushing their teeth no i didn't right so So I think we did something good there.

26:27So like coming back, like that's probably like one of the things that I'm really excited about.

26:30Alex Chisnall:Do you have a design? Do you have a toothbrush with you? Oh, I do actually. Yeah. Just whilst you're on camera and you're talking about for those who are watching. This is our new Canyon Sunrise toothbrush. Plugging ourselves. I'll just open it. So yeah, we spend a lot of time on the packaging. We obsess over it. But that's a good thing, right? We want it to be different in the experience. The way it opens and drops. So this is our Suri Pro toothbrush S2. And it comes with a travel case, very slim, and a matte aluminum body. It doesn't make a lot of noise. That was one of the things we actually did focus on.

27:12And then just on the brush, like small things, like this has a stainless steel plate because people were telling us that it got grimy and gross. I don't know what you call it, but gross. And then the head is plant-based. we want to use alternative materials so it's made out of cornstarch uh the bristles are made from castor oil so 100 plant-based derived nylon so not petroleum-based that was something that's part of our sustainability we don't and i think this is important nuance because whenever you say sustainable people are like greenwashing you've got a battery in there and i'm like we're not the most sustainable device that would be a wooden toothbrush but for us it's about making a product that people want but without compromising as much on it so we want to maximize the boundaries in terms of sustainability can we use alternative materials we have a free recycling program so in the u.s you can you get a prepaid pouch in the uk as well and anywhere in the uk you can put on an envelope free post suri just those two words and it'll come back to us for free and you put in any box in the royal mail and it'll come right back to us because i i'm sure mark said this to

28:11Alex Chisnall:me like when i interviewed him a couple years ago but saying that something like um every toothbrush you've ever had since you were born would still be in existence basically yeah that's what got us So like more for us, I can't speak for other people. Like there's certain ways you can find out to recycle them with companies like TerraCycle. But we found that every toothbrush we ever own still exists because they're not recyclable. Like people, and in our interviews, we found people were putting them in the recycling bin and being like, well, it's plastic, right? Wish cycling. And we talked to recycling centers and they're like, yeah, this is made with three different types of plastic.

28:45You've got silicone here and like, there's no way we can separate it. That would cost three pounds right there. So we just been that. and not even like upcycling. And so we've actually now collected over two tons of heads. And our first product we've started to make, circular products, is a soap dish. Made 100 % out of our heads. 18 heads. Yeah, so not mixed with anything else. So that's our goal to keep making. I don't know if you want to hold it.

29:10Alex Chisnall:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just wanted to feel the way. My girls, you said like the travel angles, both my daughters took that. They came back last night from New Yorker and they took theirs with them. Yeah. It's got a UV cleaning case. And then this is our mirror mount. This is probably one of our favorite features. I like the weightage. I always have a thing with that. That's where the dynamics of design sustainability play because you want it to be as light as possible for shipping. Yeah. But then also like your designs like it needs to feel like meaningful. Yeah. How many colors do you have again now?

29:42Alex Chisnall:I remember I got mine at Christmas and I was looking and you were like sold out. This is our new color. Okay. So this is Canyon Sunrise. So we launched it a few months ago in February. We have six now. We've got black. They're not actually called black. So I still call it. We've got really fancy midnight black. Morning Waves is our blue one. But we've got blue, pink, black, green, just to make it easy for everybody. Do you ever have any challenges with supply, distribution, all that kind of stuff? Never. I mean, we are perfect. No, I'm kidding. I mean, hardware is hard. Let me just start there.

30:18I mean, the problem with only having like, we have one core product and we have a toothpaste is that you can't afford to go out of stock. Because that doesn't mean that you sell something else. Like if you are maybe a beauty brand with like 10 different SKUs, you can sell the cleanser instead of the, I don't know, the super cleanser. No product, no sales. It's like no sales, no money, no business, no cash flow. Like it hits you very hard. So like being in stock is really important. And tariffs is something that we anticipated already as coming. And so we've tried to navigate it before. We're fortunate that we're not, our price point is more mass premium.

30:59So we could afford to not raise prices for consumers. But it's always something that we're trying to navigate. And just ensure that we're as accessible as possible. We're on sale. Every now and then we have new products coming out to help with that.

