Hector Hughes of Unplugged: Digitally detoxing the world one cabin at a time

0:00It is my absolute pleasure to welcome my next guest, Hector Hughes, the CEO and co-founder of Unplugged, the platform for digital detox retreats featured in the likes of Cosmopolitan, The Times, Evening Standard, and has now served over 12 ,000 guests to date. Hector, welcome to Strategy and Tragedy. Thank you so much, Steph. This is the highlight of my week. I'm glad to hear it. Mine too. Highlight of my month and year. Absolutely. Great to have you. All right, let's kick off with the importance of digital detox. Why exactly are they so good for us? For sure, for sure. Well, I think, you know, basically in the last 10, 15, 20 years, our lives have changed dramatically.

0:39So obviously the rise of first the internet and the smartphone, we've gone from spending no time online to 11, 12, 13 hours a day. And that fundamentally completely rewires our brains, it completely changes our state during the day. and so for most of us we check our phones first thing in the morning and then you're checking them basically all day it says that there's some research that it takes about 15 minutes to regain your composure after a distraction and for most of us there's not 15 minutes where we're not checking it so we basically spend our days just in this constant state of distraction right until the last thing at night and what that does is it just has us in the state of constant overstimulation and it's so normal now that we just don't notice it and what going offline does for a long period so you know we we focus on three days is it takes about a day for the mind to settle down so the first day yes you feel a bit more anxious you might get a phantom buzzing you feel a bit like you've lost a limb and then we start to get this deep sense of calm and it feels almost supernatural but the crazy thing is that's how humans are built to operate that we're not built to walk around with the low level anxiety and stress that we do today.

1:49So really it's just helping people return to their natural state. And in that state, our bodies can do what they're built to do. So they can heal, they can recover, they can calm down. And so I think there's so many of the issues today, whether it's physical health, mental health, are just because of the environment. We just live in such a crazy environment now. And we haven't biologically changed from our hunter-gathering days, but the world we live in massively has. Yeah, absolutely. I heard you say about observing guests kind of before and after their weekend in a cabin and you saying about them looking like 10 years younger, which is hilarious.

2:24Was there like an epiphany for you? I also read that you you went on a silent meditation retreat for like 10 days. I think you read the book like Digital Minimalism. So I know that like you started coming across these things. What helped you kind of arrive at starting Unplugged? yeah so it really was a series of fortunate events uh in 2019 i was working for a tech startup at the time it was very exciting we were you know high growth international expansion a bit of a mess behind the scenes as these things often were yeah but i just felt burnt out dissatisfied with life i was going out a lot of that time busy all the time spending all day on my phone and just started to get more into meditation and reading and read digital minimalism as you mentioned uh that was early in 2019 and they talk a lot about unplugged and unplugging and i thought unplugged to be such a great name for a business and parks that idea and then had a really intense summer and a friend of mine had recommended the sign of retreat and i initially laughed it off i thought i'm not the kind of person you can go and do a meditation retreat what would the guys at work think and then eventually thought what have i got to lose got myself out there and it was 10 days it was this beautiful buddhist temple on top of a mountain and the best thing about it is when you You get that they take your phone off you and you just spend 10 days completely cut off from the outside world.

3:42And as soon as I handed over my phone, I just felt there's like this liberation. Whatever else is, whatever's going on out there just doesn't matter for 10 days, which is a profound and wonderful feeling. And basically ended up coming back from that very cliche, quit my job a week later and got started on Unplugged. What was so interesting specifically about how you mentioned before you were like, I'm not the sort of person who does that, which just speaks to like the power of how we self-identify. I'm obsessed with that whole topic and could do a whole podcast just on that. So it's like, I'm not the sort of person who'd go off and do this like silent retreat.

4:16And then immediately after you then said, oh, what would the guys at work think? And I see this happen all the time. It's first, how do I identify? And then what other people's perceptions? So what's switched it for you? Sure. I mean, that was very much the theme in my life up until that point. I was completely governed by what other people think of me. I think there was a deep insecurity. I've always had unfailing self-confidence in some aspects of myself. I noticed this. A real insecurity in other parts of myself. So I really wasn't comfortable in myself. And I just ended up, a lot of the drinking, drug taking, like going out, was just doing, living life.

4:51Yeah, it was numbing that and also just living life on other people's terms. Like I was a real people pleaser. Still am recovering people pleaser. and I think up until that point there was just this deep insecurity and just just concern with what other people would think and the silent retreat really was a pivotal moment in the sense I came back from that and I just felt completely free of all of that it's not interesting I I definitely went through a period after that feeling like I'd solved all the problems in my life and then life happens and more problems emerge down the line but definitely for a period I just felt this just deep sense of one of the things they teach there is that we have in buddhism is that we have everything we need to be happy so we think we need to add something we think we need the job the relationship whatever it might be but actually it's it's about taking away and it's taking away the things that bring unhappiness like worrying what other people think about you so yeah i just left that retreat with just complete assurance i've always had this i've always had this deep conviction that my life would just work itself out like i used to my school reports my teachers is to bemoan what a um irrational optimist i was but uh but yeah the i i'm a big believer that if you just believe things will work out then i said like that's every entrepreneur like every entrepreneur is an irrational optimist and it gets into trouble as well right yeah yeah i love that so one thing is having almost you know daryl call it this epiphany this deep realization of the benefits of unplugging another thing is having the confidence to place such a massive bet on this whole digital detox premise right to build your business around it to get investment congratulations you've had amazing like um and investors kind of come on and support your amazing mission but that that's another level so where does that confidence come from to place such a massive bet on people spending less time online yeah it's interesting i've thought a lot about it and life just how these things happen and so after university i applied to a whole bunch of grad schemes and got to the final stage for three one was teach first and i thought i would do that and then go into investment value or something one was a high frequency trading job and the other one was an accountant at a private wealth um you know accountancy and i would have been terrible all those jobs but they would have just led me down such different parts in life and so i think to answer your question there's a you really are the sum of the people you spend the most time with And so I think being in that startup environment, I was the second employee.

