Startup masterclass - how Seedlip went from idea to Diageo exit in 3.5 years - Ben Branson

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Oncensored CMO. Now, one topic I absolutely love is innovation. I really love talking to founders, finding out how they did it. And this next guest is Ben Branson, the founder of Seedlip. I totally admire what Ben has achieved with Seedlip. It is genuinely one of those innovations that transformed the category and did something that no one else has done before. So I caught up with Ben in this episode to find out a bit more about what's it like being a founder? How difficult was it to come up with something genuinely groundbreaking, brand new in the category.

0:39I also want to chat to Ben a little bit about his charity that he's just set up and his own podcast called The Hidden 20%, which focuses on people in neurodiversity. I think what Ben's doing is very special. And so I want to dig in a little bit about what inspired that and how it's impacted the world. It's a great conversation. I know you're going to love it. Here it is. Ben, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Now we are here and we've got a lovely lineup of Seedlip. So I probably should ask, you know, as the founder of Seedlip, where did it all start? Where did the idea for this come from?

1:11Definitely. So I think I must have been asked this question. No, this is no offense to you, John. I must have been asked this question probably 10 ,000 times in the last 10 years. And I have to keep it interesting for myself. So I've never told it the same way twice, but it didn't start as a business idea. It wasn't one of those. I've spotted a gap in the market. it wasn't even actually I went out and had a really dreadful non-alcoholic drink and thought oh my god I know what the world needs I like being at home and I'm from a farming family so I live in the countryside don't come to London more than I need to and so I was living in this little Hansel and Gretel Cottage out in Buckinghamshire in the woods growing stuff at home herbs veg and looking into the kind of weird stuff that I do looking into herbs that may have been lost or looking into different seeds I could get hold of got on the internet bought some old books came across a copy of this book called the art of distillation and I've got a 1664 copy of this book I should I should have brought it to show you.

2:28It's called The Art of Distillation. It's a little book originally published in 1651. It's basically a recipe book for herbal remedies using distillation. Some of them make alcohol. Some of them don't make alcohol. I thought this was pretty cool. And I bought a little copper still off the internet, a little two and a half liter copper still, and just started having a go. And this was literally picking mint from my garden and making a liquid that smelled and tasted like that plant, which if anyone listening or if you've ever had the chance to like distill something, it's really magical. And I was hooked.

3:07So I kept doing it, kept doing it, kept doing it, kept doing it. Tried loads of different things, nothing to do with drinks. I was running a design agency at the time. This was evenings and weekends. And then I had the moment of going to London to a nice restaurant. There were four of us. Drinks list comes. Looks amazing. Beautiful cocktail list. Lovely wines. Do you want still? Sparkling. Get the food menu. Nice atmosphere. Everyone's happy. We're out for dinner. But I'm driving. I'm not drinking alcohol. and so I asked have you got anything that's non-alcoholic and there wasn't a sure yeah absolutely there wasn't anything in the menu I couldn't see anything on the back bar and so what came over was the tray a couple of beautiful glasses of wine lovely cocktail and my pink disgusting, fruity, ridiculous, mocktail, horribleness.

4:14I just felt like an idiot because we've all been there. You're sort of, you're sat at the table, the drinks come over. What are you having? What are you having? And I'm like, I'm just embarrassed actually. I couldn't finish it. I didn't want another one. It didn't go with the food. I wasn't even really told what it was. It little thing, little psychological things. Like it didn't have a name. It wasn't in the menu. And so I left just thinking, why is it so difficult? That was it. I just thought, why is it so hard? We've got amazing alcoholic options. We've got amazing food options, regardless of allergies, preferences, etc.

4:55We've got all this choice. and yet if you are not drinking alcohol for whatever reason your options are soft drinks and water or some fruity sweet disgusting blend and so i it was not an overnight moment i didn't walk out thinking well i know what i need to do i walked out just thinking why the option is so rubbish and then and this i've noticed this over the last 10 years with new ideas actually i need I can't come up with great ideas on the spot. I need time. I need some marination for want of a better phrase. I talked to my team about needing to take things for a walk, not a literal walk, but like just a walk in my head.