31:14Alex Chisnall:I was going to say, how long into the journey did you then start looking at new product development? Day one. Our second hire was an industrial designer. So he was like, my favorite conversation with him, his name is Dylan Feldman. He's a great guy. He's in New York now. He did his time with us, but he went to California back for the sunshine. Don't blame him. But I remember asking him, I was like, Dylan, we need your help on design. like other stuff beyond product design. Do you think you could do a banner and like put some graphics on it and text? And he's like, you mean like a web banner? And I was like, yeah, do you think you could do that for us too?

31:53Because you're gonna have to do other stuff. Like you can't just do product design. He's like, yeah. He's like, do you know how I do my renders? And I was like, yeah, they're beautiful. He's like, yeah, first I sketch them by hand. Then I draw them out the lines with a computer. Then I add shading and lighting and color textures and patterns. And he's like, but if you want a flat banner, I can do that very easily.

32:10Alex Chisnall:And I was like, well, I guess you can do that. I just found it was a lot more easier. Of course, now, I mean, our brand's evolved quite a fair bit. And so Kate, who runs our creative, has transformed it. And people are always like, your brand looks so beautiful. I'm like, that's not anything I did. That's just a great... I wasn't sure if it was. That's why I asked the question. Because it is like the design aesthetic is amazing. Love it. Yeah. The one thing I would say, and this is just to anybody looking to start a business. I used to index. I started a business. I was like, why don't we look like ESOP?

32:41You know, the reality is like, you need to start somewhere. And the best advice I got was a lady who was working at a creative agency called Landor. And she's like, Geeve, you don't have to be perfect. You just have to be good enough that you're happy with it. And then you will evolve it 10 times in the next year. And just look at Airbnb. They started out with a logo that had clouds on it. You know, clearly it was floating in the sky. And they've evolved it over time. Like branding and identity will evolve if the product has value and the branding is relatively okay. Like, and it can then evolve to much better.

33:11and so if you scroll down in our instagram feed we still leave our early images that look like we shot it with our iphones and like there's not a lot because i think that's that's part of the journey right like we started there and we just kept on evolving it as we people were willing to work with us kate joined us and was like i will transform this watch and she did it's that thing

33:29Alex Chisnall:isn't it and i hear it a lot chatting to people um and it is that that moment of just starting as he's saying, you know, get perfect later, right? You know, and does perfect exist? No, it doesn't anyway. But you're striving to get as close to it as possible, right? But no one's there at the start for whatever they're launching, right? It's so important at that moment, like the arguments you will have over logos and brandings and colors. Obviously, it's important, but you need to also recognize that it's going to change. Like the logo we chose was not the logo I wanted. It was the logo Mark wanted, but we were very democratic.

34:01We put it to a survey. And the thing was the logo So I wanted it was a bit more stylistic. But what got me was people in the comments were like, is it saying this or I can't read it? And I was like, oh, legibility is an issue. And that's an issue for a logo. So, but now I've fallen over their logos. I'm happy with it now. Interesting.

34:18Alex Chisnall:It's funny because I was at Virgin Startup for a number of years after Virgin Atlantic. And there was so many people who would, you know, pitch their business. And they hadn't asked anyone except like six family and friends or something. You're like, you need to go away. come back in you know 30 days 60 90 days whatever but you need to get people who have no affinity to you guys to feedback and not be afraid of what they're gonna say you know don't let that turn you off i mean starting a company there is like massive you're constantly failing right and so like the faster you can get any insights on like a potential fail and to pivot before it happens the better and so that feedback is is essentially those pitfalls like i thought it was a great idea And it worked and the investors did too, but oh no, you know, turns out people don't want this hair comb.

35:08I don't know.

35:09Alex Chisnall:What do you think that you and Mark saw that like no one else in the industry saw then? I didn't think it was one thing per se. Like I would say there's quite a few, like one, we knew that we could make toothbrushes that look nicer. Like people were caring more about their bathroom, the way it looked, like buying. And that's such a simple thing, right? We thought we could make toothbrushes look nicer. Just starting with that, right? Yeah. But as a founder, you take feedback very seriously when you get early on. And so maybe one early investor who didn't invest in was like, people don't care about design that much.

35:40You've got to clean teeth. Oh, yes, performance needs to be there. Because it is part of the category. Ultimately, if you don't clean teeth, then the product's not delivering on the commitment. It is a toothbrush. If it's a great looking thing that doesn't really clean your teeth, then it isn't delivering on its commitment. So we are, and for that reason, our brushes are clinically tested in the US, a leading independent lab that tests all the other major brands. And we've got flying colors as results. But that is a really important thing. So we knew we had to index that. And so we developed a lot of the technology.