7:16My co-founder was the first employee. So I had a good relationship with the founders. And so I was around them. Two of my closest friends started businesses that same year. So it just really normalized it for me. And then I think that combined with the unlock at the retreat, really, of just being like, things will work themselves out. And when I came back from that, I just felt like anything was possible. and then coupled with personality type wise i'm sure this is a common one in finals as well i definitely have the gambler the risk taker in me so it seemed like the obvious choice as well yeah i love that so how do you get started in terms of like you know mvps lean startup principles given that you are you know connecting guests to cabins what was like your first cabin how did you get started literally zero to one yeah i i'm i'm not a fan personally of the whole lean startup that's all controversial i love you saying that interesting same let's talk about that why are you not that's really refreshing i don't think i'm so excited with you saying because a i agree and b i don't think i've ever heard anyone say that so this is a safe space to go there well i think first of all it's just my personality types everything i'm about to say i think it's just maybe rationalizing my laziness and not going to list that but there's i'll tell you a story to highlight it so spoke to this really fantastic growth guy like a very well-known guy um who we worked with at the previous startup and so had him he was one of the most impressive people i knew so told him about the idea for unplugged and just asked his advice and he said to me now why are you going through so i was telling him we're just going to order a cabin and see what happens and you only need to pay the deposits it's like two thousand pounds and then so order a cab sorry oh sorry okay order a cab ain't uh and then see what happens and you know if we pay the two thousand deposit then a cabin will be on the way and we have to find the money for it we have to find somewhere to put it and you know and then the business should just take care of itself the opposite to the so like instead of market first you've product first is what you're saying basically while in the cabin there was i mean from the product point of view it was very much like uh i think i i would want to use this and i think this is very like intuition led rather than research led yeah yeah like that whole research thing yeah you know it's like the whole customers Yeah, customers will just tell you they want faster cars type thing.

9:29Yeah, yeah. There's a sense of just like willing it into existence. So this guy basically said to me, like, why are you going through all the trouble of ordering a cabin? Why don't you just put up a landing page and drive traffic to it and see if people actually want to lock their phones away? The issue with that approach is they probably would have said they didn't want to lock their phones away. Yeah, I get it. But that's not the change we want to make in the world. That's not the company we want to build. And so I think there's a lot to be said for being unreasonable and for taking a stand.

9:52And just for, you know, I think you sometimes got to be contrarian and just say like this, I think this needs to exist in the world. I'm going to place this better. And so my methodology rather than lean startup is burn the boat. I love that. Let's fucking do this. And then we've got to. When's the book coming? And we've got to finish. And then we've got to figure it out. Right. Because this whole thing of like validating, invalidating is like you can always you can always invalidate an idea. And much rather I'd be like, let's just let's just find a way to figure it out. Hector, I'm so leaning more on your side of the fence.

10:22with this and honestly I'm gonna be like brave here and like open up and admit I've always kind of been more on that way and I feel like through reading lean startup and to be honest I've mentor incredible MBA founder students with an ed tech scale up called one day where they study all of this and start and launch their business alongside it this isn't a promo for one day but see that is my other job and I and I love them like a lot of that is based on the in startup principles and that's obviously like curriculum I teach and the students that I like mentor through it so the past two years in particular have been more me sort of like okay like I get it I'm coming around to this idea but not fully convinced either which is why I'm so convinced I'm so excited to hear what you say on that so you say I'm totally with you on the fact that like especially if you're doing something different if you're being contrarian if you're being a bit disruptive changing behaviors putting out a landing page to see people are going to resonate with that core value prop may not always like cut it so how did you overcome those barriers because I guess you've still got you've still got those same barriers to overcome haven't you because it's like okay well one thing is people giving away their email address because they're interested in potentially signing up to this another thing is booking imparting money to go and stay at a cabin so that's that whole early validation isn't it quick one so sorry to interrupt so I'm sure that you are on the edge of your seat listening to this interview, at least I hope so.

