Daniel Murray - Founder & CMO of Grabble

Full transcript: Daniel Murray on London Real

0:00 This week on Silicon Real, we have Daniel Murray, founder and chief marketing officer of Grapple. If you possibly can when you’re raising money for startup, it’s a journey and you got to take what you’re given at each stage And hope that it improves Silicon real presents Daniel Murray gravel Try things and be positive This is a silicon real the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene My guest today is Daniel Murray who is the founder and chief marketing officer of gravel which provides instant Shopable fashion content that can be bought on the go in just a couple of swipes It’s also known as the tinder for fashion You guys are currently the number one ranking fashion app in the UK You’ve just raised 1.2 million sterling from some high-profile angel investors like skim links chairman Alex Hoy good friend of mine great guy and mark boyin who backed Pinterest and Jamal Edwards SB TV Daniel Welcome to Silicon real. Thank you very much Brian. Thanks for having me. It’s good to have you know I guess we should just come clean and tell everyone that we met at the gym because that’s how I bumped into you I saw you wearing your seat camp shirt. Was that it? Yeah, that’s very true. It’s so funny That was the one day I wore it as well. I got in trouble for having it on It’s hilarious though that um that we happened to meet at the gym of all places Yeah, I know of all places and it was weird and I it’s weird because I wasn’t always that guy even a year ago

1:53 I was a little quieter and I just introduced myself and and all of a sudden we started talking and then I started You know playing with your app today, and it was I was I was super impressed You know, I want to jump into also the whole concept of competing in the app space because I had the CEO of hotel tonight here A few months back and you know There are another app only platform and he was just telling me how it’s a it’s a completely different ballgame than not being in That space and I know you’ve learned a lot about that over the last year. So right interesting You mentioned hotel tonight right last thing that I read before I came out here tonight was a case study of a specific thing that Hotel Tonight did because actually they’re pretty great innovators in the app space and being the CMO I subscribe to every single growth hacking subscription newsletter whatever you can possibly get and there’s a great one by a guy called Morgan Brown that I get and his newsletter today was on Hotel Tonight and how they improved their not ranking but actual bookings by discovering that people were more likely to book on Hotel Tonight’s app on 4G than they were on Wi-Fi and the reason was because on Wi-Fi they were more likely they had faster bandwidth so they’re more likely to try out different competitors in different areas but it’s a totally counterintuitive thing to understand but as soon as they looked into the data on like 4G sorry 4G versus Wi-Fi they just double down

3:15 On their budget on 4G-only connections and made a killing. So it’s quite interesting seeing, you know, looking at the data of companies like Hotel Tonight and what they do. Yeah, and when I talked to him, I just wasn’t aware of this whole app space versus the non-app space and how it’s a completely different competitive landscape. You know, everyone has a buddy who wants to design an app, but then I don’t think they ever know what it’s like to market an app and how we can get completely lost in the storm and only the top 10 can come up.

3:42 And so I’d love to talk to you about that. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on. But one of the comments you made that I picked up on when we were talking is this. You said that you focused your efforts on the user experience primarily on mobile and then e-commerce secondly, when a lot of your competitors or a lot of people in the space are trying to stuff commerce down a mobile platform. And I know that’s a nuance point, but I’d love for you to expand on that because I think it’s the difference between you guys being alive and you being dead.

4:10 Yeah, so for us, it’s very simple be like, oh, Tinder for fashion. Because on the face of it, that is a pretty simple thing. And you really do swipe left and right to say the kind of fashion items you like, right? And your algorithm learns from that? Exactly.

4:24 And it’s a very simple way. And the other great thing is your typical way of understanding your customer in a web-based product is, do you like this? Do you like that? Would you like us to review your feedback, et cetera? Whereas, because you’re making binary options on our app the whole time, you’re always making a decision.

4:39 So you’re always giving us data. And that data is quite, you’ve got be careful how subjective you are with it because just because you swipe left on a green shirt doesn’t mean you don’t like green doesn’t mean you don’t like shirts there’s a lot of nuances that go into the data but the important thing is we start to understand especially things like price point which is key and brands that you like but yeah like you said the the key to us was you know me and my business partner Joel we are on our phones all the time as is everyone Really, but we noticed we’re on our phones all the time and you know, we’re getting nagged by other people mostly our parents You know about being many how old are you and your founder? We’re both 28 28. Okay, interesting All right, which makes you you know a little old, you know that you older. Yeah, so this is our third business Okay, but it’s the first that we’ve raised external finance for so we ran a couple of other businesses previously They were both profitable. I always like to joke. They were profitable therefore. They weren’t interesting therefore we can them But they weren’t scalable from our perspective, but both of them we ended in profit and we actually, the second one, we made a considerable amount of profit in about four months and decided we didn’t want to do it.

5:51 It was a daily deal site. It was absolutely horrendous business, not ever, ever going into anything like that. Okay, I want to talk about that later. Sure, we can talk about that, but yeah, not a fan, but the point is we made some money and we were able to, it was why we were able to not pay ourselves for the first year of doing gravel. we were also able to pay for our first developer and do some market research, which is actually how we started off with Gravel.

6:11 Gravel started off completely different. We just went out speaking to consumers, finding out how they shop online. Right, I remember you said like the first nine months of Gravel, you realized you were getting it wrong. You were getting it wrong. The reason I mentioned your age is because I’m guessing your average age of your, the user of Gravel is younger?

6:27 Or is that just me assuming? No, you’re correct. Okay. Average is 25. Okay.

6:33 So we say it’s an 18 to 30 audience. There are outliers in there. There’s a few. Like me today. Sure, exactly.

6:40 You’re skewing my data. Sorry. No, but actually, 25 to 30 is kind of our sweet spot at the moment in terms of users. We have just hired a new fashion director who comes from Net-A-Porter Group. And the idea with that was to try and sophisticated the product slightly, not to take it like a high end, because there’s great companies and great apps in the space doing that already, but we want to find out the right niche that fulfills the market for that sort of 18 to 30 market that is, if you think about it, extremely wide in terms of their interests and their points of difference.

7:16 But when it comes to things like personalization and stuff, it’s also important to understand the mid-range and the more sophisticated choices people might want. Right, that’s very important for you. So you said that you found that you were on your mobile all the time. So yeah, we were, yeah, so I took a bit of a tangent, but we were on our mobile all the time And we’d created this website and the concept originally was Pinterest meets ASOS, right? So you could get a grab button, you could save your favorite products from any other site back onto our site, but they’d be fashion products and unlike Pinterest, they were rich in data.

7:46 So we were able to track the price and stock availability of each product. So if it ever went down in price, a user would get a notification going, this ASOS shirt you like has gone down in price by it now. And we were often actually able to tell our users it had gone down in price before even ASOS were because our script would read it first. And by the time ASOS have done a sale with email out, we’ve already told our users. So that was quite an interesting thing as well.

8:08 But for us, we basically noticed our, I mean, we had a younger audience then. It was more 18 to 25. Our open rates, they went crazy on email. So it’s like 80%, which is unheard of. 80% of our audience were opening emails on mobile.

8:23 And then we’re opening up. Our industry standard would be 20% or 10% or 5%. Yeah, I mean, it’s growing all the time now, of course. So towards the end of last year, for the first time ever, where 50% of all web traffic in retail went from mobile. So suddenly, there’s this massive trend where actually, mobile has just come into a huge, huge, huge space in terms of actually shopping retail.

8:45 The reason for it is because everyone is essentially getting traffic from social media, and most social media is being consumed on mobile. So if you’re a top shop and you’re sending out a tweet that’s engaging and people want to buy it, they’re going to click it there, they didn’t come to Topshop’s site through their mobile. That’s just the logical way they’re gonna get there. Right, does that mean email’s dying, or is it not necessarily one or the other? Email has its place.

9:07 There’s loads of debates all the time about email, and email needs a redesign, and email needs a rethink, and of course there’s the new inbox by Gmail, which is an interesting sort of rethink of it all. The way it filters things. Yeah, I like it, but it’s very polarizing, I’ve noticed. So I think email actually still has a really good place. and it still converts really well for us, actually.

9:31 But what was interesting at the time was it was converting terribly because we had, like everyone else, a mobile web site, and it was just delivering poor, poor, poor results. So we really struggled, no matter what we did, no matter what designer we worked with, we struggled to fit in a quality e-commerce experience into mobile web. Okay, even when you were designing for mobile, you still had a hard time getting it right. It makes no difference because this is always limited the size of the hardware so you look at the biggest hardware phone on the market be the iPhone 6 plus and and even so it’s big it’s quite a big phone but even so that’s like the limited shopping window realistically to be getting your filters to be getting your basket to be getting everything in so it’s interesting because as a browsing experience I mean look if you’re going to purchase and you know there’s things like PayPal etc to make it easy that’s okay but the reality is if you want to browse on that experience it’s incredibly frustrating. We looked at all the mobile apps like from Topshop to Net-a-Porter to like you know the ASOS and good apps the ones that are the most popular and realized they were all doing the same thing which was they were probably sitting in product teams working out how on earth they can fit e-commerce into a mobile app because they’re e-commerce companies and that’s what they need to do. So Joel and I were like well actually let’s look at

10:48 This completely differently what are the apps that are addictive on your phone what are the apps that are like the go-to apps that you want to use that You just you know everyone is guilty of this you’ve you’ve used Twitter Facebook and Instagram that day And now you’re just staring at your phone looking at it like it’s got to be an app I can kill some time on here when you have 25 other apps down and you don’t open them right everyone and everyone does it Everyone’s like not that one now and spit cumbersome right the ones that go to ones are just easy and like tinder was like a Massive massive win so firstly Like everything about tinder is obviously genius, but everyone knows the number one winner is the UX and when you say tinder for fashion Don’t have to explain it to anyone. I mean even my mom knew what tend of a fashion man He’s not yeah, I knew when you told me Do you ever feel bad about saying you’re tender for this or that or do you just like look that’s the best way to explain I mean, it’s three words Yeah If you can lots of people say that if you can explain your company like your mission your u.s And everything about what you do in three words or onto a winner I mean we used to try and explain the website and ASOS meets Pinterest was easiest one You still have to explain what that means tend of a fashion is an instant You know correlation in your mind right so you had gone down the road and develop this whole interface for web