5:40And so it was probably another three, four months before I sort of joined the dots of maybe I could work with my mum and the farm. Maybe I can work with my dad who's in the design industry. maybe there's something interesting in this pot still and what i'm doing at home maybe actually there could be a need for a decent non-alc option and then it was all very small and gradual maybe i'll take it to a farmer's market maybe i'll do this as a little fun project i work for a design agency well how cool would it be to kind of say to my clients yeah i know i know you founded your business and look i founded my little brand and that yeah ended up then being a two-year process leaving the design agency life savings go in um there's no farmer's market you know i'm there launching it in selfridges and yeah taking it to the most incredible sort of bars and restaurants and not really having a clue what I was doing but yeah suddenly it it taking over my life I think what I love about how you've described the story is I've spent most of my career in soft drinks and a little bit in alcohol and none of the companies I work for I think would have come up with what you came up with because in soft drinks like we've been on a mission to find the drink for when you're not drinking as you beautifully describe you know I love the way you position that by the way um but the margins in soft drink and the efficiency of the supply chain is all geared around getting things fast and cheap, you know, and it's seen as the, you know, the poor relation to the alcohol in terms of margins or that kind of thing.

7:26Then you go, I've worked at, you know, beer brands and spirit brands for whom the idea of doing something non-alcoholic is like anathema, you know what I mean? So it's funny because as you described that, I cannot imagine that ever being invented by any of the businesses I've worked for. They wouldn't have the patience. they wouldn't have the lateral thinking it would kind of break their minds in terms of you know because what you designed with seeded by anyone who's listening that can't watch is absolutely stunning thank you and the craft that goes in the care that's gone in the design the aesthetic is incredible like i can't imagine a soft drink company putting the level of effort that you've put into it you know you've really taken the inspiration from real high-end spirits and applied it to something that doesn't have alcohol yeah and i think i think part of the part of the challenge is it has been that binary and it has been soft drinks or alcohol never the two shall meet and you know we forget that we think about soft drinks in like single serve format and cans and plastic and not really glass as much and then we think about alcohol and we think about historically well that's in glass bottles and it's multi-serve and so there are loads of huge differences although they can obviously straddle lots of occasions i think i and because i have definitely done my 10 000 hours john on thinking about this kind of stuff so i did some work looking into what i'd call parallel movements of cigarettes uh and what's happened there cars and what's happened there meat and vegetarian side and what's happened there and even beer and what's happened with the non-alb beers and actually it was one of those beautifully wonderful moments of going holy shit am i okay to swear go ahead uncensored uncensored good point holy shit i figured it out all of these the first electric car was actually designed over 100 years ago the first non-alcoholic beer was over 100 years ago the first patent for an e-cigarette was over a hundred years ago.

9:33The first soya based sausage over a hundred years ago, even alternative milks over a hundred years ago. So you kind of go, these are all really old ideas actually. But then what happened was around the seventies, we had some people start trying to kind of play in that place. So everyone would have heard of corn. What have we got? Prius was doing sort of alternative energy, fuel type system for cars bex blue in the beer side we had those cigarettes that looked like cigarettes but they were electronic if you remember those and they were all real compromises actually they were a bit downplayed prius was quite cool in in its time but corn was kind of frozen and freezer and the little cigarettes were a bit rubbish and so it's and i would call them sort of the incumbents and then we've had in the last you know 10-15 years we've had all the insurgents and we've had oatly and we've had tesla and we've had whether you like it or not the likes of jewel and we've had athletic brewing over in the u.s who've done such an incredible job and these have all come from not from big corporates you know they've not come they've come from new brands uh and i guess that's what yeah that's what i've always sort of held on to i guess when people have told me that I was a lunatic or that seedlit was the worst idea ever.

11:01I've always kind of tried to hold on to that understanding that, yeah, we have proof points within wider culture. I think this is why, you know, innovators like you succeed because big companies box themselves in. They operate to a margin. They have, you know, customers that buy in a certain way. and like you know the cost of the serve must be way higher than you know you get in a normal soft drink where it's manufactured sugar water flavor you know carbonated and then it's done sort of thing how hard was it to create the taste and serve because you're setting a benchmark which is way higher than a soft drink would in terms of the experience that you're going to deliver so how hard was it to match expectations because I'm guessing you're benchmarking well I want to feel as I'm having something as good as a premium gin and tonic?