11:50I'm so aware of all the other podcasts that are already out there so the fact that you've decided to tune in and listen to this one is not lost on me. If you can just go that one step further and hit that follow or subscribe button, doesn't cost a thing, takes two seconds, now is your chance to do that. It means so much, really appreciate your support, thank you so much. Now let's get back to the interview. Another thing is booking and parting money to go and stay at a cabin. So that's that whole early validation isn't it for sure yeah so we very much always been very bullish on the product and experience of spending three days offline and the hypothesis has always been you know to use a fancy word that that and it's like that's that's enough we can just get people to experience that yeah that that will do the job for us uh there's obviously a huge amount of legwork that needs to happen to get there so you know we launched it was really hard to get people to come and stay when we did get people to come and stay they wouldn't lock away their phones like it was you know the whole thing uh but then as we just double tripled down on that so we made some choices in the early days that added friction and actually made it harder to get customers so we fixed at three nights there are other cabin companies out there that don't do digital detox the industry average stay is 1.8 nights so moving that up to three people have to take more time off work it's more of a commitment uh and then you know taking the hard stance on unlocking the phone away and various people in my life were like well what if you're going to cut out all the people who don't and lock their phone away but actually yeah that's the point exactly and there's so much noise these days it's really about cutting through so i think both from product experience point of view it's a much better experience to be offline than to not be offline yeah and then also on the marketing point of view like it evokes such a strong emotional reaction in people when you talk about phones and when we tell people what we do they react one of two ways that either like oh my god that sounds terrible or get me there right now yeah but it evokes a strong reaction and to really cut through the noise and be emotive and like that is something that just compounds and compounds and compounds like i think the hypothesis of the stars this is always going to be a marketing problem right it's kind of like an airline you have a perishable item which is a bed or a seat and it's all about filling that it's all about occupancy and so it's really about we've really building a marketing company and it's just such an amazing asset towards that yeah super interesting and i love i read a case study before about like how starbucks is actually a fintech company yeah i love how you say well actually you're you know it's a travel platform or accommodation site actually it's a marketing company it makes codes what i find fascinating about the whole founder journey or just running a startup is every year you change completely change your perspective on what the business you're running is and yeah you just have these like moments where you're like oh my god this is a completely different business to what i thought it was i'll take back in with you next year and see what were some of the early objections that you're getting from customers did you get any funny like comments or reactions especially at the start yeah i mean we just got people flat out refusing so we were checking people in ourselves at the start they would see a cabin on instagram try to come and stay and we tried to take their phone off them and they would look at us like we're crazy you're actually gonna give our phones away you need to be dressed in black and a balaclava yeah let's do that and uh and what we realized is that it's won or lost before people even get there so you need to know that yeah the whole brand the whole brand needs to be around this is what you're coming to do because there's any doubt in their mind yeah which is why digital detoxing doesn't work as a add-on right if you run a hotel and you say like come and stay and if you want to do a digital detox you can yeah people might be like i might do and they get there and they're like i don't need to kind of commit to it you need to commit to it you just tell your friends tell your family you know clear your diary yeah and everyone warn everyone yeah and everything in the cabin then needs to be set up to accommodate that right so you need all the things that you would need your phone for so yeah it's uh like that's that's really the product yeah hilarious i love that how do you connect your um you know what are we going to call it like the power of no if you like or this kind of like that commitment to what you're doing how how do you connect that with like the vc model because are you vc but i'm aware you've got like angel investors are you venture backed we've got i think we've got a couple investors that would describe themselves as vcs yeah exactly but we you know we haven't got vcs on the board you know we've never taken a big vc check yeah uh and going forward we'll you know we're not going to do the series yeah it's actually much more debt geared going forward yeah so yeah it sits outside of classic vcs yeah yeah so so obviously all your investors i'm just kind of connecting that um you're not going for that kind of like aggressive hyperscale growth or cost you're remaining very committed to that mission and and you know who it's right for and not compromising on that and so have you ever kind of come up against like investors who that like doesn't work for because they want that kind of market share yeah i mean 100 you come across investors all the time who just want something different it's like this isn't one but also like the the hypothesis is that this is going to unlock a bigger market and a bigger opportunity it's just a different game it's not about like if you're building an ai company right now you have to blitz scale like hell and sell it asap unless you're building one of the ones that are going to be the infrastructure because that you're just building on quicksand in that market yeah for us it's so early in this space and you know unplugged is really about moving society in a different direction because all the momentum in society is towards spending more time online and just by existing we start a conversation around it start people thinking about their relationship with their phones but then if you go and actually experience that and spend three days offline then you just have this massive shift in perspective yeah and the more time you spend offline the more you crave time offline so really as a company we're trying know shifts society in a different direction obviously hugely bullish on technology here to stay blah blah blah next evolution humanity uh but i think as life moves online it becomes rarer and more valuable to spend time offline yeah and so you know we want to and change people's behavior is just going to take that time isn't it so what was your thought process around getting investment like given that it isn't that kind of classic hyperscale like growth vc growth model was there a point where you were like we definitely need some outside capital to like boost this what we're going for angels yeah well it's a very capital intensive business because you've got to pay for the cabins we flip-flopped on that as well so we paid for the cabins we then went asset light for a little while and then just started to double down on on owning the assets ourselves oh okay yeah i didn't know that so you actually own how many cabins now uh we own most of our cabins so we've got 40 cabins at the moment we own maybe we own 26 of them and then going forward we'll own 90 % of new cabins wow uh so same before you're a marketing company this i mean 2024 i guess you thought of yourself as a property business yeah owning them we yeah we don't own the land like this is the thing it's a brand play um yeah but like it's a brand play and then we monetize that with cabins and stays and all of these things yeah uh so we've i mean the it's been a journey on the investment side of things we basically started capital insurance business in a zero industry environment we don't qualify for eis which is where most angel money goes in the UK.