36:12How can we make a slim yet powerful brush? And then sustainability, we woke up one morning. We're like, wow, they're not recyclable. Shouldn't we, if we're going to make something new, and I think we attribute it as sort of cliches it sounds when you have a young child that's born, something clicks especially two girls as you have also like you're like you realize it's not about you it's about them and obviously like success everybody wants to be successful and have some form of material success or something I mean not everybody right like not Tibetan monks I'm constantly watching a lot of content from them like how do you separate sort of like happiness from peace but there you realize that it's not about you it's what you do there's a bit of legacy and so we need purpose we need a stronger purpose angle We need different materials.

36:59Let's explore this. And sometimes you'll be met with no's. And once I was like, I really want to use better materials. Materials are more sustainable in the sense that we can recycle them. They're not petroleum-based. What I viewed as more sustainable. That was kind of, we latched onto it. And then that's what we wanted to make. Although many people told us it wasn't possible. We managed to do it.

37:23Alex Chisnall:and did people think you were crazy to try and disrupt that industry yes and so uh a lot of people and we were nervous too right and so you start out and we we raised we're raising half a million investment funds in our first pre-seed pre-product and you were still working no i'd stopped by then like mark stopped too we were fully on the business trying to close we had a So we raised an early sort of pre-round going into the round. So an ASA. Mark joined around that time as we raised that amount. And I think, you know, we were getting tons of signals. You know, like people were saying, nobody cares about sustainability.

38:06Design can't drive anything. And so you, as a founder, as a saying, you index really hard on what people think. And the reason why you do is that, and you also, as you progress, you realize when people told you the wrong information and you did it. And you realize when people told you the right information, you did it. And so you really index on those things. I still remember vividly the conversations. And one of my best conversations was an investor who didn't invest in us. He was from Germany. And I asked him, what do you think of the concept? Like, what do you think? What do you like the design?

38:36What do you think? And he's like, what do you care what I think? And I was like, I'm sorry, you're a successful investor. You've got a portfolio. He's like, oh yeah, well, I can tell you my feedback, but that's just going to send you down a rabbit hole and you're going to focus on it. And like, maybe what I might suggest, you need this and then you'll focus on that. And he's like, I don't know anything. I might not even be your target customer. The best thing you can do is talk to people, which is when we started reading and find out what they think. Because if they're willing to buy your product and give you their share of wallet, you must be doing something well.

39:06And if they're not, you need to go back and figure out what's not working. And so from that point on, I was like, oh, really great, great feedback. and we've got great investors today. So Salica Investments came on early on, formerly called Hambro Perks and they helped us with our pre-seed round pre-product and have backed us since and then we have Jam Jar now.

39:29Alex Chisnall:And where did the first customers come from then? You've done all these surveys. Had you a, you know, it's Daniel Prec, was there a waiting list of people ready to buy? We did. We had a pre-sale and so I was trying to de-risk everything in the beginning so I was like need a strong acquisition funnel need to hear referral marketing is where it's at Monzo did great with it we need to do this like how are we going to get customers quick and on the cost of the product without having to spend a lot of money and I was starting with setting up all these funnels and all these reward schemes and everything and I met a growth guy at Meta and early on he was like yeah that's great you might get a couple hundred sales from that but you're going to need ads And I was like, what do you mean?

40:10He's like, well, that will take you only so far and it probably won't take you that far. You'll spend a lot of time doing that. He's like, I recommend you get your ads in line too because that's probably what's going to grow your company. And I was like, when he said that, I kind of, I was like, oh yeah. And we were going to do a Kickstarter at the time and then it clicked. I was like, I just need to focus on building the company, not like the side projects to get you to the fine thing. So we did a lot of landing pages early on and testing with people signing up to email for a wait list that then we converted to pre-sales.

