Daniel Burton: ‘I helped my 9-year-old daughter launch her own tech business’

0:00Daniel Burton:Welcome everyone to the latest episode of The Naked Founder, the podcast where nothing is hidden. Thank you to our sponsors Financial, the home of money for women and our producer Dan Brown of Renowned. Our guest today is Daniel Burton, CEO of energy home tech firm Wonderwall Group. He got his first job at 16 repairing welding machines before getting into software. Eventually, he launched an advanced home automation system called Wonderwall, which changes the way that we interact with our homes. A proud father of two, when his daughter Ella asked for a£300 hairdryer, he told her to make her own, so she launched her own company at the tender age of nine.

0:36Daniel Burton:Let's meet Daniel Burton. Hello. Morning, Chris. Okay, listen, we're going to do a deep dive, but before we do, we start every episode of the Naked Founder podcast with the same question. What didn't they tell you about founding a business that you'd wish you'd known?

0:51Ella Burton:Jesus, that's probably a lot. I suppose probably the difficult part about being a sole founder is probably doing it all yourself. You are pretty lonely. You've got a lot to deal with yourself and you don't have anybody to share it with. So probably if I did it again, I'd probably have a co-founder.

1:10Daniel Burton:Yeah, a lot of people talk about the benefits of going on their own or doing it as a co-founder. I mean, I've got a business partner as well, which means that you share the best bits with them. And also when things aren't so good, you can speak to them as well. And everyone expects you to have the answer, don't they? They hope you have the answer, but sometimes you don't. So sometimes you have to just roll with it. Absolutely. I'm going to take you into your home life. We were talking before the episode and you mentioned your daughter. And I thought I must ask this at the start. So you've got two children and you've got a nine year old daughter called Ella.

1:41Daniel Burton:She's just launched her own tech business called Myoni.com. She asked you for a 300 pound hairdryer. You probably guessed the brand. And like any good parent, you said, make your own. What happened next?

1:58Ella Burton:Well, to be honest, Chris, I know I've been building technologies for many, many years. And I know what a product costs and what a product doesn't cost. And there's no way on this earth that a hairdryer should cost£300. So that was my response to my daughter's when she wanted a£300 hairdryer. It says, go and build one yourself. And that's how the journey started for her.

2:20Daniel Burton:Yeah, just explain that to me because, I mean, I looked at the website, myoni.com, and it's really impressive. I mean, I think you source the manufacturing in China, but she is the driving force behind it. And I think your hair dryers cost a lot less than£300.

2:36Ella Burton:Yeah, well, this was part of it. So we started off like any company ever does, is that you start by doing research. So I took her down to Curry's. She played with all the different hair dryers. She looked at what she liked, what she didn't like, and she put pros and cons against a piece of paper that she was writing against. And she she actually got to the point where she said, right, OK, this is what I want a hairdryer to do. So so after that, she has she built a specification of what she wanted to do. And then she got a designer in to start designing it. So that was the first start of it. And then obviously, once she's designed it, then it's a case of, OK, let's go and build some pre-production units.

3:18Ella Burton:and get it out to her friends and family and see how it performs.

3:22Daniel Burton:A lot of people might say that's tough parenting. I think it's really good parenting because what you've given her is your time and your expertise. AO founder John Roberts famously quoted as saying that he wouldn't leave any of his fortune to his five children as well. Do you subscribe to the theory that kids need to learn the hard way rather than being given handouts?

3:39Ella Burton:I completely agree. At the end of the day, I would always want my children to stand on their own two feet. I don't believe that you should provide everything for them. And that realistically where the conversation come around a hairdryer because kids' school fees are getting more expensive. So I said, well, let's go and find a way for you to actually pay for your own school fees. So that was how the journey started.

4:00Daniel Burton:Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you're listening to this, Ella, in a few years time, I'll probably want you on the Naked Founder podcast and you can spill the beans on your dad. I'm going to take you back a bit, talk about your story. You left school at 16 to work near Preston, near to where I live, actually, repairing welding equipment. Would it be fair to say, Daniel, that as a young as a youngster, you're more of a visionary than an academic?

4:21Ella Burton:Completely. Yeah, I never was very good at school, if I'm being brutally honest. My sort of my mind went away from from doing work and focus on other things. And yeah, but I learned a lot. I learned a lot when I left school at 16. But part of the job that I had and the company I went to work for, the guy actually taught me actually how to run a business. And that was sort of the real start of my journey around building companies was actually really understanding what it meant to buy a product, sell a product, margin, all the kind of things that you actually have to understand to actually build a business.

4:58Ella Burton:I got taught that at quite a young age.

5:00Daniel Burton:Were you entrepreneurial as a school kid?

5:04Ella Burton:Probably not. I never, you hear these stories about people starting up tuck shops and selling suites and selling things at school. That wasn't really me. I just knew I was wired differently.

5:19Daniel Burton:Do you think schools cater for people who are wired differently?

5:22Ella Burton:No, not at all. No, because schools have a structure about what they have to follow. And I see it from my perspective. You see kids that actually have this entrepreneurial, visionary type mindset. set and and they do stand out and they don't conform to the normal structure that a school gives them so they they sort of what actually normally happens is that they have a drop out of school and they they end up being very very successful but uh some some people just don't

5:56Daniel Burton:follow that structure i find it fascinating how many entrepreneurs and founders i've spoken to who weren't particularly academically gifted but had something in them that was different and in the end because of that they went out and uh you know they spread their wings and the rest is history okay let's take it back to wonderwall obviously you worked your way up you worked in software for quite a few years what was the idea for wonderwall where did it come from and when

6:19Ella Burton:did you launch the business uh well wonderwall the idea was probably end of probably 2014 uh beginning of 2015 so i was researching electronics i just sold a company and i was researching electronics and part of that I looked at I loved smart home technology the likes of Nest and Google that Google bought back in the day and I looked at all this technology and I wanted to have this technology in my home but the real issue is that it was so disjointed you had everybody doing certain parts of the solution and it was frustrating because all they were doing was making Can your mobile phone be a device to turn on different devices within the home?