18:46They're particularly tight around overnight accommodation and the thing that kind of looks like property because they don't want people putting their property place through. But EIS is really designed for spending money on a tech team where if you've got a product no one wants, you're left with zero. So why didn't you go down like the Airbnb asset-like model? Because it's not the business we want to build and it's not the change. Like we're optimizing for how do we really drive a change and to do that, you really need to make it sexy and there's a lot to be said for like this is just compounding brand, brand, brand.

19:14There's enough marketplaces out there. And actually, if we just put shepherd's huts and random people's cabins, you don't build the same brand equity. That's always been the play. It's just compounding brand equity. So you want people to feel like when they're staying in an unplugged cabin or when they're staying in accommodation they've booked through unplugged, it's an unplugged cabin. Yeah, we want this to become culturally significant so that being unplugged is to switching off what Ubering is to getting around. And to do that, we need people talking about this the whole time. We need to be aspirational.

19:43We need to be bold. we need to be uh yeah we need to wow basically and just having other marketplace isn't going to do that so that has always been the big priority and you know we've made decisions like we made the high friction decision of having longer nights we've also made the decision of a uh yeah a business that has lots of troubles to get funded because not eis not vc play it's two startup for the property people we don't own the land um and starting a zero industry environments interest rates went up to five percent in the first two years so again with that it was just so many things to figure out we ended up raising uh from a lot of angels we've got probably 70 angels on the cap table just meant it was more time consuming but actually that can be a good thing because it means you have to try harder because they're not just throwing money away as a as a tax write-off uh so it just means you have to dig deeper you have to do more we then when everything when interest rates went up the asset financing we had lined up fell through so we created a financial products called a cabin back loan where basically individuals could finance cabins uh and that worked really well so that got us through two or three years what wait what very scrappy so you're saying about every year changing your perspective on the business literally is going from like a bank like a property business to a bank to a marketing company wait what's this financial product yeah well i mean that's the thing right it's like i've been talking about the brand and your mission like that is a huge part of my job a huge part of what we're trying do as a company and that's that's the secret source but on the back end you know it's a very complicated uh you know balance sheet you've got all the landowner relationships the managing hospitality business so figuring that piece out has been a lot of fun i'm i'm a numbers guy by background so i love the intellectual stimulation of figuring out that game and just learning how to think about like debt and equity from first principles because you just get you just get um completely advice from anyone you talk to in the early days like that's bad that's good yeah really understanding uh what is good what kind of capital we should be getting how we should be funding this should we be asset light or asset heavy yeah and so just figuring that out for myself and trying things and understanding mechanics uh has been has been a joy i love it wow i can tell i love that um you mentioned before that like the fundraiser's been a journey i read the one of the early mistakes that you made i mean you're saying about being a numbers guy and in the finances uh one of the early mistakes was having a a dj and music line on your on your balance sheet what was that about yes i may be a numbers guy but i'm not a details guy so someone yeah one of our advisors basically sent me a template for um a financial model and i just didn't really check it and it's the one he copied it over from said like dj and music as one of the line items and uh i was i pitched an angel syndicate thank you and uh got through to the due diligence with them the first question was what's how's this line item well good it was the first question got that out of the way that's hilarious i love so lots of lessons along the way and yeah we just it's you know it's a very capital intense business so i've just spent lots of time fundraising over the last four years in various classes any pearls of wisdom you can impart with our listeners on the fundraising given how deep you've been in that um i think look out for dj music yeah what i could do but what i could have done much better and learning to do now is just really doing a proper job and being diligent and working with experts so for example we just started recently this year working with a fractional cfo which has been life-changing wow amazing because that whole i i just do have this slightly lazy side to me so if you give me a piece of work to do i probably wouldn't do a good job but i am very good at working with other people right helping them do a good job uh so i was just trying to do it and not getting across the financial storytelling and all that kind of stuff so just ended up you know raising lots of small checks and it's super time consuming so I would say you know just do a proper job really go intense with fundraising because again I just did too much casual fundraising over a long time and uh but then another big learning is you can there's always a way like we had so many cash crunches and high spots and like there's always you can always find money what I want to link that to is because you even just saying that about the cash crunch kind of gives me a bit of a belly ache right you show up so calm so positive we're talking about this just before you emanate zen so I definitely want to talk about you know your great leadership style as well but we talked about how you manage that I know that you meditate regularly do those moments not kind of make you sick when you've got like the cash crunch when you're like my business could I could shut this down next week yeah what are some moments that really sort of like put you under pressure yeah so it's definitely when you're in a tight cash spot it is a kind of oppressive weight uh but personality wise again i've always had a you know a calm demeanor and these like suppression of emotions i think i've done some therapy on this this year so if you want the unhealthy version of it uh and so and the other thing is we spoke about prioritization but i think i've always been acutely aware that when you're in a cash a tight cash bar yeah that is the time that you need to be at your calmest so in the art of war sinzu talks about how the kind of perfect general is completely serene and i've always tried to model that so when we've been the tighter spots my biggest focus has just been to emanate calm because business is a confidence game and you need to go and get that money over the line and if you're looking panicked and the team sees it and they start to get panicked and performance slips all the cards are going to come yeah investors get a red light so so easier said than done i know that you meditate regularly is there anything else that you do to help maintain that tranquility that serenity when you're under pressure yeah i think spending time offline reading with everyone brand it works it works yeah reading i think reading about history and just like really understanding uh just what humans have gone through and what it takes to achieve impossible things or very difficult things so once you just have that backlog of case studies from history and you see just how much goes wrong when you're trying to achieve something like reading about the second world war there's a wonderful book i think it's the first world war actually uh called the guns of august which is about the first month in the first world war and germany so nearly took paris which would have effectively ended the war and the amount that went wrong on both sides through the whole month was just it was basically just a comedy of errors and i think understanding that it definitely translates to companies and it's understanding that like stuff goes wrong the whole time and that's not a problem and you can still survive and succeed and often that's what success looks like often success is just a string of failures that are vaguely in the right direction so i think often success is a string of failures vaguely in the right direction that's fantastic and i think i mentioned reading because the more you understand that yeah uh the less stress there is in the situation while i'm listening to you look i don't know about my listeners so like leave us a comment please let us know like is this resonating like because for me when i've been in i mean like my stressful situations i'm sure are like a tenth if that you know a hundredth of some of the situations that you've been in and i hear you say go offline read a book all the rest of it i'm like physically mentally all the rest of it incapable which obviously says i need to be spending more time offline and I'm practicing meditation more often so there's an element of kind of easier said than done in the moment but I think there's a there's a really big argument to like that that habit building and getting those fundamentals over like this longer period of time you're not suddenly going to go from like one minute to the next oh okay Hector I'm going to go and read a book you know and calm down so um but at the very very least I'm hoping that at least listening to you and some of your serene vibes through this podcast to getting people kind of in the right headspace for it.