40:37but the messaging was constantly changing so you know is it a toothbrush with free recycling for its heads is it a slim powerful toothbrush that also has that how do we do the hierarchy and that helped us a lot because you're able to see the clicks around what ads are performing better exactly and then we went merely into pre-sale uh and we sold uh 5 000 brushes in about a couple weeks and it was all at the same time we had taken funding and we're like we need to get this right

41:03Alex Chisnall:How much harder has it been versus your expectations to start with? Can you even remember what your expectations were at the very start? I can. Generally, it's really hard in the beginning because you are building a raft while you're swimming in the ocean. And you've got to tell yourself it's going to be a boat. And you just got to keep going. Or another way of saying it is like eating an elephant. You need to start with the toes and I kind of figured out I've never my wife's vegetarian bad example scratch that but but anyway uh the point like there's so much to do it's a wave and you have to just sort of be okay with that like i don't know i mean i'm gonna have a product team one day i i have a general marketer that's it you know so you've got to kind of put that up and then be willing to start with the fundamentals and find out what is what are those fundamentals and build it as you go and then scale it that way but it's super volatile and you have to get comfortable with it from the outside looking in and i guess maybe a year or so out from from interviewing mark it seems that suri exploded very quickly from the outside looking internally what does that feel like from your point of view uh so you interviewed mark about a year ago right and i i think um uh we've had great growth we continue to have growth uh you can chat about like our years but there's a there was a point where we went uh from about 15 people to 35 people.

42:26And I think that sort of scale jump there, 15 is manageable. You can still have like meetings with everybody in the room. There is a lot of things that change and break. And so when you double in size, processes break. I mean, you realize you actually didn't really have good processes. So you have to build some of those processes. Processes hurt speed, but like no processes hurt everything. So we needed to build some processes. A lot of things change. and it's painful, right? Like when things aren't working, you're getting feedback from the team.

42:57Alex Chisnall:This isn't working. This isn't working. This isn't working. And so you need to do that. And then at the same time, you're like, let's launch products. And so other things will break, you know? And so you're having to hold the walls up as you sort of, you know, build a bigger house. And then you've got to make a staircase because like the pole that people climb up and down isn't really working for everybody. What broke first, do you think? What broke first?

43:25probably stock like just having enough stock we ran into issues like stock was running out and we're like what's our forecasting process oh we're really conservative and we just want to smash targets well that sounds great for morale but it's terrible for when you add a stock so are we just taking the forecast like and are we are we learning to forecast properly so accepting that we're going to be more ambitious one of the things you asked that i didn't answer was like did i always think it would be like this yeah no and yes uh no in the sense that like i didn't think it would be like this yes in the sense that in my slides i did put that we'd grow like this because that's how i was getting money right and so mark was pretty amazed that like i think we put uh we would do a 50 000 month like literally four months after launching and he's like we're never gonna hit this why would you gear us to these targets like one point something in in one year like we're never going to pass a million in one year and i was like well if we don't set the targets we'll never do it and i was like but if we do set the targets then we'll work towards it and so we did and we did i mean that first year we did just shy of two million uh from may to the end of the year uh and then second yeah and then the second year nine million net sales and then the third year 23.4 million and one million profit uh so that's on company's house and then that was 2024 25 I continue scaling this year, scaling again.

44:49The numbers will come out because the mid-30s last year

44:52Alex Chisnall:and then above 50 this year. Massive congratulations. This is the next Huel story, clearly. I don't know. I mean, Huel have been amazing. But just trying to, I mean, I enjoy my day job. Mark does too. We just want to keep it going and build into a household name brand. And which leads us nicely onto something that's located over your left shoulder. So tell me a little bit about, as you were saying earlier, if you've just got one product and then you run out of stock. So, yeah. So we launched a toothpaste not too long ago. This is our restored toothpaste. So it's with an ingredient called nanohydroxyapatite.

45:31It's a bit of a mouthful, or nanoHP. It's an ingredient that's all the rage in the U.S. because it's an alternative to fluoride. And fluoride kills cavities and bacteria in your mouth. NanoHP doesn't. It coats your teeth, and so it works in a different way. But the ingredient was developed by NASA for astronauts using space to brush their teeth ages ago because there's a lot of enamel and bone density in space accelerate much faster in terms of decaying. And we launched this first, but we've been working on another product, and this is coming out, I think, right around the time this goes on, so a pretty exciting reveal.

46:13Toothpaste tubes, not very exciting, right? The format, this is an aluminum tube with a plat-based cap. Very pretty, right? But we've been working on this for a while. And so this is our Suri refillable toothpaste. I'll just get the box so you can see it. So Restore Gel. And it has a little cap for traveling. And it has a lock if you want to lock it. And I'm not going to do it on my hand and be a bit gross, but it's a thick toothpaste. And so one of the things we really had to work on was the pump. The team, when you have 10 product engineers, they're going to try and make stuff and then break stuff.