11:58 And then you did a 180 and you just we walked away from a lot of that development working right and went to the app So it was really painful So we I find this fascinating because you have to be a certain kind of company in a certain kind of person to do that We had no choice, so you’re you’re right you’re totally right But basically this the story for me and Joel was so this is a unusual thing for tech company neither the Joel or I are tech at all so we dabbled and we created this daily deal site where we used a Ukrainian white label software solution and learn some HTML but that’s not coding so you know we had this struggle and we’ve always had this struggle until recently with the technology with who we’re working with with the technology do we trust them are they contracted day rates they outsourced we’ve tried everything there’s no golden bullet for us you know it’s just after a period of time you find the right person you stick with them. So we’d actually gone through slow rounds of funding like you know 25 grand here and 50 grand there and always to prove the next sort of needle and all those needles were based on the web. So we eventually ended up raising 250k and it was this promise to deliver this nicer looking web platform that our consumers expected we’d done some research you know the UX UI that wasn’t quite right but the concept was good what we had. So we raised this money to create this website, it was delayed and delayed and delayed as things are with

13:21 Developers. We lost a lot of our users and a lot of our users’ trust, which was frustrating for us. Also, at the same time, you’ve got a team who aren’t developers, who are kind of limited in what they can do. So, you know, waiting for instruction and waiting for something to happen. There’s no website there, really.

13:38 Kills company morale. Totally, totally, totally. So, these were all challenges that we had. When we finally launched a website, we were like, thank God, we’re sorted, we’ve done it, we’ve launched this fucking website, boom, let’s go and market it, let’s get these users, and we send these emails out, and this is in June, maybe June, July kind of time in 2014, and these open rates on mobile had gone from 30% when we were like, it starts to relaunch in March to 80%, like I said, by the time it was July.

14:07 And that was in an email open, right? That was an email open, right? It was, yes, we send an email, everyone’s opening on mobile, so they’re coming straight to our mobile site, and then we were like, Jesus, mobile experience is cumbersome. And then we speak to all of our clients, a lot of retail clients, so retailers have always been very positive about our mission and what we try and do, so they get great feedback from them all the time, whether it’s positive or negative, they’re always really communicative, which is fantastic, and very lucky if you’re running a startup because you do get that inside track, they all have the same problem.

14:35 But it’s very interesting, the mobile web app debate, it all comes down to the user, So there’s a few things, but how many apps is a user going to have on their phone? Well, it might have 100, but when it comes to retail, when it comes to e-commerce or fashion, they’re only going to have a couple because you’re not going to have 10 fashion apps on your phone. So very typically, people have Top Man or Top Shop, ASOS, and Net-A-Porter and Mist-A-Porter. So you’re talking three or four apps in that space are basically, they’re not unicorns, they’re like the lions, if you will, and they perform well, they take a good market share but generally none of the other retailers are willing to create an app because they’re obviously aware of the difficulty at distributing the app, maintaining the app on the person’s phone and obviously you know from a technological perspective there’s a lot of maintenance that goes on behind the scenes for them so they all commit to mobile web which not necessarily the wrong strategy but if you’re a consumer and you have an app it’s ten times as fast. You can think about the user experience a lot cleaner. There’s a whole load of valuable reasons why an app is better. Right, do you remember when you made the decision with Joel where you’re like, we’re going this way? Yeah, he’d spent about seven hours on Tinder that day. But that was a major inspiration for you, right? Yeah, it was a good artist copy, great artist steal. Absolutely. So he, in

16:01 In fairness, we had secretly done an HTML5 app previously. We didn’t have a mobile team. So we’d used our web developers to create basically an HTML5 app, which did that in prototype. And we passed it around our team, and we passed it around some friends, and they were just all loving it. So we were like, well, actually, if that’s the case, maybe this is good validation.

16:24 So let’s look at this. So the reality for Joel and I was we’d raised this money. raise 250K to deliver this web product and it had given us until maybe December, roughly, so just recently. And we launched it and we’d spent a lot of money, you know, we still had time except then we realized that, you know, we’d made a big mistake and actually the thing that we raised money for, the money that we’d spent, was ill-advised, it was the wrong call. So we went to some investors, well, we went to actually all of our investors, some investors were like, no, absolutely not, don’t do that, like commit to your vision, it’s It’s a great vision.

17:00 Other investors were like, that’s a great idea. I actually agree. Don’t worry about the money. Just make sure you do it. And before you run out of money, you won’t be able to raise any more.

17:08 So we had this really difficult period. Hardest period was between July and September, where there was this website that we weren’t really committed to internally anymore because we decided we were gonna become a mobile company and actually being able to release our MVP of the app, which happened like the last day of September, pretty much. So pretty much October. And we’d been around for a year by then. So we started in September 2013.

17:36 So classic pivot. By September 2014, we’re an app company. And what did your investors say about that? Was that how you saw it? The younger ones, this is completely honest.

17:49 The younger ones were really into it because they had all become so mobile obsessed. The older ones, who really we’d gone to for a lot of guidance and had been great for us were really anti-it, which was difficult, because we trusted them a lot. They trusted us a lot. We’re spending their money. At the end of the day, it’s a mutual relationship.

18:07 We’re really lucky we got a really great relationship with every single investor, but I’d say it was a 50-50 divide, which was hard. It was bang in the middle. When I was talking to the CEO of Hotel Tonight, he was just saying, Brian, when you get into the app space, it’s just a whole different world. It’s just like a whole different set of rules. You know, Newtonian versus, you know, Quantum, you know, and everything changes and he said you can’t run your Google ads.

18:33 You can’t do all this other stuff that you might be able to do to boost traffic you either in or you’re out. You know, I know you guys are enjoying kind of a number one ranking fashion app in the UK, which is fantastic. But if you’re not in that top 10, is it really like being in the neutral zone somewhere? Yeah, it’s I mean, we’re sure obviously we suffered from originally. So the first app we launched was Android.

18:56 It’s a little better than the app store because there are some SEO, Google in-built things you can do. If you have a niche, like fashion, I mean, everyone has a niche, right? Then you obviously need to play to those keywords and make sure you throw in all the right ones. And actually, the stuff that we do is we actually have to constantly search is an old game, right? So search is one of the main reasons, interestingly, that we were like, you know, just screw this website stuff because SEO has just been done and mastered for years and to try and come in now with a website that you think you’ve got a chance with SEO and there’s no chance whatsoever.

19:33 You can’t afford it. You can’t afford to get up there. You can’t afford to do the PPC. You can’t afford any of it whereas the app market is still kind of fresh, realistically. I mean, there might be millions of apps but it’s still kind of a fresh game and people are still relearning the rules.

19:46 So ASO, which is App Store Optimization is more of an interesting thing that we’re able to just say, right, well, we’re new players to the game. But then again, if you consider a million apps over sort of 100 million websites, I know I’d prefer to be challenging. So for us, it was actually doing searches on things like, well, AW15, for example, which is autumn, winter 15. It’s like the current season gets a ton of searches in the app store, and no one really optimizes for it.

20:14 And so making sure that you have that little thing somewhere in your description means you’re gonna be found for like the latest looks and stuff. because if you’re a fashion consumer, that’s how you speak, that’s your vernacular. And you’re speaking to businesses sometimes, you’re B2B playing that way because you want to talk to those businesses. In retrospect, can you look back and say, it was us making like one or two or three simple choices to get where you are now with that ranking of the app?

20:38 Was it, I mean, obviously I guess the design was such an important part. Okay, that’s a good question. Without giving away too many secrets, but. Yeah, well, I mean, I wish, I think with a lot of this stuff, So for example, someone asked me, this is genuinely true. So I actually met you in the gym the day after we had the number one ranked fashion app.

20:58 Yeah, yeah. You showed me. I was like, yeah. I was showing everyone. I mean, I was like, I couldn’t believe it.

21:03 Do you know how we knew? Joel and I were working Thursday night. We were just like, it was maybe 8, 9 o’clock. We were just talking. And we were like, well, we were talking about something we wanted to do on the weekend.

21:14 So I was like, well, I’ll check the timeout app. And he went to look on the app store to download the Time Out app and was like, holy shit, we’re the number one app. And we were like, well, you know, the two of us, and he was like, just open up your app store right now, and I was like, oh my God, what’s going on? And you’re an app company and you didn’t know. Didn’t know, didn’t know.

21:30 So this is the thing, like that spot is basically reserved for the judgment of Apple, which I’m proud to say is, you know, is- They have wonderful taste. Something, fantastic taste, thank God. So we were super chuffed. But, you know, there’s different elements. So the things that we’ve achieved that are notable on the App Store is we’ve had the number one most searched for app in the UK during Black Friday, which is the biggest shopping day of the year.

21:55 So that was a massive milestone for us. We also like did fantastic traffic. So fortunately Skimlinks, we use Skimlinks and fortunately one of our investors as you know is the chairman of Skimlinks. It was good news for us because actually he hadn’t invested at the time. This was all we were in conversation with him.

22:13 And on Black Friday, we did 1% of all of Skimlink’s mobile traffic. All their sales, sorry, 1% of all their sales went through the Grabble app on Black Friday. Here’s this guy we’re talking to who’s chairman of Skimlinks. And I was like, Alex, did you know he’s like, yeah, I know. I want to invest.