27:43You touched on obviously like loads of lessons learned. One of the other things that I read, one of the other mistakes was, I mean, okay, so you mentioned Maria is a fractional CFO, which is Chief Financial Officer for anyone unaware. One of the other mistakes I heard you say was about kind of bringing in external experts or external consultants and maybe a bit of an expectation that they'd come and bring and wave the magic wand what are you happy to kind of share on that what's what what kind of happened and what's the lesson learned from that yeah for sure so i've massively changed my mind on that i've actually changed my mind on a lot most things this year what are some of the top things you've massively changed your mind on uh the value of paid of paid media yeah oh my god you're gonna get me so excited yeah this is a top one for me balance I changed my mind that I should have more balance in my life and then I've changed my mind I have less balance in my life recently so these things just they flip-flop right and I think I think one bigger one is this whole consultants where we just had some you know not great experiences early on and actually I think that is says something to us and how we approach the situation I think we didn't go with strong enough briefs we you know you get what you put into it and then who you work with is massive so there were good people we worked with that we didn't set up for success there were other people who weren't the right people uh so like everything working with the the right consultant agencies whatever is worth the way in gold uh but in the last year or so we've just i've just really realized the value of just working with deep experts and doing it right you know setting the right intentions having a good relationship with them and we brought in you know two or three in the last year that have just been completely transform with it amazing so we now have we actually we have a very small core team and uh work with a few just very very strong consultants and agencies around that that really massively multiply everything we do yeah amazing i love that that's music to my ears um it's a process right you've got to learn yeah how to set people up for success i love how you phrase that i'm a big believer in that as well why have you changed your mind on paid media i'm excited to about that well i think i was always just very uh skeptical arrogant whatever you want to call it you always see these posts like we canceled all of our paid media budget and doubled down on brand and yeah and now our sales have gone up and i think it's always been organic brand like that's our strength basically so i think marketing is an art and a science and we've always over indexed on the art and supplies always been the biggest constraints we've always had really high occupancies and haven't needed to worry about paid yeah and i think i just had this attitude that like that would continue forever and we never needed to spend any money in marketing because our products are so great and you know we're so great at talking about it that people are just going to keep ripping it out of our hands and then really started to scale supply in the last year or so uh and actually we weren't doing any more in marketing we weren't spending any more of this kind of stuff and the occupancy started to drop and spoke to again some great people i know who are really deep domain experts around scaling the marketing side of things and what i realized i'd been what i now think i was wrong on is you know it's great having the good organic but actually that just means you can acquire customers cheaper on paid yeah but you know paid is how you amplify that paid is uh you know paid is what really helps drive the revenue so yeah i think it was just a an arrogance of like we never need to be paid and understanding that actually and i think before we we any paid spend had been very siloed so it hadn't been used to amplify organic you know the two weren't talking to each other and working with someone incredible on that side of things now and just completely opened my eyes to just how the two can work in harmony yeah and actually the amazing success on organic just just sets us up so well doesn't it that's interesting i was expecting you to say the opposite actually because i feel like most of the time paid media given it's low barrier to entry it the low kind of friction more often than not that's how startups do kind of get things going and then realize that actually like it's easy to just kind of waste money it can be a sinkhole you can kind of that performance can plateau so i'm surprised to hear it was that way around that's the thing i mean paid media is not equal to all and massively especially you know mark zuckerberg's talking now about you just plug in a product yeah and they will create the ads they'll you know do the with the ai thing yeah exactly exactly so so so then all that you're left with is positioning yeah right and so i think having a unique positioning actually just means that paid is more effective yeah yeah like i think webpack what you're talking about is there are so many companies out there that raise so much vc capital and the unit economics just don't work they just can't acquire customers at the growth rate they need to cheap enough to actually make any money so there are so many household names that i've heard about or yeah people have told me about uh that we're just losing money on every order and so far away from this before you even take the team in this kind of thing and again you just get this and there can be success stories right like Deliveroo lost money on every order for years and years and years and then the bet was always that if they could become the scale player yeah then that changes it changed they sold for you know two or three billion recently so but timing is such a huge factor in that I know that so preaching to the choir you know this better than most other people but I feel like that era is gone now bill like the deliverers the ubers the airbnbs like these huge tech unicorns there was a huge element of right time right place because yeah so many different like tailwinds but there are different eras right now like the founders who are doing that are now building the latest ai company and but it depends what your goal is right because if your goal is to get a billion dollar exit then that's 100 the right strategy but my goal is to make this particular change in the world and so i need this to work yeah you know and so it's all about how do we make this succeed whereas you know someone could churn through an ai company now raise hundreds of millions and if it doesn't work then they just go and start another company in three years they'll keep churning that they'll keep learning each time and they'll make it a huge success and they'll get the payout they want the payout doesn't interest me at all it's very easy to say that as a founder but it really doesn't you know i want to get a good result for our investors blah blah blah and teammates um but yeah that's just a scorecard i think for me what's really really important is that we can build a huge company here so that we can make this change in the world yeah and on that note your very recent congratulations you made it to what was it the top 100 wealthy list but like the different type of wealth just it was called the sunday times runner alternative rich list i love that i saw some yeah um what's that but how do they like what are the metrics how do they calculate that do you know um what was your position on the rich list on the rich turn it the alternative it wasn't it wasn't ranked it was basically they had they just had i don't know 15 20 uh companies entrepreneurs that were amazing i think it was more of a it's less quantifiable than so it was more of a they were just looking for the companies out there they came across us exactly they came across us so it's nice validation i mean all of these things uh you can get you can go so carefully it's it's uh i think it just confirms that like there really is something here that's changing to happen in the world yeah and uh you're going to keep doubling down on that incredible i love that hector i feel like you are a walking advert for on because i feel like you really are i mean like every founder should be the poster boy or girl for the business and the brand that they're building but with you it's 100 true um any other like uh funny stories uh like good lessons that came out of some like funny anecdotes in the journey i just want to make sure we don't leave any stone unturned any particular give me something to any particular areas um we talked about investment already um marketing kind of covered i guess actually what you were saying before with paid media what i did also read was that you did have that complacency and I think it was in like 2021 did things sort of fall off a cliff for you and then you had to sort of re reset and revisit how you were going to rev back up again um well we've had there'll be many bumps along the way like it's never as straightforward as it looks on yeah I think personally I I had a really uh challenging like two or three years up until really the start of this year so when I started the business within such a good place mentally i uh gave up drinking drug taking all of that spent four years completely sober and then shortly after starting i started to get these weird health issues so this isn't a funny anecdote bob so i get this like burning rash apparently this kind of redness and keeping up during the night last for 72 hours that went on for a couple of years and this is is this after giving up yeah this is four months after giving up drinking interesting and uh you know antihistamines would keep it away but every time i stopped it would come back and then i started to feel like rough and hungover every day and that went on for two two and a half years and i basically i basically found out last year that was due to mold poisoning from household mold oh so i just had i just had a couple of years uh the last two really where i was i just felt like i was fighting fires on on every front i had you know feeling profoundly rough every day relationships grumbling romantic relationships uh cash crunches and it was literally just i just had to as i said my my priority each day was was turning up and just being like a calm positive influence so every day I just had to grip my teeth and just turn up and try and exude calm and good vibes um and yeah I just really felt like I was surviving not not thriving and then this year I really feel like I've got my mojo back and I was feeling feeling pumped so excited for teacher I love it and perfect timing to come and show up on a podcast and talk about your journey but I love how you mention there have been many bumps in the But of course there have.