46:47And so we worked on a pump that would last for a long time because the concept is a refillable toothpaste. And so if you open it here, this bottle is home compostable. So you can put in your home compost and it'll biodegrade. We've done it in partnership with a company called Shellworks. So the material is called Vivo Mer.

47:08and inside here, it's an airless pump. So there's no messy straw going in. You can just change the cartridges. So there's a plate at the bottom of the bottle that goes up as you pump out, which then makes it so you don't need a straw. So it's all air-driven, which makes a nicer, neater experience. You haven't got crumpled tubes on your counter, messy. So that's the design angle. Then the performance is, it's a great toothpaste that helps your enamel and whiten your teeth. Multiple flavors we're coming out with, so an aloe vera flavor, a strong mint flavor. And then sustainability, it's got a home compostable bottle and this one's meant to be reused, so you're not throwing away the tubes or the aluminum is recyclable.

47:53Alex Chisnall:The numbers on that must be crazy, right? Yeah, without getting in details and shaming anybody, any company, because we also have an aluminum tube that's recyclable, but still. But yeah, and so our whole ethos is can we make products that are enjoyable to use, that are designed to look nice in your bathroom, right? And so that is very neat, stands up, no mess, and then more sustainable at the same time. But they'll both live together, both products. This one, we're moving to that one really. I mean, this is more to try. The formulas are different. So this toothpaste is white-based, but we've got a lot of feedback.

48:27We do listen to our customers. Some didn't want the whitening agent. So this has no titanium dioxide in it. And it's got a completely different foaming element. So it's a very big foamy. Because when you do a more natural-based toothpaste, they don't always foam well. But we found a way to do it with coconut. It's pretty cool. So ultimately, that one will... To be seen. We want to see what customers prefer. But eventually, we want to move to a system-based. It's a habit change. So we have to see what do people prefer. And that is sort of the tension. We want to create products that are design-led and deliver performance without a compromise on sustainable elements, but also without a compromise to changing your habit, right?

49:04So you need to feel like this is what I want. And nobody's really doing this well. Some people have done versions. We like to think they got the thoughts from us because it's taken us two years to develop that pump. Because toothpaste is thick and so like hand cream is very thin. But if you want to pump thick toothpaste, you're going to have a really robust pump that's going to last a few years so that this can be a refillable at least a few years, right? so it can be something you can say like i have a refillable system at home that does this

49:30Alex Chisnall:yeah and i suppose with a lot of sustainable products it can feel like a compromise was changing that always part of the mission for you guys yes like suri stands for sustainable rituals so like that when we started we're like that's what we want to do i think the way we don't shout about sustainability because there's a lot of people as soon as they hear the word they think greenwashing. But for us, it's about being future focused and constantly pushing things forward without compromise on experience, on performance. Because often there are products that are either, you know, very design led, terrible performance, very sustainable led, terrible performance, or very performance led, terrible design and sustainability.

50:11So we were like, could we keep those three pillars on even setting as we innovate? Do you think you can really change consumer behavior or do you just have to make the better choice easier for them i don't i think it's very hard to change consumer behavior we looked at um tablets which are toothpaste tablets and they haven't really caught on uh quite a few i mean some people use them right but they haven't become mass adoption uh and our view was that people still like a wet toothpaste uh and that's just a habit that you're not going to change and so you have to you can kind of try to evolve in directions but you have to test and see uh which is what we're doing um but it has to be really convenient and elevating in a way that people are like that's okay i'm willing to do this you know like we have a mirror mount for our toothbrush that instead of putting in a cup or on the charger all the time it's slightly different you could say but it's also something that's like lends itself to a more elevated experience you're like fine i'll do it that way yeah so it can change it's just got to evolve i think and and not lose the essence of what people really want really

51:16Alex Chisnall:enjoyed chatting to you got a last couple of questions to finish up with a quick fire round but um someone who has an idea still sitting on it for years and years um what advice to give somebody uh i want to obviously naturally say just do it uh but i would just say start start i mean they're sitting on it for a few years it could be that they're probably comfortable in their position where they are uh that was me right like i had a book of ideas and i would proceed to kill them like to write out why are they going to fail like that's a good exercise by the way to to write out why should i not do this idea where can it fail because finding those failures and like potential fails early on allows you to build bridges over them so that they don't happen uh that's how i we wrote our business plan i was like it's going to fail here and that's i'm not going to get rapid scale marketing this one i'm going to do it doesn't necessarily mean it's right uh and then to speak to a lot of people in adjacent industries and and and and or brands that you like reach out cold email like hey love your brand love to chat i i shouldn't say this but i respond to almost everybody reaches out for a call try to fit them in um because like i i do that's how i was able to get started people were able to had chats with me they told me oh you want to go into hardware good luck you know um it's a slog and then when they realized i was like so where do i start then they're like great so here's where you need to go you know like bit of a test on their side probably.