11:52So there are so many factors involved, I guess, sort of psychologically in adding up to, I feel like I'm not having a less than experience and I feel like I'm having a really grown up drink. And that can be, and so I could kind of plot so many of those from where you might find this drink. So if you find if you found, you know, seed lip in a in a newsagents versus Selfridges, you're going to have a very different experience. If you were served a seed lip and tonic in a top cocktail bar or a Michelin star restaurant versus, I don't know, your kind of local pub, or, you know, a coffee shop, you're going to have a different experience.

12:44And so even the fact that you know they're glass bottles they don't go in the fridge they sit there on the back bar the smallest words really on the bottle are non-alcoholic and then we built this brand initially by association and by distribution and so i never ever had to say that seedlip was any good that was my number one goal was to never ever have to comment on whether seedlip was delicious or not i wanted to go heston blumtal thinks sealip is delicious and he knows a lot about how things fucking taste so if you don't like it or you don't agree disagree with him or disagree with you know the food buyer from selfridges or harrods or whatever you know disagree with those guys yeah and so it was there were so many little factors of like selecting the right distribution even having the right price point which events we showed up at i mean we launched seed lip it wasn't even available to buy online i was really against e-commerce i had no idea i'd never bought anything online i was a total dinosaur but going and showing up with seed lip in you know gallery openings or polar events or you know we we just kind of established it in that premium space without ever having to say that it was premium either it was like let's never let's never say that you mentioned premium price i mean this was one of those launches that i really noticed because i thought wow that that's genuinely not been done before but the thing that's the back at the packaging and the taste all that sort of thing was amazing the pricing i'm like what that you know because when you come from a soft drink background like your price per liter is just like breaks all conventions because you're anchoring off a much more premium category and delivering it in just such a different way was did you get any pushback on how much you were charging or or was your distribution because you're going to selfridges or the fat duck or something did that help establish that premium yeah we got we got plenty of i got plenty of pushback i think the the interesting thing about the pushback was initially the pushback wasn't about seedlib and it wasn't about oh you've used oak and allspice and i don't like those or i don't like the taste of it it was it was way upstream from that it was what is the point in a non-alcoholic drink literally that simple and it and it was it was palpable it was tangible it was me standing in Selfridges, serving people Seedlip and Tonics, and a man coming up to me and going, what is this?

15:31And me going, this is Seedlip, it's a distilled non-alcoholic spirit, and him being angry with me. Really? And saying to me, why the fuck would you work for a company like this? And I'm like, oh yeah, it's my company. but so angry that a non-alcoholic option existed which sounds so crazy to say but it was you know we we place so much importance without realizing on alcohol on how we socialize what we drink and our drink choices actually being part of our identity you know everybody knows the oh I'm only a beer drinker or I only drink white wine or or she loves Prosecco or oh he's always on those health drinks or he drinks those protein shakes or you know we we we do much I think more than food drinks seem to be absorbed in sort of part of our identity which is crazy because you can now go on Instagram and find thousands of influencers who are sober and teetotal and that is that's how they earn their living you know which is kind of mad from where we were 10 years ago with with such dreadful uh with yeah real dreadful response so that was way before i could even get to saying how much it was i've already got to kind of try and explain to these people that you can't drink alcohol all the time and shouldn't there be a great option like what do you do when you're driving?

17:12So that was, we spent a lot of time and given we were the only non-alcoholic spirit from 2015 to 2018. So for the first three years, we were doing all category jobs. We were doing all the heavy lifting, all the education. And actually, if you imagine a kind of, you know, a pie chart, I'd say 85 % of our time was focused on educating people that they deserve a great non-alcoholic option. 15 % of our time was on kind of let me tell you about Seedlet, but actually talking to the world's best chefs and bartenders and people in hospitality, we were, it sounds, it sounds like ridiculous to be saying this now, but we were explaining that we think it's a great mark of hospitality in the modern age.