37:37And that is the whole purpose of this show. And it was born from that place of like the LinkedIn humble bragging, the sifted press coverage, like everyone announcing their headlines. And you're like, you know, I was in a very privileged position where I was at the epicenter with my last marketing agency, working with all these incredible clients like yourself. Right. And these entrepreneurs and leaders and seeing like how far the the the reality was, you know, from from what everything was going on online. Again, it goes back to that difference between online and offline. I have one penultimate question to ask you before we get on to my traditional closing question, unless you do remember any funny anecdotes that you want to share.

38:15Why do you not believe in deadlines? That's a good question. I'm just trying to think if I still think that's the case. All right. So first of all, do you? All right. All right. Let's backtrack there. Do you believe in deadlines? Do I believe in deadlines? Well, I remember writing a long time ago. I didn't believe in deadlines. I think I probably changed my mind a bit on that. Okay. They're useful, right? Like it's useful to... To give us context why you didn't before then. Just because there's so much... I think before I was like, I never hit deadlines anyway. Like, why are we doing this? It's a waste of time.

38:50You know, no one cares. Let's just do it when we can. Stop trying to make fetch work. But actually, I think there is, you know, there's a lot to be said for... One of the things I'm learning to be is less agreeable. so i think uh recovering people pleaser 100 a weakness and a strength as a leader is i'm highly agreeable i think it means that you kind of coach through all of the people relationships i have great relationships with everyone i work with um but it just means that you know there are things that you're not firm enough on you get walked over on all these kind of things so i think i think one of the things i'm learning as i develop in my role is to just be more unreasonable at times push more say things that are uncomfortable every now and again was there some catalyst that helped you kind of switch on that yeah it was some therapy at the start of the year uh i again i as i say wasn't in a great place last year and at the end of last year i just had this like i just had a real like weight and started some therapy with a chap called gavin who's a very amazing character and just just had to face up some very big things in my life and this year i've just been facing as many uncomfortable things as possible and just just getting through them and so much of what you want in life is on the other side of an uncomfortable conversation and so yeah this year has really been about about going through that and the weight has just has just fallen off and how do you do that again any sort of like practical tips that you can give on you know easier said than done like do you just grit your teeth and go through it or what or is it like having that really clear idea of the motivation behind it it's that it's that i think the more you can talk about it yeah let's say there's something let's let's talk about a romantic relationship because it's a an easy one where if you're in a relationship which a lot of people are where you you know deep down that this isn't right and you need to end it that is such a horrible thing to face up to yeah that like you can't even you can't even think about it yeah um because you can't imagine yourself like actually breaking up with that person this person who you know your whole life is around you know trying to be there for and make happy and all these things and i think just take the first step which is vocalize that to a therapist so i think in for example when i was seeing this therapist he's i still see him he is deeply challenging which is what i need i think i was skirted around being too challenged in my life there'll be something where i feel i don't want to say this to him because i know that once i say it to him it's out there and then he's going to talk me into doing it in the next few weeks or talk with me on it and then eventually will I end up having to do it and I think it's just taking I don't need to end the relationship now but I just need to take the little brave step to say it out loud you know and not worry about that and so just it's just learning to lean into discomfort yeah so I've started doing recently I've kind of done it on and off over the years uh Wim Hof breathing which is 15 minutes in the morning and that that is very uncomfortable when you're holding your breath for two minutes it's very uncomfortable and I think I'm just learning through that and through therapy of just like the more you lean into discomfort and the more you like take the brave little step i think courage is i don't think courage is you know me raising loads of debt and taking all the risks of being a founder because that's not stuff that scares me yeah any relationship is courage for me because i'm a real people pleaser and it's horrible i feel sick to myself when i have to do it yeah um so it's just learning to be courageous like courage is courage is every part of your body telling you that they doesn't want to do something and then and then doing it anyway and so i think it's it's just learning to lean into that yeah makes sense and these things you know it's what's that phrase like the the fear is is almost like worse than the thing itself isn't it like i think you do make things worse yeah i you know in the build-up and the analog the overthinking and everything and it's like um picking up the phone and making that making that call that you're just like you know your heart is your heart rates up through the roof you swear you but it's like either like i honest i don't think like it never is as bad as you think like i was just trying to think for a sec there like i don't think anything's ever turned out as bad as i thought it could have been in my own head yeah yeah i mean you're obviously an irrational optimist so obviously you would say that we all we all but it is true exactly it is true did we close the loop on the deadline thing just to give our our listeners just i think but yeah i'm now thinking