7:04Ella Burton:And I just thought to myself, there has to be a better way to do this. So that's where I started out on that journey. And that's how the whole vision around Wonderwall started, because we didn't want to be another go to your mobile to turn a device on and off. We wanted to create a home that actually controlled itself, which in essence was the intelligent home.

7:24Daniel Burton:Every business has to come up with a point where they devise a name. I think Wonderwall, it's a brilliant name. And obviously it plays into the whole Oasis backstory as well. Where did the name Wonderwall come from?

7:39Ella Burton:Well, everybody says you're a Manchester-based company. You must love Oasis. But unfortunately, that wasn't the case. My previous company before Wonderwall, I built some technology where I put electronics into wallpaper. So I was printing Wi-Fi antennas into the back of wallpaper. I was printing light switches into the back of wallpaper and I was printing sensors into wallpaper to work out if my nan fell over and she couldn't get out the wallpaper would alert me. And that's where the name Wonderwall come from. We were actually giving the walls a job to do and making them wonderful.

8:13Daniel Burton:Yeah, it's just a great story. It's one that everyone remembers as well. So you launched Wonderwall. One of the things I remember about you, because we've known each other for quite a long time, was that I hosted a roundtable more than 10 years ago and you were on that roundtable. and there was a panel of businesses around the room, mainly from the property sector as well. And you explained your vision for Wonderwall. And like I say, it was like it's a brain on the wall that basically ran the entire house. And I still remember everybody in the room being like, you know, open mouth at the ambition as well.

8:45Daniel Burton:What was the ambition back then with Wonderwall? What are you trying to achieve?

8:50Ella Burton:The vision right from the beginning was to create the intelligent home. So realistically, a home automation platform that controlled like heating, lighting, security, safety, voice control and music. So realistically, that was our first vision around what Wanderl was. We achieved that by probably 2019. We obviously designed hardware. We manufactured hardware. We got a product out into the field in probably late 2019 was when we actually hit our first goal.

9:22Daniel Burton:I mean one of the things I remember as well is the way you described it you said look she said um what happens in in um in UK homes and homes all around the world is that you come and you turn the heating on and the heating and the radiators come on in every room and um you'll turn the light on upstairs in the bedroom but then you'll leave the bedroom and come downstairs and you'll watch television but you've forgotten you've turned the light on so what you need is an intelligent system that basically heats the room that you're in as opposed to wasting energy on all the rooms and make sure that when you're not in the room the uh the light goes off i mean basics really and that's how you sort of described it and i still remember it now is that an accurate

10:00Ella Burton:summary of what you were trying to achieve back then it was yeah yeah what we realized is that once we built the home automation platform uh we had no option but to start building heating technology because if we wanted to have full control over them and being able to control heating in each individual room then we had to build the technology build the technology itself so that's when we started building heating technology we started building infrared heating direct electric heating and now we have a an air source heat pump as well there's a big drive

10:32Daniel Burton:towards creating like net zero going net zero effectively you're trying to create net zero

10:37Ella Burton:homes aren't you oh yeah we built net zero homes we launched our first net zero homes probably in

10:43Daniel Burton:about 2023 yeah and you rely on 20 000 data points is that right yeah so we're learning about how

10:51Ella Burton:the home performs how you use your home and then just intelligently controlling it based on occupancy when you're home when you're not home what rooms you spend in spend time in when you don't spend time in but also most importantly how the price of energy fluctuates during the day so we only want to use energy on off peak so when energy drops to its lowest point we're going to store energy within the assets to actually power that home on low cost energy rather than using

11:20Daniel Burton:high cost energy you turn the dishwasher on when the energy is at its lowest cost

11:24Ella Burton:in a way but we control the most important parts which is how we charge your car how you heat the

11:31Daniel Burton:home how you heat hot water things like that okay um there used to be a tv program lloyd grossman through the keyhole so if i went through your keyhole daniel and i stepped into your house

11:40Ella Burton:what intelligent home tech would i see in your house ah well uh i i've got probably a 75 kilowatt of battery storage i've got heat pump i've got battery storage is that like a like a generator how does that work no battery storage we developed battery storage uh probably about four years ago with a with a company called catl one of the largest battery manufacturers in the world so we created a uh in essence a uh an all-in-one battery so a stackable battery that you put within the home which connects to the electricity grid but it's a very similar battery to what you have in an ev charger and in an ev car so an ev car will have a battery and all we're doing is rather than you charging your ev car up to power that car to run a certain amount of miles what we're doing is we're charging a battery up within the home to power that home on low cost energy so during the evening we charge it at seven pence a kilowatt we store energy within the battery and then any energy that's used during that house during that day is powered from low cost energy

12:43Daniel Burton:so you turn the light switch on you're not plugged into national grid you're plugged into your

12:47Ella Burton:um your battery we are still plugged into the national grid but we are we are powering off

12:53Daniel Burton:the battery rather than the grid and what else have you got in your home in terms of because you live breathe and eat your own company wonderwall yeah so um i'm not angling for an invite to your

13:05Ella Burton:house but i would love to see this i've got a 32 solar panels yeah i've got 75 kilowatt battery storage two ev chargers uh um air source heat pump uh hot water cylinder all electric um and our full home automation platform built into that yeah and then in terms of the technology clearly