22:29 So I was like, thank god. That was the best thing we could do. So then we had the number one search for apps. So that’s like in trending searches, it says Grabble at the top. The way we got that, we basically did a lot of activity on Twitter.

22:42 So almost all of the marketing we’ve done, since this is speaking as a sort of CMO, the number one thing we learned the hard way is advertising doesn’t work for us. You know, I used to, I come from an advertising background. Advertising’s great, I love advertising, but sometimes it doesn’t work for what you do. Being a fashion app and being like, hey, we’re a fashion app, you need our fashion app, is just not a way to approach it. What you need is word of mouth.

23:15 And of course, word of mouth is easy to say and hard to execute. But of course, as any marketer will know, that’s why influencers are around. We did stuff with YouTubers. Amazing influencers, like amazing. So they’ll do a YouTube video.

23:30 They’ll mention gravel just somewhere in there. And that gets us a lot of traffic. And then same thing with Twitter. So for us, when we launched our app, We, well, our beta, so not our MVP, but when we really went to launch it, we basically locked myself in a room in Twitter. Sorry, not in Twitter.

23:51 Hi, how I felt. No, I locked myself in a room and researched all these different Twitter pages, all these different accounts, all these different bloggers, and who would be influential. And I got in touch with maybe 500 or 600 people to ask them all to tweet out at a certain time about Gravel, and the only rule that I gave them was they weren’t allowed to say download gravel. They weren’t allowed to hashtag gravel. They weren’t allowed to act gravel.

24:16 They weren’t allowed to, I say the only rule, sounds like 10 rules. They weren’t allowed at any point to endorse gravel. The only thing they were allowed to do was say, say they do a meme, for example, of someone with a happy face or whatever, right? It was that feeling I get when I find that dress I want on gravel. You know that a CMO at any Fortune 500 company would have told them to do every single one of those things.

24:41 Yeah, but I mean, we tried them. This isn’t like we’re a genius. We tried all those things and they didn’t work. So this comes down to timing again. So this was the most stressful part of our entire period at Gravel was this two week period because we had spent almost all our money.

24:58 So we’d got the funding and we’d spent all the money on developing the web product. And we realized we’d done the wrong thing. And so instantly we have to become a mobile company and we have to find a mobile design and we have to find a head of mobile. We have to find a new product manager that’s mobile focus and we have to like out with the old and in with a new and just Fucking become mobile. So that’s expensive. And when you’ve got nothing nothing but like a clear deadline You know how long it takes to raise money as well. You’ve got no choice So we had that and we had maybe 25 grand in the bank. Where are your gray hairs?

25:30 Well, yeah, they’re coming believe me. We’re surprisingly calm. I get this up and down. It’s your coffee This is the calming coffee that you gave me. The calming coffee.

25:39 So you’ve got the funding deadline coming, you’ve got the bank balance dropping, you’re really not even pivoting, you’re pulling like a whole completely different business strategy. Yeah. But you see it all happening in your mind. You’re like, we can make this happen. Well, we tried.

25:51 We just, this is the thing. So we tried to advertise, nothing happened at scale. So we tried Facebook ads, which were for some companies and you know, I actually believe in them, but not when you don’t have much money, you need time and space for them. Yeah. We tried Twitter ads, we tried banner ads, we tried, I mean, everyone will get in contact with you ever if you ever run a mobile app company we can optimize your CPM for £2 per install £3 per install that’s like UK average it’s like well I don’t have the budget to do anything at scale my investors are gonna think like what you know what the hell so I really had to think so what we had was five grand what was five grand? We had five grand and I said to Joel who’s like holds his purse strings really I’m like you know we got five grand we’ve got about two months like what the hell are you gonna do so I took that five grand I just like researched all these people on Twitter and I just started going to them, DMing them, basically, and I have an interesting opportunity for you, et cetera.

26:40 What do you offer them if you don’t have anything? Just 10, 20 pounds a tweet, as in literally is desperate, but, you know, because you’re giving these people rules, right, and it’s their page. I know not like, you know, I’m not trying to be a dick, I’m not trying to undermine your page, but I research their page, and so one of the things that worked really well was, you know, you have, so one of my favorite ones is there was this page called Lord of the Rings Reactions, right, so we wanted students to begin with, right, we wanted loads of students, So I found out this page, Lord of the Rings reactions, and they had a million followers.

27:09 And every time they do a meme, it gets thousands of retweets. So I was like, this is a really engaged page. We could do something funny on this. So I got in touch with the owner of that page, and I made them a meme. So I made a meme where these pages did memes that get retweeted so much.

27:24 I created a meme especially for them. And this meme was a picture of Frodo holding up the ring, and the tweet was that feeling when you finally find that bloody ring on Grebel. And it was like, when we did the campaign, that got retweeted like 12,000 times or something. This is guerrilla marketing at its desk. And it was all we had.

27:41 So I was like, Joel, we can not spend the five grand, and we can spend it slowly over the next two months and die a death. Or we can literally, Sunday night, perfect time, before X Factor and after the football. And we chose a night where specifically, because Twitter is basically on a Sunday, it’s 100% football or X Factor. So we chose a day where football games weren’t massive. was that the Super Sunday was like a mid-league one.

28:05 Made sure that it was far enough before X Factor. And so I’d gone in, negotiating with all these different pages, 10, 20 pounds, created all these memes, like wrote the memes for most of them, not the fashion bloggers. So fashion bloggers, you’ve got to be careful and not tell them what to do. But I just gave them rules. I was like, please, don’t endorse us.

28:22 Don’t hashtag us. Don’t make it look like advertising. Anyway, it all went out at 7.15 on a Sunday night. Joel and I sitting in the Hoxton Hotel, actually right next to here. Yeah, yeah.

28:34 In the lobby just waiting. No. Well, so we’d been there all day and we’d actually had our first investment meeting with Alex Hoyt that day and it was one of those things, typical scenario where you’re like, you should invest now. He’s like, well, I might just wait till, see how the night goes, you know. Alex, how dare you.

28:50 Yeah, exactly. Have you guys, can you wait 12 hours? Could you wait to miss this opportunity? Anyway, so we sat in that lobby and I mean, we didn’t even notice, you know, at the the Hoxton Hotel was like it was buzzing around us and it was us two hogging up two tables with our laptops like just drinking water just like staring and staring and suddenly it all just kicks off we we just start getting mentioned over and over again we’ve got all of our friends involved we’ve got everyone that we possibly could all our retailers we’re like you know this is our last shot there’s no shame I’m gonna ask everyone I got everyone I possibly knew to tweet about gravel but just not endorsing it and not acting us right and Can you track the app store downloads?

29:28 No, there’s nothing tractable about it. So as a marketer, there’s pros and cons. The pros are, it’s a phenomenally successful campaign. The cons are, you just can’t track it properly. And that’s the issue.

29:42 Because there’s a big lag. You can’t tell people downloading it. Can you tell people are using it? You don’t. Yeah, absolutely.

29:47 People were using it. We had buying with it, or swiping, because you collected it with a swipe. I mean, we did crazy amounts that night. So in that night alone, we, and bear in mind, it took us a year to get to 6,500 users, right? And slow, it was web, killing us.

30:07 That night, and the next two, three days, I mean, we did about 25,000 users. Is there any better feeling as a chief marketing officer than that? Yes, because I tell you what is better than that is when you don’t have your servers crash, which is the typical, the typical ups and downs. So I mean, I’ve learned now every time something good happens, like we were featured at number one App Store the other day, I was at a Joel, I mean, how many days until something terrible happens?

30:36 Something bad’s about to happen. But anyway, that night our servers went down and you know, we managed to get it up, but you know, we were doing 300 downloads a second at the peak when we trended on Twitter. So we managed to trend at the number three spot nationally in the UK. just the word gravel because the way Twitter works is as hashtags which are campaigns and then there’s just words of interest right and when you get in that spot and you and your feed starts to all become about gravel then you start to take note fascinatingly you know we basically went up zero Twitter followers but everyone actually had the initiative to go in the app store and download the app which was fantastic so you didn’t have a big follow-up presence on Twitter but you were trending and people went straight to the app store people use their initiative which is amazing so it’s just like a case study like I don’t know how many people are listening but there’s like Like people, I mean marketing officers should be listening to this.

31:22 Yeah, but it was a last ditch attempt, but like I said, it’s one of those things where we had tried the traditional routes, they didn’t work, we had no time at all before we ran out of money, and we got a team, and there’s a lot of guilt and a lot of everything involved because these are people’s careers, and actually by spending the five gram, we’re just cutting it short even further because if it goes down the pan, you made a terrible decision, you’re closing the doors. So it didn’t and the next morning basically we were able to go to Alex and he was like right okay. And raise the terms on him.

31:55 Yeah well no but at the time obviously during the meeting he was like you guys are overvalued you know there’s no way and then that next day he was like okay he’s starting to become about value and then now he’s like right you by the end of the funny round you know he was like you’re undervalued you know you could do whatever but we don’t really want to we just want to close the money and get on with it. So the App Store thing actually, in all seriousness, is what happened. So that happened, we trended on Twitter and we did over 20,000 downloads in a night.