that actually having some tight deadlines is good whether or not the deadlines get hit like it does just move things forward yeah i think especially when you have a team right i think maybe before yeah i'd hazard that like maybe it was more a personal thing of just like this deadline isn't going to get hit but maybe for a team you sort of need to like rally the troops yeah and i think at that point maybe i like had a team but wasn't doing a good job of leading them and so i i do think there's a lot to be set for deadlines now so change my mind again cool and you're allowed to this is another i think it's encouraged like it's yeah i think so so many people run into problems because they have these very dogmatic views on this yeah i think it's super important to change your mind on everything i'm reading a book at the moment called the reason for god and i'm not religious but it's like i think it's good to doubt your doubts yeah yeah yeah i really hector thank you so much for saying that i really really love that you say that and it really does connect to the whole online offline because the more time that we spend online as well you obviously know much more about this than i do but i feel like that conditions us even more so into this black and white thinking yeah into you know especially in the era of like personal brand and like profile building and you know being known for a thing taking a stance on something and um and you say you know i say it's allowed you say it's encouraged i think the vast majority of people would would disagree with us on that at least 100 at least if you look at their actions on social media like oh wait you said this you stand and i i think it's i think it's understandable because it's the people please because people need to know like if you don't stand for something you feel for everything so i think there is this for people who don't really really know you deeply i think there is that like that doubt that it creates in people's mind like it goes down to trust right it's like can i trust you um and i think if you change your mind on something it's like wait but you said this yesterday what are you going to say tomorrow and I think in leadership as well with teams I guess that's different because you you haven't changed your mind on the mission and the North Star with Unplugged so that is where there is that nuance but I saw something the other day that really stuck with me which was like what's one thing that like looks stupid but actually isn't and the answer is finding out new information and changing your mind based on that yeah so i love that i just wanted to give that a bit more airtime hector unless you thought of a funny story that you want to shake because i just have a feeling that you've got a few unless unless you have then the final traditional closing question on this show is one particular tragedy that's taught you an unforgettable lesson uh well i'll tell you it's a bit of a ridiculous story but the story i thought i was um was it was a bit of a tragedy at the time but uh we basically completely messed up the first cabin in many ways and so it was running out of solar power in july that we just we just got so many things wrong and so we had to swap out we basically had too much in the cabin that consumes energy and so overloaded the solar system so we had to swap out a lot of the stuff in there and one of the things was a wood stove so we had this very complicated pellet burner that was electric start and just swapped it out for a good old wood stove which is what we we use now so we ordered this thing ben and i lugged it up to the cabin obviously it was a wrought iron wood stove so so very heavy wow and we got there and there was a guest checking there were two guests checking in the next day and so we're like that we'll just get us sorted today and then yeah it's all green we actually had to go pick them up from the train station the next day so we had to come back up anyway and got it out and the chimney was twice the size of the hole we had in the roof because they just had different flutes so we're oh my god what are we going to do about this and ben and i were still on handy at all so we're oh my god we're just gonna have to we're gonna have to cut a hole in the roof and it was it was getting late at this point so like let's go back down to london and tomorrow we'll come up come up early wake up at five come up early just get it done call my mate who's you know in construction and i was like what tools do we need went to screw fix on the way so we arrived at probably seven in the morning with all our tools ready to go the guests arriving at three so have loads of time and uh it started cutting through and it was it was wood at first and then you start to cut through intubation and then finally got to the top and there was just this metal plate and so we got on the roof and found that they welded a metal plate around that and obviously none of our tools could do that now to get back to screw fix buy this massive metal saw and that's a bit expensive well i have no idea i was like 40 quid i was chief of the cabin um so i was then up on the roof with this fucking metal saw trying to hack a hole in it so that we could get the the flu through made a complete mess of that complete health and safety hazard complete health safety hazard in the process i put a Stanley knife into my finger i'm really squeamish as well so oh no that was horrible i had to had to wrap it up with this like bloody rag basically and also had to had this waterproof paint so once we finally got the thing through had to paint the um you know the the collar back down uh finally got it done i was the one driving because it was one of these these higher cars so I had to go pick up the guests I had this bloody rag around my finger covered in black paint picked them up from the train station um dropped them off and anyway they ended up having a wonderful stay and but the worst the worst part of the whole day for me was I had to go to A &E to stop the bleeding in the evening I'm I'm so squeamish and the worst part of the whole day was in A &E I couldn't talk about it the woman the woman sat next to me had cut off her finger and she just wouldn't stop talking about it.

