In this episode, we meet Dan Yates, CEO, and co-founder of Greener, a platform that helps businesses create a sustainable supply chain, a problem that’s becoming more important for businesses and customers alike.
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Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd and welcome to Inside the Scale Up. This is the podcast for founders executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers within the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the success the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses. Hey, welcome to the podcast. This time I’m here with Dan Yates from Greener and I’ll let Dan introduce himself introduce Greener and look forward to hearing your story. So Dan, good to have you here.
Dan Yates
Yeah, thanks for having me on. So like Matt said, my name is Dan Yates. I’m the co founder and chief executive of a clean tech startup called Greener. So Greener is an early stage software company. We use algorithmic matchmaking technology to help agri food businesses to build sustainable supply chains. You can kind of think of us a little bit like a dating website, except instead of using a matchmaking algorithm to find romantic partners, you’re using this to help find sustainable suppliers and buyers for your food and drinks supply chain. So not quite as romantic, but hopefully, still quite important.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, hopefully. Just as if not more impactful.
Dan Yates
Yeah, hopefully. Yes.
Matthew Todd
Cool. So I guess to kind of start things off, how did you you get to kind of found in greener in the, in the first place? What what did that early journey look like? To lead you to that point?
Dan Yates
Yeah, for sure. So it’s, I guess depends how far you want to go back. But so I’ve toyed with some startup ventures in the past. So shortly after I left my master’s, I started a computer hardware company. And I was trying to build this new type of form factor for gaming computer, very bold idea to go hardware as a fresh graduates, I now realize but it was, it was fun, I learned a huge amount, I wasn’t able to get the main funding to get to manufacturing stage. But I got a lot of positive validation. And I learned a huge amount.
And I guess that’s when I kind of fell in love with startups, I loved the idea of building something from scratch. But I did that for about two years, I worked on that, then I decided to spend some time in a more conventional role. So I ended up going to consulting. So I moved in, I moved to the Netherlands, I was working in this innovation consulting company. So essentially, we were helping big corporate clients to think a bit more like startups and to connect with relevant startups and all the associates kind of innovation tasks, I quickly got quite disillusioned there, you know, comparing a corporate role to a startup role, you do realize that your, your work is not quite as impactful, maybe not quite as meaningful as you’d like.
And that’s when I started talking to my co founder Mehrnaz. So she, she was doing her PhD in sustainable supply chain management at the University of Bath. And she started telling me about some of these huge challenges that are facing in particularly the agri food sector, you know, the global food systems and how much strain they’re under.
And it piqued my interest immediately, because I, you know, I love problems, I love solving problems. That’s kind of what I what I’ve done in all stages of my career is I like to find interesting problems and try and work out the best way to solve it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah
Dan Yates
And this caught my attention immediately. And I think it was in the, in the span of an afternoon, we decided that we were going to, we’re going to build something we didn’t know what we were going to build. But we knew that this was the problem that we wanted to address. And from there, we started just testing out a bunch of stuff.
Matthew Todd
Awesome. So that’s how we started I suppose. Yeah, so kind of sounds like you. You fell in love with that startup model of seeing your work make a difference, but that consulting startups in the big company didn’t really quite cut it in.
Dan Yates
Not really, I think, when you’re dealing with very large companies, each team member no matter how much they may want to bring about change that there’s still quite a small cog in a very large machine. So it’s still very slow, it still takes a huge amount of work to overcome the status quo inertia.
Matthew Todd
Yes.
Dan Yates
As it is. So I felt like we were coming up with some really cool ideas. I thought there’s some really interesting stuff being discussed. But in terms of actually implementation, it was just a bit slower than I would like really, you know, used to start up pacing. So I’m used to like new idea. Let’s do it right now. In bigger companies where it takes a bit longer than that.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. So it’s an easy decision to to jump back into actually your your own startup as a as a business.
Dan Yates
I think it was very exciting. Yeah. As I, as I, you know, got settled into a more conventional career, you do get used to certain stability. Yeah, well, obviously very little stability in a start up, especially when you don’t We know what you’re building yet. Yeah. So there’s risks. But I think the excitement and the prospect of doing some meaningful work that that overrode the risk of losing a bit of stability.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, sure. So I guess kind of arms with a problem that you’re looking to solve, you know, a co founder, very connected to that problem as well. We’ll, where do you take it from there? How do you start finding a solution? Or potentially, you know, multiple solutions and narrowing that down?
