How to Succeed on Dragons' Den

Thanks, Ian, for having me.

Yeah, sure. It's a free mortgage app that helps homeowners pay off their mortgages faster and save interest, just by doing their everyday shopping.

Yeah, I'm, the BBC are obviously very cautious around the whole process, so I'll try to give something away without giving too much away that I'll get in trouble with the BBC. But effectively they reached out to me. I got an email that just hit my inbox, and it was effectively like, "Apply." And I knew a founder who'd been on Dragons' Den twice, so I gave him a call and said, "Look, what do you think? What are the chances? Do you think it's a good idea?" Because I'd seen the show, but a lot of the businesses on the show are quite early. We were still early, but we weren't that early, and I'd raised some private investment. So for me it was, "Does it make sense for me to go on the show?" He gave me some of his first-time experience, and he also knew the producer of the show, because he'd been on Dragons' Den twice, with two separate businesses. I think he might be the only person who's been on Dragons' Den twice, once it got aired and once it didn't actually make the final cut. So he said, "Why don't I drop a note with the producer and also put in a good word?" Then I did the application, and I got selected and went through the rigorous process, which I can't go into too much detail on, otherwise I think they'll shoot me. But I got invited to the studios, and that was an interesting day. It was quite a long day. You see about 15 minutes of me on television, but I was in the studio for seven hours in total. I was in the den for an hour and a half. So a lot of what makes the final cut doesn't even, obviously a lot of it doesn't make it. So yeah, it's a long day for sure.

So, you've got to be consumer, number one, because it's got to relate to the people who are watching the programme. Secondly, if you can find an inside connection, someone who knows the producer and puts in a good word, that's obviously going to help. But I'm not, if you put in the application cold, it's on their website, so you can literally go on the website; they're always looking for businesses to apply. I don't know how many they get. I think the more interesting your business is, the more it'll stand out. It's a bit like a job application: you write some text on a form and then you kind of hope for the best. Then once they get in touch, there are a lot of strategies you can apply to give yourself the best possible chance. I've just got to be careful, but they will look at how well you speak and make sure you can articulate yourself well. They'll want to know the business, and they want to make sure you have integrity, I think that's important. The BBC are very careful about their reputation. Without going into too much detail, they'll assess those attributes, and once you get selected, you get invited to the studio.

So it is pretty intense. Generally you're by yourself, so you've got to be careful not to get too much in your head. I've spoken to other founders who've been in the den, and they said the longer you're in there, sometimes you can overthink things. So try to keep yourself busy, get a laptop, do some work. They have refreshments, which is quite nice. But it's really just keeping busy. I've got so much going on with my business, so it was pretty easy to get my head down and crack out some work. So it wasn't too bad.

Yeah, Gary Neville was the Dragon there, because I'm into my football, and I see a lot of Gary Neville's podcasts, so out of the five he was the one I thought, "Okay, I actually know", not personally, but obviously I've seen him on TV. On the other side, I don't watch Dragons' Den as much as I used to when I was younger. But actually, when I went in there, I wasn't that nervous, which was really strange. I practised my pitch quite a lot. If you watch the show, there's an initial two-minute pitch where you literally talk about your business and give a demo of your product. That bit is the most important bit, because if you get that right, in my head I felt like the rest of it would be a lot easier. I've raised quite a lot of investment since I started the company, it's a tech business, and it's very difficult to build a mortgage tech business without raising external capital, so I was very comfortable answering investment questions and questions about my business. I live it, breathe it. But in terms of the pitch, I've seen episodes where founders completely blanked out and literally forgot what they were saying, and that can be very embarrassing, very very quick. The Dragons are not afraid to say, "That didn't go very well, that was the worst pitch I've ever heard." That's the bit you want to get right, and you have a lot of control, because they don't give you that much notice, but you can rehearse and practise. So I literally spent a weekend saying it over and over again, kids literally jumping on me and pushing me and screaming in my ear, just trying to get to a position where I felt super comfortable, so that no matter how fazed I was, I'd be able to deliver it. That put me in a good position. I really felt that I owned that pitch, and I was supremely confident. Once that went well, that helped build more confidence. To be honest, I forgot about the cameras, I forgot about the lights, it was just those five individuals, and I was like, "My business is amazing, let me show these guys how good my business is." That was my mindset.