32:23 That’s how you get into the top 10 in lifestyle. So just to give you like rough estimates on what you need to get into top 10 in lifestyle, which is our category, has to be over 10,000, but typically around 20,000 plus is what we’ll do. So we were very happy to wake up that next morning and see that we were at the number seven spot. Our highest position has been number six, which was last week we’ve got to number six. To give you an idea of the top five, Amazon, eBay, Tinder, Apple, and maybe Argos. There’s another one, but you know the big, the massive, massive e-commerce of all Apple themselves are the top apps. So when you’re at number six, you’re talking about the number one by all the other fashion ones. So during London Fashion Week for example we were number six top shop was the second highest was 25 so what gives you an idea of like the difference in space there and so as a marketing officer what do you do after that big push I tell you exactly why yeah okay exactly what I did so firstly if you’re in a startup right now you should take some notes it’s all I’m saying this is precious knowledge I emailed everyone I knew to get hold of the App Store manager like like some contact to the App Store like someone must have an email to the App Store manager or someone in the app store and someone gave me like a low-level contact and I emailed them and I was like look I’m really sorry to do this but I

33:51 I don’t want to bother you because you know you’re the app store you’re like god and I’m just this lowly ant but I’m freaking out because our app is so high in the lifestyle chart right now we’re a startup we’re basically fucking desperate how do I get featured how does that happen and they actually got back to me, and they were like, you know, you need to apply here, you need to do this spreadsheet, you need to do all this stuff, five-week road map, etc. And I was like, we’re gonna miss this opportunity so badly, because being a number six in lifestyle or number seven in lifestyle is great, but actually, as you’ve seen, like when I showed you on the homepage, if you’re on the homepage featured, that’s different. So we really, funnily, I basically just said to him, look, I did a little presentation, a one pager, where I just highlighted the tweets that we’d got from our users.

34:42 So in about a night, we received around 5,000 tweets from users. Basically, with tweets like, grab all is the best thing on the app store, or why has no one else thought about this, or all this kind of stuff. And I just collated some of the best ones I could see, put them on a one pager for them, and I was like, I completely respect the roadmap, I respect all the rules, I promise you. However, please. You’re a lobbyist.

35:02 Yeah, and I was just like, look, I mean, we’re not gonna get this opportunity again, I didn’t mention the funding staff, but a company like ours just doesn’t know when you get this opportunity again. And all I have to say is, please just go on Twitter and type in the word gravel. We know we don’t have a perfect product, and all apps have bugs and everything else. However, the most important thing if you have a consumer app is your consumers like it, and they identify with it.

35:27 And whether you’re the app store curating a list or you’re anyone else, all that matters is your user base. So I got the guy to just, I mean, I didn’t force him because I couldn’t do anything, whereas I just type in the word gravel on Twitter and I gave him a URL link and I gave him a little one pager, like if he wanted it and I was like, that’s just what I have to say about it and thank you very much for your time. The two days later we were featured in the best new app spot.

35:50 So it was amazing this time round when we featured the best new app, I didn’t get in touch with him at all because I think it’s one of those things where I don’t know him, I don’t know them. They’re the app store, right? I think you need to be careful with these relationships. You don’t make it a phone call to YouTube, it just doesn’t happen. Yeah, you don’t want to be annoying and you want to maybe pick your moments wisely.

36:12 And with the London Fashion Week stuff, for example, we planned a campaign and I had quite good faith in it. And I didn’t want to bother them. So actually when we got there organically, it’s even better sign that, you know, you’ve moved on a little bit. But yes, this first time I just, and I contacted him and I got hold of all our investors and just, you know, made a song and dance out of it. We might use it to get new retailers on board that had previously said no.

36:35 We did 300,000 clicks to buy in a week from that day, which was humongous on a mobile app. Right. So this is a crucial, crucial piece. You mentioned something earlier about advertising for startup, or maybe even mobile-based startups, on the traditional places, like Facebook and Twitter and things like that. And we’ve played around with a little bit here.

36:54 We don’t really have a product. But I might as well light that money on fire a lot of times, because it just doesn’t go anywhere. And I’m not saying that a Fortune 500 company with a targeted ad spend to all the different metrics they have on Facebook. I’m sure it does something, it sells cars and stuff, but for people in your shoes, you know, with 10 grand left or 25 grand left, I mean, is it usually a waste as opposed to really going deep and finding some people that are gonna…

37:17 I think so. So this isn’t new knowledge, right? Do most people know that or are most people not aware? I think it’s subjective. I mean, I think what I would say as a caveat to anyone listening in and basically probably shouting down the Facebook.

37:30 Facebook. Twitter. Google. But I personally, and it is just my personal opinion, we haven’t had the budget to optimize those things properly. Like what I will say completely wholeheartedly is I know some great marketers in really good companies and they kill it on Facebook because they have time to sit there all day optimizing and making sure they do it.

37:50 And you know what? Like Facebook, we have a love-hate relationship at Grabble for it because, you know, it’s It’s very hard to criticise it as a consumer because all the changes they make, which is every fucking month pretty much, they kill every bit of great work you’ve done as a company, every single thing you’ve tried to learn about how to optimise the ads, how to get the CPM down, writing fresh content, all this stuff you’ve tried really hard, they go and change the rules again, you get really pissed off, yet as a consumer, your feed is more and more and more relevant to you and more and more and more enjoyable and the reason is because they’re changing the way that the content reaches the consumer. So we do have the love, hate, where we’re like, well, OK, but on the other side, Facebook’s a content platform.

38:31 They want to be bigger than video space. We’re not creating video, for example. I mean, you’re lucky that you are, but that’s not our specialty. So I think if you are good at creating video, I think you can kill it on Facebook at the moment. If you have flatter content, like ours is fashion products and collections you can shop, it’s impossible.

38:47 It doesn’t work for us. Doing hyper-personalized content all the time is very time consuming. I think if you have someone who can spend all day with a good test budget, say 10 grand, optimizing on Facebook, you can work out how to do it well on a low cost, but we didn’t have that at grapple. Right, and most companies don’t have that. Most companies don’t have that, so it’s about finding something else that works for you.

39:10 Like honestly, what works, but you know, we’re lucky in the sense that we’re a consumer fashion app. You know, what works really well for us is building relationships with bloggers, building relationships with influencers in general. We take them out for lunch, we meet them, I have a colleague, Katie, who’s the most sociable person you’ve ever met, and she is genuine and authentic, and we’re lucky that we have her, because she goes and meets them, and then it’s not a matter of what am I paying for X, Y, and Z, it’s a matter of they like her, and they wanna talk about the product, and they like the product.

39:39 And those are real allies for you to have. You know, and please, if you disagree with some of my comments, please leave us some comments below if you found a lot of success with Twitter-based advertisements. Twitter was quite expensive as well. You know, or TrueView on YouTube, but you know, I don’t know, I mean, I haven’t, and it’s interesting that you say that experience, but obviously someone’s using it out there. Let me ask you a bit about happiness, because you said that you’ve run businesses before, like you had that group-on-like site, and I know you had a point where you had, you were selling playing cards.

40:07 Oh yeah, I was previously, a different business. And you were doing really well, but you just said that you absolutely hated it. And so it’s funny, because a lot of people think a successful business is one that makes money, but when you’ve been loving and enjoying a business, it sounds like you are right now at Gravel. That’s a completely different feeling than just making money with a business, right? Well, Joel and I are pretty similar in that we like the unknown and we like challenges and the biggest challenge, so we did both previous businesses together.

40:37 We’ve got very different personalities and skillsets as well. So he’s more like finance-based, he’s the responsible, respectable one. The reputable one, I like to say. You seem pretty respectable. Sure.

40:48 I’m the one that has the crazy ideas and I was like, let’s double down on that and it might not work and then the company goes under. So I’m the guy that’s like red or black. But I hope it lands on red. So the reality for us is we did this playing card platform. So we were the first company in the UK that utilized QR codes when they first came out.

41:10 And we did different brands advertising with QR codes on playing cards. And we ended up, so basically the consumer would scan that and they’d get the fresh advert, whatever it was, and the advertiser could change in the back end and their side, whatever they wanted the advert to be. So it was quite a cool product, bit early, to be honest, because even QR codes, apps had just come out, and so one of the few apps a lot of people did have was a QR app, but not everyone, it’s quite a techie thing still.

41:40 So we did it, the only challenging thing for us was we didn’t think the whole thing entirely through, so can’t really describe to you what a million packs of playing cards look like when they turn up at your house, but that was not the best thought out strategy. There were a few lorries, a few crates. Fortunately, my family business, so my youth when I was growing up was in fashion manufacturing, so I spent a few summers in a warehouse driving forklift trucks, so I actually had- Not all glamour there, is it?

42:12 Yeah, as that is, I was actually able to do something with these cards, but- But you made the decision that you never wanted to be involved in a physical- We just turned up and we looked at that and we were like, Jesus Christ, it sounded so good on paper and it sounded so good on our bank account and everything else, but now, this is a nightmare to distribute and we were like, why would we ever choose to do that? That’s just stupid. But you don’t know until you try it.

42:36 It was quite easy to sell. It had really good advertisers on board that wanted to advertise, like Bacardi and Just E and Olympus. We had really good, strong premium brands paying good money, but by the end of it, we were just exhausted, we only did it for three months, we did one distribution to universities across the UK, and did it all as lean as possible, did as much of it ourselves as we could, but by the end of it, we were like, well, that was not fun, and I definitely don’t wanna do it again, so if you do two or three print runs a year, we were like, absolutely not, not for any money.

43:08 By the time we’d actually done everything, it wasn’t even particularly profitable, so we were like, right, forget that, we’re never doing that again, don’t wanna do physical product, we are interested in web. And we didn’t know how to code, but it was summer of 2012, Google had just made a $5 billion offer for Groupon, which Groupon very cleverly turned down. And yeah, I think about three months after that, it just took a nosedive and no one was interested in daily deal sites anymore.

43:39 However, we got into it because we’d actually got a lot of leverage out of our cards. So from our cards, doing so much in the student space, we got a lot of leverage out of student sites and student media, and they quite enjoyed them, and we’d give them loads of them for free, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we were like, look, we’ve got these good relationships. We could probably get some free marketing. If we just do a daily deal site, how hard can that be?