Dan Yates
Yeah, it’s a great question. So we we started toying with a few ideas. So when we, when we were discussing the problem, we had a few initial ideas, like things that we thought could be worth exploring. Yeah. And we just went out to test it, essentially. So we actually started off with a bunch of different ideas. So the first idea was a think that it was a simplified carbon calculator to build. And we knew we wanted to help small businesses, because their businesses who have the least resources, the least capital, the, you know, the smallest teams to dedicate to investing in sustainability.
So we wanted to make a product that could help them yeah, this is 90% of businesses who are small and medium sized enterprises. So the first one was a simplified carbon calculator, which was interesting. But we quickly discovered it is a hugely populated market, there are a lot of carbon calculators, and some of them have far more resources to commit to us to commit to the problem than we did. Yeah. We then moved on to an E commerce angle.
So essentially helping small businesses to buy the right stuff, you know, buy products, which are sustainable and helping sustainable businesses to sell sustainable products. Yeah, again, kind of made sense, the the business plan checked out. But we didn’t have the resources to essentially build an E commerce platform from scratch.
So you know, there’s a lot of it, there’s a lot of upfront investment into building a platform, and building the infrastructure to do that properly. So we would have had to raise more than we probably could have that stage to get started.
The third idea was a direct consulting angle. So we were like, we were actually going to small businesses, we were saying, let’s have a look at your operations and see how we can make it better. Yeah. Which worked very well, but was obviously not cost viable. Small businesses cannot afford consulting rates.
Matthew Todd
Sure.
Dan Yates
And also, it is absolutely not scalable at all, you know, we’d have to hire more team members. And it wasn’t quite right. Yeah, essentially. But so we took a step back. And we were actually I think we’re at a a rainy train station in the West Country, just to set the scene a little bit. And we were like, you know, what, what do all these ideas have in common? And what then what are we? What are we really trying to do? And we realized what we were trying to do was get businesses working with the right partners, essentially. And then we were like, how else can we do that? One on matchmaking. And that’s kind of the that was the eureka moment where we settled on, on greener as we know it today.
Matthew Todd
Cool. Yeah, great to hear that, you know, there was some trial and error that led you to that point. But there was always that common thread kind of holding those things together and good that you were able to kind of identify that as well, rather than, you know, give up, which would have been the worst thing or, or potentially just as bad plow on with one of the not so good options?
Dan Yates
When you’re when you’re starting a company, you need to have that flexibility, but also have a little bit of direction established from the get go.
Dan Yates
Yeah, I think that’s the thing, when you’re when you’re starting a company, you need to have that flexibility, but also have a little bit of direction established from the get go. So because we knew the problem, that kind of dad gave us the the compass to work out all the other problems as we went along. Yeah, but there are some startups, it’s very easy to get distracted, or to over pivot and to say, oh, maybe this is the way to go. But then you kind of lose sight of your vision a little bit. And you focus more on kind of this business idea. And it’s, it’s, it’s a difficult thing to balance sometimes.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, it certainly is. But I think, you know, I see a lot of other founders, perhaps liking the solution, more than the problem. And, you know, then going out looking for the problem where that solution fits, whereas it sounds like you are more committed to the problem or willing to iterate on the solution, which I think is a better way around.
Dan Yates
I would say. So I think you know, it’s good to love your product. It’s good to build something that you love. But ultimately, it’s not about you, you know that you have to be doing something for other people, for your customers. And that’s where the problem comes in. So you focus on that, then you’re going to keep it better compass.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess you kind of mentioned resources, you’re not having the resources to build the full on, you know, ecommerce platforms, I guess, how did you haven’t kind of narrowed down then you know, that that matching was the right approach? How did you resource the the early versions of that and get out in front of people?
Dan Yates
Yeah, so it was, I guess, the joy of going down the matchmaking route as well, it was it was something that that we could control the process entirely for the early stages. It was just about kind of doing the math, testing it running this program to see how well we could get it functioning. And we could we could do that for totally ourselves, you know, without any money. Yeah, I think we made the V one, or the V 0.1. using Excel. You know, when you start with the tools you have available, yeah. And you kind of start building as you get access to more resources.
Once we were happy with the actual maths then we started doing some tests with some early stage users who were happy to kind of volunteer their time. They knew We’re nowhere near having a product but they liked what we’re doing. They liked the vision. So we got them to kind of help us out a little bit. Yeah. And the first funding we got, actually came from Innovate UK grant funding. So we kind of built this more of a research case than an investment case. Yes. Because with Innovate UK, it’s more about doing something. You know, technologically or innovatively innovatively interesting, rather than building a business necessarily. Yes. Yeah. So we did that to start with, and we got lucky with a couple of grants upfront. And that’s that was how we got started.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I know, a number of other startups that have gone down that Innovate UK funding, and it is a great source of funding for businesses. But I agree, like you say, it’s, it’s not like you’re making a business case, there’s, they are very research driven. So they are looking for, in a way risky projects that are seeking to prove or disprove something.