The difference, I suppose, is that when you're typically in a room with investors, it's more of a conversation. If you don't understand a question, you can say, "I don't quite understand what you mean." You can't really do that when you're on a one-take shot on camera, because the way it works is, you can't say, "Can you retake that, cut that." It's literally one take, and they have complete discretion over the final edit. You only see the final edit when everyone else sees it, so you have no idea what bits they're going to choose. From that perspective, it's a little bit more tricky. A good example: initially, I think Deborah Meaden asked me a question about something called layering, and I had no idea what she meant. Normally I'd be like, "Sorry, I don't quite understand the question, what do you mean by layering?" But you can't ask that, because that just comes across not in the right way. So you take a guess and go, "I think you mean this," and you answer the question, and then she's like, "No, that's not what I mean." If they have that in the edit, and it did make the final cut, it makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about. So that's the challenge.

Yeah, that's right.

So when I went in there, my attitude was that I wanted all five Dragons, that was the goal. I don't know if many founders think like that, but for me it was, I wanted all five to say yes and all five to invest. If that happened, that would be the ideal scenario. So when two Dragons dropped out, in my head I was like, "This isn't going that well," because I didn't expect it. Maybe it's not arrogance, but I just really believe in my business, and I was like, "How can you say no? This is probably one of the best businesses that's ever walked into the den." That was my mindset. I think, as a founder, sometimes you can be a little bit, what's the word, just so gung-ho about what you're doing that you think it's the best thing since sliced bread. When those two went out, I was like, "Okay, I'm in trouble here." And then you start to think, "All my investors will see this, all my family will see this, all my friends will see this, how do I keep fighting and try to get something out of this?" But Peter Jones's strategy, I found, was to wait and just let the other Dragons do their thing. And he was the Dragon that I knew, from the research I did, knows my space really well. He's on the board of Haldanes, which is a big financial services company. They bought a company called SPF, which is big in mortgages. So when he started talking, and when he started asking questions, they were really good questions, it became super obvious that he really liked the business, and that massively helped.

Yeah, I knew that I'd get grilled on the P&L, because I'm a tech company. There isn't a tech company like mine whose first year is not going to be making a loss. You can't bootstrap a mortgage fintech, it's impossible. So if you look at all the mortgage fintechs in the market, losing half a million in your first year, most professional investors would be like, "That's nothing, that's amazing." But obviously, with the type of businesses they see, for the normal person watching, a half-a-million loss is like, "Wow, this guy must really not know what he's doing." So I was prepared for the questions. There was a question where Deborah was like, "Why have I not heard of you?" And I said, "Because I'm not trying to grow." I probably could have said it in a better way, but it was the honest truth. Then I tried to explain how the unit economics at the time weren't right, and there's no point scaling aggressively when your unit economics aren't in the right place, because then you're just burning cash. Once we solved that, we started to think about scaling, and now we're at that inflection point. But obviously on television, that can come across not exactly the way I just said it now. You're trying to say it in a way that's not too technical. They're all tough, it all felt like they were asking good questions, direct questions. And you could tell a lot of the Dragons had done this for many a time, so they know how to create entertainment, and ultimately you're the entertainment, so you've got to sink or swim.

No, not really. I felt like there was enough in the tank. Because at the end, I think Gary Neville made a comment and said, "I think we're a bit naive", that the best thing was Sprive. And then at the end there was a bit of banter where Peter Jones goes, "Sprive might be the next PayPal." I think at the end of the hour and a half, and I'm not just saying this, I think if you asked all five Dragons, all five would have said yes. Once you got really into the detail, some of the questions they were asking were so in the detail, because they were obviously there for a long time, but it just wasn't appropriate for it to make the final edit. Once you get into the weeds, they start to realise this is actually a really exciting business, but by then, the two Dragons had already left.

Yeah, I think Gary was very like, "That makes me very uncomfortable." He's not a tech entrepreneur, he's in property, and in property things are a lot different. So I think that was one of the reasons he bowed out, he was like, "I feel very uncomfortable with that." And in my head I was like, "That is nothing." I met founders who are

I met a founder just for lunch recently who was burning two million a month.

So in my head, I thought £50,000 for 2% was really arbitrary, because it wasn't about the cash. I'd raised the investment, I'd raised £2.5 million, I think it came up just before I entered the den, and they grilled me quite hard on "Why are you here? You don't really need the money." So the way I saw it, it was more like an advisor. Sometimes, as a tech company, you bring in advisors and you give them, like a non-executive director, a chunk of the company. That's effectively how I saw the proposition. So I wasn't too bothered about the actual amount of equity I'd give up, as long as it wasn't, you sometimes see founders who go there and give away 20% or 10% or 30% of the company. That wouldn't have been economically viable. I could have got one Dragon for like 3%, that was on the cards, and that didn't even make the final edit, but I wanted more Dragons, I got greedy, so I was willing to give up more equity.