44:04 And the answer was not very hard, by the way. We did so lean, we spent 1,000 pounds on the entire company, incorporating, designing, Naming, branding, marketing, everything. All the tech. But you ended up, you didn’t like it in the end, is what you’re saying. We absolutely hated it.

44:21 So what we learned was, and it was really profitable, so our first month we made 40,000 sales, and what we realized was unhappy consumer, unhappy retailer, that’s the nature of dropshipping and group buying in general. And no one’s happy, and everyone blames you, but it’s actually not your fault, because what you’re doing is connecting the two dots, but you can’t explain that. So we were like, well, I mean, we just literally were going to spend our life knee deep in email, apologizing to people and trying to right these wrongs.

44:48 Because you felt the consumer. Because it’s a lot of negative energy. So much negative energy. And it wasn’t worth it. So we just, really quickly, and you can see the history of snap decisions, but really quickly we’re like, let’s just stop it and profit.

45:02 We’re not interested in this anymore. So we emailed all of our users, ceased to exist, took the money, and whereas a lot of people might be like, right, let’s go traveling, let’s have a bit of space. We were so into the entrepreneurial journey and really enjoying what we were doing. We were like, let’s investigate trends. Much more Joel’s area.

45:20 Again, I’m the snappy one, so I was like, oh, group buying, that’s really popular right now. Let’s do it right now. Not realizing, of course, that if you join a trend right at the end of its popularity, it’s probably gonna fall off a cliff. Joel’s much more research-driven. So he was the one who was like, well, let’s just see social commerce.

45:37 That looks like it’s becoming a real thing. So you put your money into the next venture at that point, you know You said you don’t code and Joe doesn’t call doesn’t code and a lot of times I ask people at the end And I’m gonna ask you a few questions here You know what they what they would do if they could give advice to their younger self and a lot of them say especially in this Text base learn how to code Yeah, do you wish that’s something that you would learn how to do or in a weird way by not knowing how? Do you have to make more intelligent decisions as far as who you hire and what you do you do and you also have to make?

46:05 The hardest, I mean the biggest problem is no one takes you seriously so to start off with, well they say everyone says like serious investors you need to have the magic team as a designer a developer and a hustler and then you know we’d be like well we’re both hustlers is that a thing and they’re like no fuck off that’s just not like we’re not interested so that was the hardest part was trying to find the right developer or person that would actually believe in us to give us the right money with some credibility. So what actually happened is when Joel was at PwC, he ran something called the Entrepreneur Forum and he started it there. And he basically interviewed young tech CEOs under 30 in London and he met this guy called Rob Durkin.

46:52 Rob Durkin happened to run a company which did data scraping which was exactly the technology that we needed to do our idea for gravel. So he went to him and basically asked him for money. when we had the daily deal site, is we were like, we’re doing this, look what we can do with $1,000, imagine what we could do with pounds, imagine what we could do with 25,000 pounds, which is what you should invest. He pretty much told us to fuck off like many times, in fairness, like he was right.

47:14 But he was like, just here’s the name of one of my developers, go to an MVP, see what happens, you got some money, just go to your own MVP, put your own money where your mouth is. So we actually did it and came back unannounced to his office one day and he just never thought he’d see us again. And he was like, I can’t actually believe come back I was pretty rude to you guys and we’re like yeah but we want to do this we’re serious and we need someone who has some expertise and understanding so we just kept going back to him until he became our first investor and from then it got it got a bit easier but in terms of learning to code I mean so many times firstly we were like like no one takes us seriously in London and start up chili looks good let’s just move to chili and like there’s a you know what about our new life in Santiago let’s just do that and then there was you you know, these really expensive coding courses, we’re like, you know, shall we do them?

48:01 And actually now we take coding courses. You do, okay. Yeah, yeah, we found a great guy that does them and… Okay, so learn to code. That is good advice for anybody in this space.

48:13 I think it’s good advice anyway, but in the same way it’s like, you know, it’s good to learn the basics of marketing and it’s good to learn the basics of like, you know, finance, if you can. But it did make us hungrier in fairness, And we wanted to build a sophisticated technology product. So what was interesting is we would never have been able to learn the quality of code that we needed to get it off the ground anyway. So it did make us hustle a lot harder to find the right people.

48:41 But you really have to do your due diligence if you’re not that familiar with the product. But in a weird way, you don’t taint it with your own lack of knowledge. Like you said, if it’s going to be something super sophisticated, just because you know how to do some basic coding. But also the biggest problem is management. So you get these developers in, and how do you get the management?

48:58 How do you know what they’re doing is right? How do you know they’ve built it the right way? You just have no vision or clarity on these things. So in the early stages, these were the things that would keep us up at night so badly. Like I got really bad insomnia for three months.

49:09 We had a developer called Ben. He was phenomenal human being, amazing coder. However, I mean, I started a Tumblr blog once of the best excuses I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m not saying up to work. One of them was I fell asleep tying up my shoelaces this morning.

49:25 So he presumably just fell asleep in that position all day. Another one was he fell asleep in the bath. He did that about three times. Another one was my dad’s a prick, as if that is an excuse to not come to work for a whole day. So you basically have to deal with the fact that you’re dealing with these people that you don’t really know.

49:43 You’re reliant on them. And that whole environment is really stressful. And I think the best thing I could ever give as advice is, if you can start a business with someone that at least understands how to lead the technology side, you’re going to be able to sleep a little better, that’s for sure. Insomnia is real. Yeah.

50:01 We really like scrapped around to get to this point, like hardcore and they say fake it till you make it. The first six to nine months was faking it until we were able to get a quality CTO in, a quality product manager in, but those things took us longer than they should. Right. No, understood. You’ve said that being in London has meant everything to your current trajectory.

50:20 You know, we are in the Silicon Roundabout here, you know, my other show is called London Real. Some of the tech people give us a hard time because we’re so London focused. But you know, what the hell, we’re here. So get over it. Tell me why London’s so important for you.

50:33 You know, people always talk about London being such a capital when it comes to fashion. But I’m guessing it’s not that simple. Why has it been such an important part? Well, you know, if you think about the three things we need as a company, you need fashion credibility. That’s big.

50:47 And therefore retailers. Right. You know, you need the clients. Right. Technology and you know the actual supply of quality technology now got a lot of issues on supply demand curve on technology in London, but there’s more developers here and quality technology knowledge and infrastructure here than anywhere else in the country and as they arguably say Europe and And finance and London is one of the finance capitals of the world. So You’re talking about an amazing environment and then you know, I hear loads and loads of of positive and negative feedback on SEI, SEIS, which is like the tax schemes.

51:23 Yeah, Aletheia had a few thoughts on that. I bet they’re probably negative. Maybe, and I think even Stephen Rappaport as well, of Pat Coffey had some thoughts on that as well. Yeah, so I, and Joel and I have different opinions. My perspective is we never ever would have, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this chair, we never would have got it off the ground if it wasn’t for SEIS.

51:47 Two guys who aren’t coders are not going to get the money, the capital, to start a technology vision, full stop, unless there’s a scheme in place that makes it tax efficient for the investors. It’s a huge risk, the first 150K. We barely built a product on 150K. It’s just crazy to think, actually, I came from a background where all the businesses we made were your typical business of, well, I’ve earned money, I’m going to put it into myself, there’s going to be this cost and that profit out of it, which is a pretty normal business.

52:25 And here we were suddenly being like, well, we need loads of money to build a product that apparently is going to make money in five years. And that’s kind of like a tech startup. And I was like, I felt very uncomfortable about it. But you go and meet investors and whether or not they’re the right kind of investors for you at that time is a problem. And it does kill companies, and I know lots of examples where that’s been a massive problem.

52:47 So we got lucky, I think. But I would say that our first investors, our first 150K, were almost all not good quality investors, as in they, by their own admission, you know, they’re there to invest because it’s tax efficient. They got us off the ground. We couldn’t be more appreciative to them, and we have a really strong relationship with them. But they don’t add value to the business, and they don’t try to, because that’s not why they invested. Our next 250K, which is EIS approved, starts to become a bit more sophisticated because actually it’s not as tax efficient so they actually need a good reason to want to invest and we’ve got better investors out of it. This latest round, because we’re mobile focused and we’re doing interesting things in the mobile space, we’ve got dream investors. All I would say is it’s not good to have a dogmatic point of view on it Because actually, when you’re raising money for a startup, it’s a journey.

53:42 And you’ve got to take what you’re given at each stage and hope that it improves. The same way as you do a Series A, it’s often institutional. And you get phenomenal investors, you hope, at that point. OK, great. I really appreciate you putting it that way, because it’s nice contrast to what other people have said about that space.

53:56 You just raised 1.2, Sterling. You talked about expanding in the US and Asia. How can you do that on that amount of money? That’s going to be in the future, right? Yeah, so that’s a good question.

54:08 It’s very valid. So what’s really interesting about our product is so you talk about moving to a new domain and it being this huge hassle. And for us, we take a very pragmatic view. It’s an app. At the very core of it, it’s just an app.

54:26 And there’s clever technology behind it that understands users and recommendations, but the way our app functions essentially is you take affiliate feeds, you take products that our fashion director chooses based on style trends, et cetera. They’re different in America than they are in the UK, but these things often are led out of New York or London anyway. You’ve just got to localize your app to the app store, and then you’ve got to do marketing. Now, I’m not saying that you can’t have any people on the ground in America if you’re going to be in America, but as a starting point, it’s actually, it’s not like Pat Coffee, for example, if they wanted to go and start up in America, have to ship the beans and have some infrastructure, and actually it’s amazing what scalable technology like an app can be, it’s quite amazing to think about actually the low cost of just being in America or being available in America.