18:02If you are offering great non-alcoholic options, we think it's better than, it's better for your business too and you'll make more money and people will stay longer and have more drinks we were having to do that hand and foot like round you know going around every kind of bar restaurant etc this i think is the phase people don't realize isn't it because because um i did i was i worked for britvik for many years and did a little project looking at how long it takes for brands to succeed and i worked out the average time was seven years so by the way you're way ahead of that but you know you take a fever tree for example fever tree they were stuck in about 50 high-end bars for five or six years before they kind of kind of broke through and it's the education thing took them forever to go well if you gin and tonics to you know three quarters tonic make it a good tonic you know which now seems really obvious but that education job took a long time how did you kind of keep going through that period because like um you talked about you giving up your job you've invested in you know product it's not easy to produce i'd like to know how it's produced actually but then how did you kind of like back yourself for so long until you know of course eventually everyone looks back as well of course it's always going to be a success i don't imagine through those periods you necessarily sat there and thought of course this is going to be a success no no i i really i really hated the first six months really really hated the first six months and genuinely wanted to close the business every week and i know you hear people who start businesses say oh yeah i wanted to close it and we made all these mistakes but I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

19:34We went from me producing 1 ,000 bottles, and by the way, it was taking six weeks to make and we were sourcing all these ingredients, and it kept selling out really quickly. And so I had to go from me on my own making 1 ,000 bottles to then three, four months later, packing a white van with 7 ,000 bottles and driving it up to rent a bottling line up to Lancashire, filling them, driving it back down, getting people around to come and label the bottles. So we were kind of 7Xing production easy within the first six months and then actually having to hire a team. And I think I don't know what, I didn't really know anything about being a founder and what that meant.

20:20And so I think in my head I thought, well, I just want to kind of make the liquid and sort of stay behind the scenes. I didn't I sort of was too naive to kind of go well no one else is going to fucking talk about this and so I was also having to deal with yeah just being you know we heard from 100 countries in the first three months I was invited to Buckingham Palace and we had sit down having to do one-to-one cocktail sessions of teaching Kate Moss how to make drinks with seal it because she loved it we were hearing from all these bartenders who are a global community and so we had lots of people in touch yeah it was it was um i was totally overwhelmed totally how did that happen did that i mean that sounds incredible right 100 countries yeah no nice problems i mean nice problems what what was this what generated was it the sheer like novelty or the inspiration of it or did word get out what what led to all that response do you know we had a really good um full page write-up.

21:27I went, a journalist called Victoria Stewart, who's wonderful, me and her did a bar crawl. And we did a bar crawl sort of, when would that have been? End of 2015, so just after we launched. And Seedlet was listed in three places. One of those was Dandelion, which went on to be the world's best bar. The other one was Clove Club, the two Michelin star restaurant. And Selfridges was the other stockist. And she wrote this big page, wonderful piece. So we had some really good press. That was great. I think word seemed to get around the trade quite quickly, probably good and bad, and definitely felt like in all of our meetings, you knew where you stood.

22:12It was either a very quick meeting or it wasn't a meeting. And many of those people are the people that then we later heard are like yeah I was one of the first to try to see it I knew it was going to be big or we were having brilliant you know in depth meetings and I was you know we had a we got selling online I had this one customer who was buying it for her husband who was dying from cancer and I was like I'm going I'm coming to see you I want to come and see you and I've got this I want to bring you the old book to come and look at and I'd love to just come and spend some time with you. And amazing that it could sort of do all of that, what's real startup stuff, of really giving a shit about customers and really taking the time.

23:05But yeah, the industry is very small, you know, and we talked about it, framing it of like, there are only a thousand people that matter in the world for CLIP. If we can get those thousand people, we've got the keys to everything else and it's same thinking that we're adopting with season with silver with all of our projects a thousand people matter and those thousand for us were bartenders and chefs i guess and people in the drinks industry but i walked into the american bar at the savoy for a meeting with eric who was the head bartender at the time and he was like oh nice i was just hearing about you in greece last week and i'm like what's going you know this is so yeah i guess having a what can people take from that of there was something pretty polarizing about having a non-alc option that was expensive and premium that didn't sit in a fridge And that was, yeah, that was clearly talked about.

24:10And then just being super focused on not trying to be everywhere and really understanding who our first audience, our kind of first buyer was rather than worrying too much about the end consumer. I remember seeing a post from you actually that struck me. I think you recently shared the very first Gantt charts that you created for the business. Yeah. And you had this like offhand comment, something along the lines of like, this is the meticulous plan that I came up with and then never looked at again sort of thing. What's been the balance between kind of planning for success and actually adapting as you go?

24:45Oh, that's a really good question because I, with Seedlip, I literally did buy Business for Dummies. And, you know, I remember going and talking to a friend, sat upstairs in Whole Foods in South Kent to spend an hour with her while she talked me through what a value chain was. I wanted to understand every aspect of the P &L. I wanted to understand every job. I was absolutely voracious in my like appetite to kind of, I don't know, learn what a business is and learn about the drinks industry and read what other founders had written and get case studies on Fevertree, Brewdog, Hendrix, Innocent, you know, I was just absolutely voracious.