Yeah, so the first thing is a huge spike in the number of new customers, which is incredible. I literally had a dashboard on my phone that showed how many people were registering on the app, and it just kept going up and up and up. Then a couple of days later I was looking at my LinkedIn, because I did a few posts, and that was all blowing up. I had messages, I've never had so many LinkedIn messages in all my life, emails, WhatsApp, people calling me. Pretty much everyone I know in my entire life was reaching out to congratulate me, which was nice. I ended up doing lots of radio, podcasts, talking to journalists, BBC radio three times. A lot of people at my children's school were coming up to me, teachers were coming up to me. So I was like, "Okay, this is, not a celebrity, but this is probably what it feels like to be a celeb for a day." And then we were the number one finance app in the UK in terms of downloads, so I'm going to frame that and put it in my office, because that's a pretty nice career achievement, to build an app that's the most downloaded app in the UK. We were the sixth most downloaded app across all apps in the UK during that week, which is incredible. Even now we're in the top 100, and it's two weeks later. The growth from that, and people telling their friends and family, that referral loop has just been amazing. So that's been super, super good. And then partnerships: people coming up to me saying, "Let's partner, let's collaborate." You get so many opportunities that it's like looking for the wood for the trees, going, "Which ones are worth doing something about?" I've been working crazy hours, I'm probably dropping the ball in certain places, but just trying to prioritise ruthlessly. We're also fundraising, believe it or not, raising more capital. So there's all the Dragons' Den craziness, and also raising more investment.

So we spent a lot of time, because we knew we were going to be on Dragons' Den, making sure the app was super robust and that the customer team was all in a good place. The good thing is, I recorded it a long time ago, at the end of March, and then it aired in February. So you're talking about nearly a year between when you shot it and when it actually aired. So we had time to really make sure the technology and the team were in a good place, and I didn't have to do any knee-jerk hires. We hired during that last year to make sure we were in a really good place. In terms of my time, it's been busy. My wife's been super supportive, making sure home is running the way it should be, and I've just been very focused on the business. It's about being laser-focused on where you need to spend your time. My team is quite self-sufficient, so that really helps. You get a lot of interest, and you can quickly work out which ones you want to go back to, which ones you want to be really short with and say thank you and not spend too much energy on, and which ones you want to take the time to have a meeting on, whether face-to-face or a video call. I worked at Goldman, so I'm pretty good at getting through a lot in a short space of time.

Ruthlessly prioritising, yeah, that's kind of my bread and butter.

Yeah, at the moment we've spoken, obviously after the recording, but we've not spent too much time together, I've just been so busy. But the way the Dragons typically work anyway is: when you need them, they're there, but they're not going to be knocking on your door asking how they can help you. It's very much, if you need something from them, you can ask them, that's the general dynamic. So at the moment, everything's going well, and if there are things I need help with, I'm sure I could get in touch. But at the moment, I haven't really needed to.

So, the first thing is, we're still early in our journey, so we want to grow, grow, grow. We want to help as many homeowners pay off their mortgages faster and save interest, and then expand to maybe other geographies, other debt types. We've got some really exciting features planned. I want to create a savings product where the interest you earn on your savings goes towards helping pay off your mortgage sooner. We're trying to create a shopping AI assistant. So there are some really cool features coming out that will help homeowners save even more money. We've got some cool things happening, like, a customer every week can get their next month's mortgage paid, which is nice. Customers can get like a thousand pounds towards their mortgage. So we're just trying to create more buzz, add more features, and then take each day as it comes and see where we end up.

You've got to do it. You'd be mad, if you got the opportunity to actually go in the den and effectively showcase your business, you're not going to get a platform like it. How often can you put yourself out there and talk about your business for 10, 15 minutes in front of three, four million people? The amount of money you'd spend trying to get that kind of airtime, it's millions. So yeah, it's a no-brainer. The personal risk is that you don't do too well, but at the same time, people know what your business does, and if your business is solid, then you'll still get good PR from it. I've seen so many founders who've been on it, not done well, and they own it, and they use that as a new marketing angle, I'm sure you'd find an amazing way to spin it. So it's about getting yourself out there. If you're not willing to take this risk, then you need to decide whether being a founder is the right job for you.

No, thanks for inviting me. It's good to do this again.