55:22 Marketing is a completely different tactic and you need money for that, absolutely, but what we intend to do with the money is prove that there’s some appetite for what we’re doing in New York, which is actually where we’re going in May to meet the UKTI about the steps we do and what we need to do. But absolutely, our money for this round is 100% product focused. So we know, so we just hit 100,000 users. Congratulations. Thank you.

55:49 We’re having a party, but after ICE, which I’ll be on with you, this is funny. We’ll take the whole team out, but Joel and I are away this weekend, so next week we’ll have a party. But for us, we know that we can acquire users and we know that users like it, but the thing that we genuinely believe, This comes back to what kind of mobile app are we. So we talked about e-commerce apps. Trying to fit e-commerce into an app and then trying to say that’s the experience.

56:16 What happens with those users is you find a user that thinks, I want to go shopping. I’m going to open up the ASOS app. I want to go shopping. I’m going to open up the Topshop app. That’s not what our users do with us.

56:27 So our app gets opened at short bursts. Sorry, on those e-commerce apps, you’ll spend five to 10 minutes dwelling, searching, etc. Our app, our users come on five or six times a day, 30 to 60 seconds. They open it, they snack, they swipe, they put it down, they open it, they snack, they swipe, they put it down. Their interactions are completely different to the way a typical consumer shops in general.

56:47 So what they’re doing throughout the month, very typically, they’re making these decisions all the time, really quick decisions. They’re filling the time, what they like, what they don’t like, putting it away. When it comes to payday or a time when they actually want to buy, what they do is they bypass all of that. They go straight to either their sale alerts they’ve got a bunch or they go to their basket and they start checking out all the things that they want to buy there and then they’ve already made all the decisions they don’t need to spend ages searching for the things they want they already made those decisions last week or a few days before yeah so for us these heads of e-commerce sales of these companies are salivating now someone would open their app six times a day yeah it starts swiping but what it shows is is a different experience so we have different metrics we’re not all about sales which is terrible if we’re in e-commerce app in a way but for us What we think is fascinating is being an addictive app being something that’s fun and easy to use and just like low barrier to entry Is the most important thing so it comes back to doing research on what a user looks at when they’re staring at their phone You know we see a lot of our team are you know female obviously because it’s a shopping app And you know we see them do it all the time like just staring at their phone I mean like what do you what are you looking for and they’re like well?

57:55 I’m looking for what app I want to just play around on right entertainment, so you know staying in touch with new fashions So, people say to us, you’ve got a monumental challenge, you’re challenging ASOS, you’re challenging Topshop, and we’re like, we’re not challenging them, don’t worry about it, we’re challenging Instagram, we’re challenging Tinder, we’re challenging Snapchat, we’re challenging any… Because the app game is so different. So if you think about it, Google search is a thing of the past, right?

58:22 So realistically, who the hell goes on Google search? For an experience, don’t search for a taxi, you don’t search for events, you don’t search for whatever, you go on Eventbrite, if you want an event, you go on Uber, if you want a taxi, you want to go, you know, like send, look at pictures, you go on Instagram, there’s just the go-to app, so your mobile screen is your home screen, that’s your search bar. If you can get your app on someone’s like first or second page of their phone, then you’re sorted.

58:48 So for us, it’s like we want gravel to be that, we start that fashion experience and want it to be low barrier to entry and we want it to be fun, but we need to be addictive. We need users coming back regularly all the time to look at the content and consume it like as if they were on Snapchat, like as if they were on Instagram. Have you read the book Hooked? Yes. Talked all about this experience.

59:05 Yes. The variable reward. Boarded for my product manager, actually. Okay. Yeah, I’ve been listening to it.

59:10 It’s fascinating and a bit disturbing when you start really understanding how you get hooked on something. Yeah. That variable reward concept. Speaking of which, I just started reading, oh, we just had a maybe opening Twitter, cracking Twitter. Is it about Twitter?

59:25 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It is. Well, I’m on page five, but Joel tells me it’s fantastic. Okay.

59:32 Yeah, that whole hook thing, you know, the concept of variable reward, I was like, well, that’s not important, but it is important, because sometimes you come on like an email is a grade or Twitter, sometimes you get nothing, sometimes you get elated, sometimes you get pissed off. And so, and this is what, you know, creates interesting habits, sometimes they come on to your, and they see something cool, sometimes they see something they don’t like, something, you know, and that’s what you want. Well, what we found was fascinating on our research was, because, you know, your typical fashion or e-commerce head of marketing would always say, like, what are you doing?

59:57 That’s terrible. showing people products they don’t like is a satisfying part of the journey for them. So our users love saying no to things they don’t like and it’s not it’s not annoying that they swipe no ten times it was actually rewarding for them in a way and we’re like we’re very protective sometimes like shit that’s terrible that person had ten negative swipes and then we do direct research to them about how I made them feel etc etc and fine. Interesting. Yeah. This is cutting-edge stuff especially with the UX you have and how fast do you get that data and you present the data and it’s so visual and like you said you’re getting feedback, you know, without people knowing that they’re giving you feedback.

1:00:31 Well, what’s amazing is we’re able to give our retailers that we work with. So one of the features that we didn’t kill about the web product is we have retailers and publishers that love using our web product. And what they’re able to do is grab their products off their website, stick them in a collection and share it on social media. What happens then is the user clicks that collection. So say it’s a 90s boots or whatever, right?

1:00:52 So that user will click the 90s boots collection if it’s in style now, and they’ll go to the app store to download, grab all, they’ll open up the app and it’ll open straight into the experience from the retailer that shared it, which is really interesting. So it’s giving them like a native app presence as well. And what’s interesting is every time they do that they were able to then go back to let’s say if it’s Topshop doing it, they were able to go back to Topshop and go you know that 90s like trend you did on your boots you had 20 products in there and here’s the data on it. Like this is how many people grabbed, this is how many people discarded, now you have some information on whether it was popular or not or what was popular and what wasn’t.

1:01:26 Beyond just sales. Yeah, that’s a super value-added feature for them Yeah, I want to get your thoughts just kind of in the end here about the London ecosystem when it comes to startups I know you’ve you know, this is your third I guess, you know a pretty developed one You’ve talked about, you know some day you want to be able to give back and maybe invest in some businesses But you said you want to do it in the right way with the right energy, you know It’s so frothy right now in this market and and I am to blame because I’m promoting all these tech rock stars like you every week and it’s something that came up with Aletheia and so a lot of times you know the the tech is the new rock star can bring the wrong people bring the wrong energy to bring the wrong capital and I was just wondering what do you see happening now in this ecosystem is changing so fast and you know we got billion dollar valuations here and there which was definitely not happening a year or two ago like what do you mean by that within the right energy I’ve been to say the way Joel and I raised our money which is you know I have say something I recommend to anyone because it’s hard so Joel and I so we didn’t not only not know tech we also didn’t know a single investor like so we kept on trying to go back like I said to the fuse pump guy Rob but you know he told us to fuck off like ten times maybe like on individual things so in the meantime we’re going to every single pitching

1:02:39 Event we can so into there’s all the ones that were like members clubs where people have money so home house arts club shortage house you know they all run funding events, and we don’t know what we’re doing. We went to Dream Stake, which is a good one, and they’re based at Google Campus. I would say they’re more, they’re the best of all of them, from my perspective, and there’s a few that are good as well, like Angel Lab, Angel’s Den, where you pay a fee, or you pay a fee plus a commission if you raise the money, et cetera.

1:03:10 Now, what’s interesting about the- I’ve never heard of these, which is weird, maybe because I haven’t been raising money. Oh, you haven’t been raising money. If you need early capital, you’ll do a search and you’ll find these. Okay. For angel capital, all angel capital.

1:03:21 All angel capital. It’s hard to find angel capital, but at the same time not, because you go to one of these events and then you suddenly realize, shit, I’m pitching up on stage. Another good one, by the way, is Angel Investment Network. And I tell you why they’re particularly good, just as a quick caveat, because they said no to us for 12 months, they were like, it’s just not good enough. So to give them complete credit where it’s due, they have an email database of about 2000 sophisticated angel investors and they have one event every couple of months and you stand up on stage and you speak to a room of 70 or 80 angels, but then they also send your presentation and feedback and everything out to their entire database.

1:03:54 And why I think they’re good is they always recognized we just didn’t necessarily have the right product. So they just kept on saying no very politely and always offered good feedback. We had our mobile product, you know, we were raising money straight after we trended on Twitter and got all these users and they were immediately like, yes, bang on, that’s the right product. in and you know they introduced us to one of our board members now who’s the head of e-commerce at CNA, Liberty’s Harrods, so great relevant investor.

1:04:17 Anyway, so we went to all these angel investment events, there’s a hundred people in the room, 90% of them are just old men with white hair and money. Too much money and no longer having any fun. And yeah, yeah basically and you know it’s fine because that’s what we needed in the early early stage like Joel and I didn’t care like we just didn’t care we’d have raised money any which way we possibly could to have a chance at pursuing the dream that we wanted to execute there was no I mean there’s question that’s sickened us like regularly as you meet people you talk about are we just raising some angel money and they’d be level who are your investors and we were like no one you’d know and they’re like oh okay and it’s like well that’s a privilege to some people to be able to have the right connections, the right people and everything else have the right angels.

1:05:09 But actually, you know, on the face of it, if you’re trying to get business off the ground and you’re trying to do an idea, you’ll take what money you’re given and you’ll be really thankful for it and you’ll never forget how thankful you were for it and you’ll always have a good relationship with those investors because they backed you. But what you do see is a lot of people and it’s happened to us a lot and actually makes me frustrated. I was even thinking about it this morning for some very strange reason, but it will approach you as investors.