25:35And so then I guess sort of vomiting that out into kind of, okay, here are all the things I need to do to launch this. And I was diagnosed autistic in 2022. So I have a very, I can have an incredibly logical, analytical, rational brain and process of wanting to capture everything and getting that all in the right order. but because i had no idea that it's not how it fucking goes and it doesn't really matter you know planning is one thing i think planning now and thinking about launching new things plans are not what's going to happen they are an opportunity to think through what needs to happen yeah and i think that's so important because i spent way too much time i wasted way too much time and then i didn't even do it so i didn't even follow that plan and that's not how it went and so even things like in those first in those early days you know forecasts and timings and forget all the brand decks and tone of voice and onions and values and wheels and absolute bollocks basically you don't need any of it you don't need any of it until you've got to tell other people about it because there are more people working on your brand and they probably aren't full-time when you've got a full-time team however small working on it you don't need any of that it will be fine and rightly or wrongly definitely don't fucking pay an agency to help you with that you can do a lot of that internally but i do think that stress testing which channels you're going to sell in at what price point does the value chain work so that everybody gets their margin what what rate of sale do you think you need or could hit what are the reference points for what that rate of sale is regardless of sort of what happened you sort of got to do a plan but i think you just someone told me twice as long and twice as much and that's always what i've tried to stick i think very often a plan is about convincing other people not convincing yourself actually sometimes adam morgan who i think is like the guru of challenger brands he's got this beautiful phrase called intelligent naivety which i just think you're a really good example of because i don't think you'd have done any of this if you'd come from the industry right because you'd have had a billion reasons why this would not work right but i think the fact you didn't come from the industry you came from a different perspective and you didn't know the answers necessarily he says the answers quote unquote like who does to some extent but but that probably helped you because you took leaps that other people would have gone oh no you can't do that or we don't plan for this or plan for that that's part could be a lot of it it's so top of mind now knowing that with launching new things and i know a bit more but i want to maintain as much naivety as possible and that's a delicate balance because i definitely made loads of mistakes I didn't need to definitely I definitely wasted loads of money I didn't need to but that I don't know just sort of lack of resources making you incredibly resourceful and going great I'm just going to email 500 of the best accounts in the UK and I'm going to ask them what non-alcoholic drinks they have on offer free absolutely free to do that and the results of that gave me such confidence and such an understanding of the landscape of without driving around the country and without spending any money yeah the the sort of state of play of how poor the non-alc options were and so yeah having that kind of resourcefulness we touched on another point actually which you which is the beauty of the constraint of no budget which people people People underplay that a bit, but you have to make your packaging the media channel.

29:42You know, you have to make every customer your PR. Yes. You know, you have to make the serve so good that people will tell their friends, you know. And in a way, big companies become lazy because you just started what's the launch campaign? You know, how much are you going to spend? Yeah. You haven't got that option. So you've got to make all of it work. Yeah. I mean, we're launching a shandy this summer and we're doing it as a test. and next week we've got every single person in the team is going to pitch. They're going to do their launch. And because I don't like group brainstorms and I think we're going to get amazing individual ideas and then we're going to pull that together and do a launch plan.