48:44I was so little passed out listening to her. So anyway, I got my finger glued up and it was all fine. Oh no. And for anyone not watching this on video, just listening to the audio, like Hector is just squirming so much in his season, like making every facial expression. Wow. But the lesson there is like... Do you don't like horror movies? No, I don't like movies. The lesson there was just like, there's always a way through. There were so many points that day, like, oh my God, what are we going to do? And again, it's when you look back, that's the other thing is like none of these things matter as much as they feel at the time it felt existential to the whole business what would happen there yeah when you're in the moment fundamentally worst case scenario would have just had to cancel one guest stay and then got a professional in to sort it out yeah and so yeah there's an interesting there is just an interesting magnitude that when you zoom out it's like what are we going to think about this in three years four years five years so it always feels so important in the moment but it ever is Hector your energy is so fantastic I feel like I need more Hector energy in my life because um never had a story like that on the traditional closing question often there are themes and a lot of them do go back to like self-care and found a burnout that's a really common one so not had that I love that there's kind of a funny story in the mix but but ultimately it's that power of perspective it's that exactly zooming back out is this going to matter in a few years time you can get through it one way or another like you get through it um And exactly.

50:11And it's actually your point is kind of like, what's the worst that can happen? I like asking myself that question as well, like not to induce any unnecessary anxiety, but just like, wait, what? Like, go there. It's kind of like what you saying before about like leaning into that discomfort of like, OK, what actually is the worst? Because, again, it's that fear of the thing that is the worst thing. And so to your point, it's like, well, I would have had to cancel. I would have had to grovel, make it back to them somehow. And you live to tell the tale. Hex, thank you so much for coming on Strategy and Tragedy.

50:44We've covered mould infections, therapy, breakups, all the stuff that I wasn't expecting to cover on an entrepreneurship show, but lots of all the good business stuff as well. So really appreciate it. Thank you so much. So much, Kevin. Come on. Love everything you do and so happy to get part two sometime. Thank you. Yeah, that would be amazing. If you want a part two, comment below. Really hope you've enjoyed this as well. If you have, comment the part two, hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks a lot.