1:05:36 They will give you all the reasons why they’re amazing investors, and then they will spend time with you telling you what you should do differently in your products and blah, blah, blah, blah, and eventually there’s actually no money. They don’t really want to invest, but they do want to advise you, and do you want to give them like a percent of equity as like an advisor, whatever. When you are desperate and you need it, you’re never really sure who a snake is or who is real and you know it’s like any business relationship it’s like due diligence but it’s hard because you know it’s so easy for someone to create a fake LinkedIn account with all these I mean who’s gonna verify it who’s gonna say that it’s not true so this actually happened to us a fair amount you know we’d go to certain events and some people would just turn up and try and really sell you their expertise and their amazing investment credibility when it came down to it no money and when it came down to it they wanted something from you.

1:06:25 Wow. Okay. It’s something you’ve got to look out for. And it’s all based around, and this is the negative part, the SEIS-EIS thing because it becomes an opportunity where you get unsophisticated investors being the norm of the fabric. Right.

1:06:38 If that makes sense. Whereas if it was just quality investors everywhere, that wouldn’t really be a problem. Okay. That’s fascinating. Interesting.

1:06:46 I guess, and also, it’s due to the frothiness of the market that maybe these people are kind of existing and showing up these events to grab equity percentages from people. So yeah, that’s a good observation and it’s an interesting thing and if you’re listening to watch out for and maybe, I mean, I guess you’ve got to do your due dill at the end of the day, right? But there’s only so much time in the day. So everything gets stretched, right? Yeah, exactly.

1:07:04 And due dill is like I say, due dill is, you stop that at LinkedIn a lot of times. Someone’s LinkedIn can make them sound absolutely incredible. Right. When you have no time, due dill can go out the drain really quickly. Daniel, I always ask people a few questions.

1:07:18 I’m going to ask you them. One of them was what I alluded to earlier, but I’ll ask you. I know you have a little bit of a family business background in fashion and things like that, but if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Daniel and give him a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do knowing what you know now? Okay, that is a great question. Well, for starters, we’ve already covered learn to code, but learn to code is the really obvious one.

1:07:47 I think, realistically, trust my gut more. So the really hard lesson I learned, and this comes back to exactly the same developer I mentioned earlier, was I felt it wasn’t right immediately and I started to see signs of it not being right, really crippled our business. So we almost died because we didn’t get rid of this developer because he was very good, but he wasn’t reliable and he wasn’t in. So I think it was a sign of I was still green At that point, I was trying to learn how to be a boss and manage people where I didn’t really understand what they were doing or necessarily anything else, and I had my own timelines.

1:08:28 You’re raising X money, it runs out at Y point. So regardless, if that guy’s a good developer and can get stuff done fast, then get him in. But I was too soft because as soon as he came up with one excuse, like I fell asleep in the bath all day and couldn’t call you to say what I can come into work, and other people you’re working with are all relying on him being there because he’s the lead dev, you’ve got a big problem. So I think learning to trust my gut and making the harder decisions faster, which is what we have learned on this journey.

1:08:57 We learned to do the pivot at the right time and actually probably like a week or two later would have been completely incorrect. And I mean, I think like for Joel and I, we’ve always been really pragmatic anyway. So we’re very determined. So regardless, I mean, we’ve told no a million and one times. And it’s funny because the 20-year-old Daniel didn’t want to run a tech company.

1:09:28 I wanted to do advertising. And that’s what I did. And I loved it. It was great. And it was actually Joel nagging me to leave advertising to say, let’s try and do something entrepreneurial and different.

1:09:37 So I think my major learnings is actually if your gut says No. It’s almost always right. No matter what your heart and head say. And I just really felt it. And so I’ve really learned to go from the gut now, actually, and it’s been working.

1:09:55 Right. Which is useful. Learning to code is just such an obvious one. But I think,

1:10:04 Realistically, and they say this a lot, but it’s also about who you meet. So So the thing that was a turning point for Joel and I, I’d say, is every single meet-up, and every single thing. And I always advise people to do this, like in the early stage, like no matter what kind of business they’re running, if they’re like an independent PR person or anything else, and they’re like, oh, I’ve got this thing, it’s going to be crap. It’s like, do you know how many crap events I went to?

1:10:30 Like, you know, if there were five or six a day, I went to five or six a day, every Every single day and one a week would be good, but you just don’t know who you’re gonna meet, you don’t know how you’re gonna meet them, you’d never be too arrogant to not go to a certain thing or turn up to something because you just don’t know. You’ve got to be totally and utterly pragmatic, and if you’re actually dedicated to try and making it work, then you’ve got to make connections one way or another. People are actually really helpful and really nice in this game anyway, which is massive benefit.

1:11:02 Yeah, super. So the complete opposite to advertising and media, where people are very cutthroat and very insular and they’re into their own deals and their own campaigns and it’s all competitive and it’s like that in fashion as well. In tech, people just wanna help each other. No matter how successful you are or how many years or how few years, if you’ve got a bit of advice to share, you generally share it and that’s why I’m always really honest, like how we did our marketing or whatever else, I’d love for anyone else to be able to do that.

1:11:30 I wouldn’t want anyone to be in this stressful situation We were in Hoxton Hotel, a nice place to be in, but it wasn’t an enjoyable day. So I think making sure that I was out and about meeting people earlier, because that’s a crucial point. Because we’ve all been to the lousy events. And I’m not the most sociable person, even though I invite strangers over here and talk to them twice a week. But sometimes you go to these things and you’re like, what am I going to do?

1:11:55 And it’s going to be shit, because it was last time. But magic happens when you’re in person with people. And sometimes you’ll have an experience that will be 1,000 times better than anything that would happen, what online or something like that, and you’ll meet that person that will have this 100X effect on you and your business. That’s the thing, and no matter how social you are, you’re always gonna go to an event, so you’ll try and go with Joel, but actually what we’d often do is there’s too many events, you go to one, I’ll go to the other, and I’m like, oh God, I hate just going up to a stranger, I’m like, hi, Daniel, I want to run a startup, have this idea, I don’t have any money, I don’t know anyone in tech.

1:12:32 Yeah, it’s so cringy just saying it, but that’s the reality, that’s who I was. And you’ve done it hundreds of times. I did it, I had to do it hundreds of times. I hated every single moment. I felt like, hey, a creep, be a weirdo.

1:12:42 See, I didn’t fit in, imposter syndrome, majorly. But one by one, person by person, event by event, you build up an amazing group of people who are like, oh, I should introduce you to my friend who will do this, and oh, this person might be able to help you with that. If you don’t just get out of the building, It’s like the Steve Blank thing and customer development get out the fucking building, but it’s the same thing just in your own personal life. You’ve got to get out of the house, away from your computer screen, meet people in real life.

1:13:09 Again, that’s why London’s so amazing for that. There’s just so many events all the time. You only have to go on Eventbrite and type in a start-up event and just see how many things are going on. If you’re ever hesitant to go to an event, just think of all the people around the world that would kill to be in central London and that you are and you can’t be bothered and you want to go home and watch Game of Thrones or whatever you watch. No, I agree, one good tip for that is there’s a great book called How to Work a Room, and I’ve been reading it lately, and it’s just a great way to go to these cold meetups, and just a few tips to which you can go in and just feel more comfortable and just chat with people.

1:13:42 It’s probably better that you and Joel used to go separately, because if you go with a friend sometimes you just sit and chat with him. Well, that’s what we learned as well. Right, and it’s just a waste of time. And the other takeaway was go with your gut, man. I’ve been really using that a lot lately with me.

1:13:53 I’m an engineer background, and so I’m all about the numbers and the spreadsheet, and Sometimes it makes sense on paper but it doesn’t make sense in your gut and it’s just like and sometimes I just give myself a few days and like I get all the info and then I just sit on it for a few days and then I just make the decision. It’s obvious like a few days later if you can just kind of let it, you know, process. Yeah, my head and heart is too confusing. Right, yeah, it’s super confusing.

1:14:18 The second part of that question was best advice you’ve ever received. I guess in part of that is kind of, you know, getting out or advice you’ve given and to yourself is get out to those meetups and go and meet those people. Because that’s kind of where the magic happens. The last question is, to the 20-year-old that’s listening, that wants to be like you, that wants to be the guy on the App Store, be the guy in the Hawks in a hotel, be the guy that’s raising money from Alex Hoy, and then moving to the US and all that.

1:14:41 I know there’s a lot of media hype around this area, but what do you tell them of things that they can do to get there, to start their own company, to get into a tech space? Well, first, it was interesting. When I say, as a 20-year-old, me didn’t want to do this. I’m still not doing what the 20 year old me wants to do. I want it to be a screenwriter.

1:14:55 Oh yeah, yeah. So I actually want to be a screenwriter and I still, one day, you know, it’s funny, like the 20 year old me is looking at me like a tech fan like, fuck, how far do you want to meander from that? But then my idea is, you know, hopefully do well out of it, sell, and then I can start like focusing on writing scripts because I wasn’t making any money off that and it became impossible. I like that. I bet that’s part of your success is the fact that it’s not the only thing you’re focused on.

1:15:17 I have just, I want to, I want to like, yeah, I just want to do the other thing. So that’s what will make me feel fulfilled. Exiting a tech company would actually not fulfill me like having one screenplay or sitcom published by the BBC or Channel 4 or something like that. That’s much more important to me. What’s your favorite screenplay, by the way?

1:15:36 Or just a few at the top of your head. Okay, so I absolutely love Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman. Yeah, okay, okay, yeah, yeah. It’s a Nicholas Cage film, Spike Jones as a director. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:15:46 Because it’s absolutely crazy. And it’s about a screenwriter, It’s about Charlie Kaufman writing a screenplay about Charlie Kaufman writing a screenplay. So it’s a bit mad It’s the ultimate. Yeah, I love his stuff eternal sunshine is another one Okay with a spotless mind and being John Malkovich. I really like his films every so you like you like the weird stuff I like the weird ones are just very different So sorry you were saying that this isn’t your dream in a weird way. No, it’s not But which I find fascinating because you’re obviously very good at it. Well, it’s based not that is actually just humans are people, basically blank canvases, and you learn skills and you acquire skills along the way for them, right?