30:20And we're doing it on a tiny budget and we're doing it as a, A, because we want to test and bring Shandy back and we've made an amazing Shandy, But also, I think for a team where we've got two other brands to focus on, there's some sort of light relief and learning here in having real constraints and just using your brain and being resourceful, I think is a good, yeah, it's a good like, it's a good muscle to keep alive and finding ways. we did this with seed lip finding ways to ensure that the team doesn't yeah just become rigid or lazy in their thinking um i think it's really important you've gone through the kind of innovative stage you you've got into selfridges you've got into some of the best mission-starred restaurants at what point did it kind of get get to scales you know to the point that you started getting interest from big organizations about you know partnering with you when when did that bit happen so we i worked out that in our first three years we were growing faster than i mean fuck you name it innocent brew dog fever tree hendrix we're growing really fast and you know ultimately we went to 35 countries in three and a half years we had three offices in three continents and i spent a lot of time out of the uk on a plane and flying around and launching and opening markets um with seedlet which i wouldn't want to do again actually it was kind of hell uh and that's even with a non-alcoholic drink so yeah it was it was a lot it all the first year i mean it was just it was it was fast and big and it was relentless there actually just wasn't even a there just wasn't a moment to kind of yeah there wasn't a kind of i don't know i've not had it before in a business where you're like oh it's just good guys yeah it's good it's nice just ticking along it just wasn't and that was either because we were dealing with problems or stuff was happening and we were you know launching another market or launching another product um so yeah it was just it was fast and big and you know we took investment from distilled ventures in 2016 um to pretty early on and that was good they that was very hands-off but we had the funding that we needed to kind of scale the business and so yeah it was i mean interestingly the spirits industry looks at those same how long as it takes to grow this kind of stuff and they get to about seven years before there's an intervention that's needed and ultimately you know we exited in three and a half years because the other mantra is well 10 years for an overnight success we hear a lot in the drinks industry and so actually when you think that seal it's been going for 10 years i had the brand i guess for four years i'm still a shareholder now i'm still involved categories now you know tens and tens of billions of dollars and there's thousands of options um i'm just clearly a sucker for punishment because i want to go right back to the beginning into the independent startup scrappy yeah messy bit yeah it was it was really it was really relentless it was really stressful um any advice i think people are surprised to know how stressful success is i think people look at it and go wow you're flying around the world you've got this brand you're the founder it's glamorous good on you and there's elements of which you know you should never complain about that because they're once a lifetime things but scaling something at the rate you did that puts a lot of stress on the supply chain on your your leadership on you know keeping the investors happy in this case any advice on how you go through that scaling process because i see a lot of great ideas or or creators that just don't get to that point they've got a wonderful idea but they can't make that jump to scale, which is what they're ultimately to do.

34:37Any advice on how to navigate through that? I mean, the first thing to say is I am scared of that happening again, which is probably the wrong thing to say when I'm at the beginning of launching two other businesses. I think having a great team around me was brilliant. All I did over that period is started doing everything and gradually everything got taken off me in a good way. And so I think I was doing the Instagram for like two years and I was, you know, and actually I just got more and more funneled and focused into what I could really do for the business. And you can only do that when you have a great team around you.

35:22And so having an amazing team of bright, young, driven, hungry, curious people who for the most part were equally naive and not from big drinks industry backgrounds. You know, the real requirements to join Seedlet was that you needed to love nature. I didn't really care whether you drank alcohol or not, didn't matter, but you needed to love nature. And so, yeah, I think having a great team, I think it's really easy in this day and age if you spend enough time on things like LinkedIn and I do this at the moment to kind of go, fuck, we're not growing fast enough. we're not going fast enough we need to be bigger oh my god it looks like they launched yesterday and now they're like massive and we have this weird aversion to actually building something and actually growing something and doing it properly i think we just everything seems to be overnight and it's not and you know i've interviewed enough people i guess on on our podcast where people might have just come across them or they're a singer that you know went absolutely huge on tiktok but they've been singing for 15 years yeah you know yeah and so yeah i i i kind of i do think it's important to enjoy it i do think it's important to have a really great team around you and i i do think it's important to kind of do it properly i resonate with that I mean, even though I've just taken podcasts as an example, I think thinking long term, I mean, the amount of podcasts that have a go and then give up, you know, so I think there's a bit of consistency and persistence is a big part of it.

37:05And as you say, having a team around you that is the old, I don't know if it's Branson that came up with this, employ people better than you. Yeah. Absolutely damn right. You know, just understand the key skill sets you need for growth in the different areas, whether it's supply chain or production, whatever it is, and you hire for, you know, talent in those areas. Yeah, I only, and that was only an exercise in what am I good at? And therefore there's my hiring strategy. I'm just going to hire for what I'm not good at. That's literally as simple as it was. Yeah. Now you did in three and a half years, right?

37:37You got to an exit. Yeah. So you beat, you 50%, you halved the average time. And by the way, the seven years is the success. This is the other thing I found wild actually looking at the soft drink data that I'd looked at is the seven years was only the successes. boy, there were like, for every one success, there were 19 failures. Yes. So you're basically looking at the real successes, had the persistence, they carried on, did the right things. They didn't go too mass too soon as well. So like you, they stuck at the high end to create the adoption and then kind of blew up. But to do it in three and a half years is genuinely incredible.

