CLIP: She Pitched 100 Investors, Here's What Happened | Founder of JUDE

0:00Olly Fawcett:Even though it was a good and easy time, not easy, but like it was a better time to raise that kind of capital. How did you find selling the idea to other people? Because listening to you now, I can understand the passion for it. I can understand the problem you're trying to solve. But I know in a lot of these health and wellness brands, a lot of investors don't get it. And they actually care more about what's the LTV a year going to be on a subscription or whatever it might be. So what was your experience like? Yeah, I pitched to like 100 investors. Wow. I think only one or two say yes. A hundred.

0:33Olly Fawcett:What do you think? What was the biggest challenge for you in that situation? I think people were just like, are you mad? Really? Like, what are you talking about? Incontinence. It's the last thing we'll invest in. There's no virality. People are not going to talk about it. You're selling to older people. So digital is going to be very hard. Oh, they thought you would be selling to sort of like 45, 50 plus only? Because that is like, it's still our biggest demographic. Right. It's like 45 plus women. Yeah. At the time, like it was quite hard, like CAC is going to be high. So when they look at these fundamentals, they know this business is now going to like fly or work.

1:10But one or two like understood the size of the problem, understood there were no competitors, understood the white space and were kind enough to give me so much time to really talk about it. And when I pitched, I also don't have a product. It was really the idea in my brain and going back to this really rich inner world. I was quite good at telling that story of the inner world and showing videos, showing this community that we've built and the depth of despair these women are in and this unmet need. And that alone at the time when capital is sufficient was actually enough for me to get one yes.

1:53And that one yes rolled in two yeses and then got 40 investors on board after like seven months of fundraising. But it was me, just me and an idea on Zoom. Yeah.

2:06Olly Fawcett:Where does this self-drive come from in sitting in front of 100 people? It's more than 100 people sometimes, right? Because there's various people on the call and getting those a lot in COVID in a pandemic. But you believe in the idea so much. Where does the drive come from? I think it's being able to probably tell my parents, yes, even though you didn't spend a lot of time with me, like I am a valuable member of the family. Really? Like see me and I can do as good as you're doing in your business and now I'm in business. So maybe you'll spend more time with me. I think that it came from that.

2:44Olly Fawcett:Really? Do you still battle with that today? I think so. I think so. But at the same time, I think it's quite difficult to let my parents know what I'm doing now because they know I'm running a business. But it's a space that they don't understand. The funding model is very different because they were bootstrapping the whole way. But I still believe, I mean, I believe that they love me a lot, honestly. And they, of course, treat me as a very valuable member of the family. but I think it was held beliefs that I had then and now it transpired to well we can talk about something else you know we can talk about that we have more topics in common it's interesting right you're kind of basically saying that the driver is proving people wrong a little bit right it really is and it's so interesting how many people I've interviewed now where like that's really the root cause and I think that it feels really negative because it feels like that's negative of energy driving you forward and there's there's like uh something you're holding on to and that's a bad thing but actually i do think that some of the most exciting brands and businesses are proving people wrong do you know what i mean it's like the investors it's the family member it's the friend it's the ex-business partner whatever it might be you know it's the people that you're like oh no everyone thought this wasn't going to work i'm going to prove that forward but in the moment when you're going through fundraising and so many people are saying no how did you personally deal with that because you were by yourself yeah so how did you how did you go through that like how did you have that conversation with yourself i just said a lot of people are gonna say no because i'm up front i knew what it's gonna be like um i've been an investor before i've said no to a lot of people right when it comes to them asking for investment so i know the default is going to be not i'll be lucky if i get one yes that was my mindset that really was my mindset And so if I set the bar so low for a response, then what I can do is to give it my all.

4:46I recorded all my investor pitch actually. And then I would like look at the investor pitch and I was like, I can do better here. I can tell a better story here. And I think that is a fuel to just make it better for the outcomes really.