1:16:25 So the reality is most people can do most things. It’s just the path you choose to take. So, you know, you, for example, could have been a doctor easily, you were in banking, you definitely could have been a doctor. You would have had the same skills. So same intelligence, same ability, you just chose not to, and you chose to do that.

1:16:43 Doctor friends could be pain, because they could run startups. So it’s just what interests you for that time and what you can do. And I think, actually, you know what, Alex Hoey, we keep talking about him, he’s a really interesting point here. He’s run four tech companies, one IPO, chairman of Skimlings, what’s he doing? He’s running a ski company, because he fucking loves skiing.

1:16:59 He isn’t no shit about how to run a ski company before he started Faction, but that’s what he’s doing and he’s killing it with them and that’s his passion. So, you know, I respect that. We actually like connect a lot. Actually, he’s finally doing that. He’s in his 40s.

1:17:13 I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that. Sorry, Alex, but hey, and hopefully by the time I’m in my 40s, I’ll be writing screenplays and I’ll be fulfilled, but I think the thing to say to advice to 20-year-olds and stuff is, this comes back to actually what we were talking pre-interview about Americans versus English people. Yeah, I’m glad we got into this, tell me. What’s the difference? Don’t be a dick, ever.

1:17:36 So this is, and I love English people and I love American people, as I was explaining to you, but the big problem with English people in general as they’re quite reserved. This is the worst in London as well. So I’m a massive London fan. I think it’s the best city in the world, and I’m fortunate enough to have been to a lot of cities. I’ve been traveling for a year.

1:17:52 But London is my favorite city. The only thing that’s bad about London is if you go to Manchester, not as good a city, the people there are great, though. They’re great. They’re just energetic, happy. Same sarcasm, but sarcasm said in a nice way, whereas us Londoners, I’m also guilty, can sound so sarcastic in a bad way.

1:18:11 That’s our niche, it’s our thing, it’s what makes us likable too in our way. But I think it’s very easy to be a Londoner and have a negative perspective or a reserved perspective or an unenthusiastic perspective. It’s very easy to see the enthusiastic American in the room talking about love and goodness and how we should all be one great big community and oh, isn’t it so lovely? And if you’ve got 100 people in the room, one American and 99 English people, 99 English people are going to be like, Oh God, what a load of shit.

1:18:44 But actually the American guy is the one who we should be respecting for that attitude because that is highly positive. And the tech thing really is, um, more an American culture, right? So American culture, in my opinion, um, especially based around technology is a lot about helping each other. It’s a lot about positivity. Um, told you the downside of that.

1:19:06 Of course, as you can be so positive, you’re not really sure if it’s always honest. Right. Because at least British people will tell you straight away if they think something’s shit. Right. But I just think the most important thing, and this is the most important thing to Joel and I that’s always been important, is you’ve got to be nice to everyone. You’ve got to make time for everyone if you possibly can. You know, it’s the typical, you don’t know who you meet on the way up and then on the way down kind of thing. So we’ve been so lucky with the people we’ve met, you know, really senior people, they’ve really given us their time to help us. And And we’re still at the start of our journey, right?

1:19:40 So we’re like a dot at the moment, and hopefully we get to even a place where Hotel Tonight are. They’re an aspirational app company from our perspective. So I think attitude is the most important thing. Never think you know everything. And we literally act like we know nothing.

1:19:57 And actually, you know what? In the app game, no one knows anything. This is the fascinating thing. You’re learning on the job, right? Who knew that the Twitter thing would work?

1:20:06 Who knew how you get to a trending search on the app store in Black Friday. We didn’t know this stuff. You can’t learn it, it’s all new. And all these consumer actions are new, so you just have to try things and be positive. And stay humble and treat people well.

1:20:22 Well, yeah, I mean, the people that I’ve met who are humble, who are just so successful and so amazing are true to that. And all the best investors and entrepreneurs actually know are you know crazy wealthy and successful and just super chilled and decent and I aspire to that 100% so do me a lot of egos along the way and a lot of people that talk up their game you know like Joel and I we get all this you know pressing you and you interview me for Silicon Real and we’re like you know how amazing but behind it all it’s just like that you You know, this is nothing, we are nothing, which is true, completely true. We have so many hard months and years ahead of us to get to a point where we’re something.

1:21:16 We’re not even in the same breath as Hotel Tonight, and they’re not even in the same breath as other unicorns. They’re not Snapchat, for example. The mobile space is fascinating, and there’s only a handful of unicorns. Those guys are absolutely aspirational and their point of difference quite often is they do a singular function really well and that’s why Hotel Tonight’s doing well, it’s why we’re currently doing well because we just understand a simple function and we try and keep it as simple as possible.

1:21:43 We killed all of our features like I said to you before. Yeah, we did a short video earlier and he was saying about killing features. Yeah, we killed everything. That’s amazing. So you slowly take your features out and see you.

1:21:51 Yeah, and that’s the one thing we learned about mobile is like when you look on your phone at the apps you like to engage with, they do one thing and one thing only. counterintuitive to how the web was built. The web was built that you have websites that do everything. The more a website can do, the more useful it’s going to be. So Facebook is the only real exception to the rule, and look what they did. They acquired WhatsApp, they separated Messenger out. Like, you know, even they understand that actually needs simple functions on an app. So, you know, Facebook has 99%ed on just the newsfeed.

1:22:21 You know, that’s what they really try and get you to do, is just engage in content on the newsfeed, if you want to speak to people, separate up. So yeah, we have a lot to learn and a lot of places to go, fortunately. Dan, you’re a fascinating guy. I’m putting you top on the ones to watch list. I’ve just made a silicone reel, top 10 in London, ones to watch, and you’re on the top of the list.

1:22:42 You know, and so I just thought I’d make that up. You know, it’s really fascinating to hear from you and like the energy you have and kind of the humbleness, but yet the intensity and I don’t know, I just think it’s a winning mix here. And I think your investors feel it And obviously your customers feel it. And you know, that’s a big thing. We just feel lucky.

1:22:59 Yeah, well, that’s a big thing. Because we’re not tech. And we got challenged on it all the time. And you know, we just feel like, so humbled was the perfect, we are humbled to have the opportunity to be at this point already because we almost didn’t. Right, but feeling lucky brings a lot of things whether it means you’re grateful, means you’re constantly trying to do better.

1:23:20 In the grand scheme of things, your accomplishments are small, You’re giving respect to the people that are doing better than you and trying, I mean there’s a lot of things going on there. So I think they’re all going to make you a success. So congratulations to Alex for getting in on such an early round. You know, he’s making all of the other investors, you know, he’s really showing them up, I think. And if you’re listening to us, get in on the Series A sooner than later, contact Daniel Murray and get involved.

1:23:47 What’s the best way for them to give Grapple a try? I guess it’s just right now, go to the App Store and download Grapple. to the App Store and if you’re looking for some light entertainment follow us at Gravel on Twitter where we share content collections to swipe through but also a lot of our own personal brand of fashion humor I would say okay which is important to us as a brand you know we like to be a bit tongue-in-cheek yeah not take it too seriously so good App Store and follow us on Twitter yeah and I downloaded Gravel today and I loved it and I was playing with it and I’m not like your typical guy but some guys are like I’m not into fashion I don’t know how to shop my girlfriend shops for me and so like if you’re that guy or you You’d think you might be that guy.

1:24:22 It’s so easy. I did Facebook login and I already started swiping and I was showing someone I was swiping so it becomes interactive, social, entertaining and I guess I’m building my profile now and maybe I’ll look better in a few weeks. Let’s see how you look next week. See what I’m, hopefully I’ll change this look so. Awesome and you’re on Twitter as well, Daniel Murray, they can find you.

1:24:42 You got a weird Twitter handle. Yeah, it’s MurrayMuzz, weird Twitter handle. How do they know? Murray being my surname and Muzz which M-U-Z-Z which was my nickname in school. So yeah, I got it before I realized Twitter would be that big, and now I’m stuck with it, so I’ll keep it.

1:24:57 Well, wish us luck on the weekend with ICE this weekend. If you don’t know much about ICE, it’s just a really cool group of entrepreneurs here in London and in the rest of the world, too. And they really go out of their way to learn a lot and to really help each other. And again, it’s just a testament to the tech scene here in London. And it is just a really positive place where everyone just helps each other out.

1:25:18 Yeah, there’s 95 of us going. That’s crazy. Quite a big number. Yeah, crazy. So hopefully we’ll make it back alive.

1:25:24 Daniel, as we say on Silicon Reel, it’s about the people and it really is, this community is. You’re a big part of it. Yeah, I just, I’ve really enjoyed this. So thanks so much for coming on. Thank you very much, Ryan.

1:25:34 I really enjoyed it. Okay, cool. Thank God for that session in the gym. Yeah, right. And yeah, I know.

1:25:39 Thank God for all that stuff. Best of luck with gravel and I’ll see you soon. Thank you. All right, cool. This week on Silicon Reel, we have Steven Rappaportz, founder of PAX Coffee.

1:25:56 I want to stop you from running out of coffee that you love. Stopping you from running out of coffee is different from sending you a bunch every month. Customers hate subscriptions. You need to be passionately emotionally bought into the problem you’re solving in order to execute better than everyone else. And if you don’t execute better than anyone else, why launch the business in the first place? The global coffee market is the second largest commodity market on the planet after crude oil. We’re a highly commercial business and We’re a very customer-centric business on Monday silicone real presents Steven Rappaport Packed coffee follow your heart do the thing you’re most passionate about