38:09How do you come to make that decision with Diageo to go, right, this is the moment that I do the exit? Because it's personal, right? Because it's you, it's you've created it. It's personal, but I'd already, we'd already cleared that up. It was already part of the deal. It was already part baked into the investment deal. And that really suited me because I had already known very well that my skill set is not about scale. I am not interested in scale. and I'm not the best person to scale a business or kind of, yeah, have a big business. I'm really good at the beginning and getting things started.

38:55I also knew and understood that I did want to have a big impact and that continues, that wish continues. I want to make a big change and I want to have a big impact. And in order to make a big impact, I couldn't do that on my own. And so it was a very deliberate choice to want to work with a company that was global, premium, understood spirits and cocktail culture, had a track record of building huge brands, like iconic brands, and had an understanding that founders were important in doing that. And Diageo are second to none at that. and so I had no hang ups on am I selling out I had it was all open transparent you join the business this is what we're doing this is the goal we want to change the way the world drinks that was always the goal and Diageo are going to help us do that and so it was yeah it was really really clear really really simple and really really open I gave 20 % of the business to the team and so everybody was driving in the same direction and it was all open transparent and was yeah hugely incentivizing for people i love the humility in that to know like what you're good at and unique at and what you want help with and like as you say you don't get any bigger or better than diazio to get a non-alcoholic spirit out into the world's best bars and yeah retailers the longer i do this the more i realize that i'm dreadful at selling and i'm not excited about selling and I don't get excited about selling.

40:37I'm dreadful at marketing. I don't know. I think the more I learn about my brain, the more I realize that me and marketing are real opposing forces. I hate brands. I'm really skeptical of them. And I don't, I don't have a good enough understanding. I don't think of like how to market a brand. What I can do is make really delicious products and start them in the right way that means that they are set off in the right direction from a from a strategic perspective and yeah i'm i'm sort of becoming increasingly okay with that i love the fact you say that and you're one of the best marks on the planet because you're so clear about why you're here.

41:35Your eye for design is incredible. Your storytelling is on point. The way you describe, you know, like the drink when you're not drinking. There will be people paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in big soft drink companies around the world trying to get to that clarity of insight. Your ability to influence other people and get them to tell your story for you, inspire a big corporate organisation like Diageo to scale you up. That's marketing. It's all genius marketing. Okay. A lot of people could learn from that. Maybe then it's more about some of the execution of marketing to a consumer where I struggle.

42:18But actually building the foundations of asking a really great marketer like, hey, look, I've made this and clarified it and made it simple and sticky. now can you go like but i think what i think we've done is you've done the really really really hard bit because most most i mean most people shortcut to advertising when they say marketing which they shouldn't do right yes but most people most people with advertising brief are trying to invent some authenticity and tell a story right yeah you've created all that organically and naturally and authentically so when you look up seed you get your story you know You get the farming story, the botanical story, the maturation, the whole thing, right?

43:01You've got naturally what 99 % of the world's brands don't have already, which is authenticity, which I think is marketing gold dust. Yeah, I think it's, you know, I see this really clearly with Silver, with our age spirit at the moment, that I fucking love trees so much. and they are so full of flavor that the world has had absolutely no idea about apart from oak basically there are 73 000 tree species on this planet like the the scope of this project is is enormous but what it is giving me is i guess i'm going to such extremes that most people will not bother to go to nobody I've you know I've bought two domestic ovens to cook wood no one's fucking gonna do that or stand out there and pick thousands of hazel catkins just at the right time when they are so fluffy and powdery and full of pollen and then distill them straight away so that I can capture all that freshness and like I'm this is all scalable but that's not important at the moment what's important is yeah slightly selfishly going i think there's an opportunity for something that's neat and that you sip and that's got that ritual and that occasion of aged spirits that you don't have to fill with mixers that's full kind of full-bodied but actually gives me a real opportunity to learn more about trees yeah but the other thing i think you you've naturally done even in the way you tell that story is you're joining some dots together that other people just don't join you know you're most people would stop i really love trees and they'd become really obsessed with trees yeah some people might stop i love distilling in my back garden right some people might stop i'm a great designer and i love designing right but the jump i think you've made which is incredible is you've brought those things together to create something that didn't exist in the world before and that's what i find so inspiring about it oh and then you've managed to package it in a way that people go yeah that makes sense why didn't that exist before yeah back to your um uh your sorry season yeah sorry i was gonna link to that years and years ago i was brand manager for about five minutes on angostia bitters amazing it's the most insane thing in fact they invited me out to um trinidad and tobago right because uh i had invented a cocktail book and they were so excited by the fact that someone had showed a bit of love to the brand love it they said come and show the board i love it i had this two-week trip to tobago to join their board and talk about cocktail, but it's insane that like that would be a thing that got me an invite out there anyway, random.