52:38But you'll get like, I can share also like tips on like, how do you get started? What are manufacturers? There's so much to learn that just getting that knowledge even before you start, then you start to put together sort of a concrete business plan and you can make a decision then like, is this what I really want to do? Is this too much work? Am I nervous? I think you just have to have that sort of desire and just to move forward. There's no right time to do anything.

53:03Alex Chisnall:it's just whether you decide to do it now or not and looking back what do you think was the decision that changed everything for you i think it was when i mean vivid moment where mark had decided he was he was going to join we'd work on the project that was definitely a big one but there was a uh we were raising we i had prepared a deck i didn't really think i was going to raise funds right like it was kind of like oh yeah we'll just see what people think and one of my friends was an early investor in wild deodorants. And he was like, Hey, I think your deck looks really good. Can I bring on two other investors?

53:37You can just chat to them. And I was like, yeah, sure. We're not ready for raising or anything. And in my mind, I was like, I'm not going to raise, not taking money means I don't actually have to do this. I can still keep moving it forward. And he brought on two other angels and they were like, it was a great idea. So, and he was like, great. So we're going to give you some money now. You're going to take it. Right. And we should get this going. right like you're gonna take our money right and it was he kind of pushed us into it and i was like we are gonna take your money and there was then i vividly remember being like once you take money you're like the timeline and also we took an asa which meant in six months we had to close around so all of a sudden like my world overnight was like hey this had no timeline and all of a sudden i'm racing to find other people who want to invest and like i'm sharpening the story and and now like this idea of like potentially making a mock-up has now become something i need to do in two months because otherwise I'm not going to close around.

54:27So yeah, I kind of was pushed into it. I probably, I probably would have taken a lot longer to launch otherwise.

54:34Alex Chisnall:Quickfire round. So whatever comes into your head, short and sweet. Dave, for you, what is an entrepreneur? I think an entrepreneur is somebody who's willing to do something different, to create something special. It's somebody who's willing to look at the signals inside of them and to be like, I think this is right. I think research is really important. And then to listen to the noise outside and turn them into signals that align with what they want to do. I love that. It's interesting to literally get a different answer every time, which is brilliant. Something that you're right in the crux of, I guess, what is a scale-up business?

55:13I think a scale-up business is one that has got product market fit, that is, is changing the engines on the plane while some of them are not changing. and turning them to turbo and building more seat room and headroom. So you are scaling and moving faster. And there's a timeline, right? Because you've got a certain amount of fuel and you need to get to the next point to refuel.

55:35Alex Chisnall:You've got a bunch of these. They're brilliant. You've got houses. You've got planes. I'm a very visual thinker. It must be my dyslexia. Okay, a bit left field. But if you could pick one song that reflects your life or your entrepreneurial journey, what would it be and why? Rolling Stones, Start Me Up. and then probably my team would say can't get no satisfaction the common theme there love it and then last one again you can think about this or come back to me but having been on the show and told your Screw It Just Do It story is there anyone you'd recommend who's also got Screw It Just Do It?

56:13Oh I mean there's so many great startups in the UK and generally my belief from New York people are like why didn't you start in the US I'm like it has to be the UK great talent great business and great community Yodo my daughters love the product Ben Drury one of the co-founders definitely recommend him they're doing really well they make a sort of music player that's interactive that has a screen but it's a pixelated screen so it's kind of like screenless but I I don't know what we would do without it like my daughter is is just loves it uses it for songs storybooks etc

56:50Alex Chisnall:interesting your daughters are probably too old for it but Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But no, that would be awesome. Steve, thank you very much indeed. Thank you so much for having me out. It's been amazing. If this conversation resonated with you, don't just sit there, act on it. Make sure you follow or subscribe for more game-changing conversations. And remember, the only thing standing between you and your business breakthrough is the decision to screw it and just do it.