45:46But even then, like the pink gin and tonics, you know, just adding a little seasoning to a drink and it transforms the occasion. You've got an amazing insight there, haven't you? And the way you frame that as the salt and pepper of drinks, I just think it's very clever. I think this stands up for any food and drink product mostly and it's it's based on the fact that and i'm talking sort of startups and small businesses here and founder-led kind of brands but when you start from the point that nine out of ten are going to fail right you're kind of like okay the odds are really against me so therefore your next move has to be how can i do whatever i can to ensure that i've got the right conditions to mean that I've got that chance of being that one that succeeds.

46:39And relevance and need in people's lives, I think of everything, it doesn't matter how good it tastes or what it looks like, if it's not meeting a need in people's lives and therefore it's not relevant to them, I just wouldn't start anything if it didn't have those core components. The next bit is, can it connect in to what is going on in culture? Can it have a place beyond just the product that can sit in people's brains or tag on to various reference points? And so, you know, season is the salt and pepper for drinks. That's very deliberate. Foodies have a big understanding. You know, I went to chef school.

47:28I had it drilled into me every day. Season, season, season, season. and every day and foodies who want things to taste nice and will spend money on condiments and seasonings and spices they know that and chefs know that and bartenders do know that too and so rather than it's the difference between let me tell you about cocktail bitters what the fuck are they or have you heard of angostura let's start start by telling you about the competition you know who have 85 market share no that's probably not the best way to start either it's trying to find another way a bit like with seed lip of instead of going do you drink alcohol it's what do you drink when you're not drinking alcohol it's a real different frame on it and so yeah season you know season's only about a year in but having you know a white pack and black pack making it simple for consumers that you've got a light one that's green and lovely put it in your lighter kind of drinks and a dark one for your darker kind of drinks it's not kind of you know branding by numbers but i just gotta make things simple for people yeah it's really it's really well done and yeah if i angust you wouldn't start with angust era would you like if you if you were to kind of create the category that's being created i mean the oversized label and the weirdness of it and all that kind of thing um i wanted to move i can to talk about your podcast and your charity as well the hidden 20 yeah um extremely powerful and you know um inspiring as well you know you've obviously seed lips now moved to insiazio you're still inventing what led to the decision on hidden 20 you talked about earlier you know discovering you had autism it's quite late presumably to discover that how did that come about yeah so ironically it came about from uh where are we summer 2022 um starting to just connect into hearing some snippets of other people talking on podcasts and kind of going that sounds a little bit like me i you know i had i'd never heard the word neurodiversity before I knew such a tiny ignorant limited amount about dyslexia or Tourette's or autism or ADHD I had no idea that it's 20 % of the population globally like 1.6 billion people I hadn't even really properly understood the fact that every single person on the planet has a different brain you know and so I went and you know I had this 12-week assessment and the psychologist said congratulations Ben you're autistic and I kind of really felt that I really I really believed that and nobody was surprised when I told them which you know feels like I was kind of the last to know but it just answered loads of questions and made a lot of sense and I've been able to then I guess start embracing that and learning about that and kind of going fuck I've got this tool and I've got a photographic memory and I have really acute senses palate hearing smell I've never really realized what I can do with these things or why I gravitate towards making ridiculously long Gantt charts or obsessing over tree species or just attention to detail on hiding my ancestors' initials in the fox on the bottle of seed lip or just all these little things.

51:16And also why, ironically, for creating drinks businesses that are about including people and socialising, I'm incredibly antisocial. You know, I'm not the consumer for my drinks. I sort of, in the nice possible way, I don't really care what happens after I've made them. I kind of, that's the most important thing for me is kind of making them and then finding other people to work with who want to take them on and make them big in the world and make them sell and all the rest of it. So I was diagnosed and I then really, I started doing a whole load of research into it and I found two things. One, so many people that I look up to, so many of my heroes or so many icons in the world and in history thought differently.