Dan Yates
Absolutely. And it’s a huge asset for UK founders, like innovate. UK is an absolutely incredible institution, like some of the competitions, we were lucky. So the general competition they run is called Smart grants, which is open to pretty much any business with any idea with a few restrictions. Yeah, but we also found a more specialist competition called the Sustainable Innovation Fund. And that was right up our alley. So we, we had perfect luck, timing wise, in that we were able to kind of get out of that competition, in one of its few limited runs. And we were able to make the most of that. But it’s true. So they’re they’re looking for businesses, which essentially, are unlikely to get investment from the very beginning. Because it’s an alternative, you know, if a business can go out and raise venture capital, for example, then they don’t really need innovate. UK is more like a nice to have. Yeah, so that’s kind of their focus is like, cool ideas which need that first step.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. So and for those people that don’t know, kind of that grant funding, you know, what, what kind of strings are attached to that? What conditions does it have associated with it?
Dan Yates
Yeah, so it depends on the competition you get. So the smart grants one, I believe, you get a percentage of the total competent the total application. So you you apply with a project, you give a forecast of costs, you give a breakdown of those costs. And depending on the type of company you are, and the type of research project and the type of project it is, you can get somewhere between 60 and 80% of the project cost covered by Innovate UK, yeah. So if you I believe I forget what the exact definitions are. But if you’re a micro organization and the project is industry research, I think you’re able to get 80% or something like that. And double check these days, these do change from competition to competition.
But essentially, you’re the project type and the size of your company will change how much you can get match funded. Another thing you need to look out for is whether the competition has an advance or not. So for example, smart grants, smart grants did not offer an advance the funding. So you would be expected to essentially pay the costs yourself initially. And then you would send these costs NBK. And they’ll reimburse you afterwards. So that’s fine to be aware of as well. We were very lucky with Sustainable Innovation Fund, because that had quite a substantial advance as part of the competition. So essentially, we didn’t need to worry about any sourcing or any of the any of our money to start with. And we were able to do that as we went along in the project. I see.
Matthew Todd
So basically, there, Innovate UK, as you say, are funding the majority, you match the remainder of those costs, but there’s no equity at all, no loss, or
Dan Yates
No equity at all. It’s a great scheme. And what we found was, quite interestingly, it’s just it’s a great alumni network, as well. But I think it’s my it might have reached further than people expect, right? For example, we had some contacts from quite, quite large American venture capital firms talking to us. And we were like, how on earth did you find us? You know, we have no marketing, we have no presence. And they were like, well, we were looking at the Innovate UK Alumni Network. And we thought this was worth a chat. So it’s a it’s an incredible opportunity to take if you if you can take it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, and that’s, that’s definitely interesting. I know, other businesses have, you know, made use of that. And I think, again, that has definitely helped them with raising other funding because, you know, innovate, UK have done part of that vetting process for them. Right. So,
Dan Yates
Absolutely. And as I know, there are a bunch of angels who I’ve spoken to, and they won’t invest unless they see something like Innovate UK, you know, they want those trust indicators on the deck, essentially, before they even take it too seriously. So yeah, as an early stage founder, you need to build up as much trust and credibility as possible, and getting those pre existing logos on your deck. It’s a great way to do it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so you mentioned you had a couple of grants that that enabled you to develop the platform beyond the Excel spreadsheets and everything else. So you know, how far did that or has that taken you then, in terms of platform development, marketing other things?
Dan Yates
Yeah. So the the Grant took us to v1, or MVP, essentially. So we raised we got about 92,000 through that grant. So we match funded about 20 of that and that was plenty for three of us on decent. So when we grow our team to three, two of us full time one of us part time. Plenty, it was nice, first of all, to not be splitting my resources between part time work and also this project. So that was a great starting point. Yeah, we were able to work with a great development agency, as well, because we thought it’d be more cost effective to bring in an agency than hire our own dev teams for this stage, which works out to be a great decision.
So we got to go to MVP stage, the platform went live for pre launch, I think in April 22. Last year, okay, let’s nine months after we got the grant funding. It also allowed us to get to our first private funding round. So we have to Innovate UK, we closed in another 50,000 pounds of kind of friends and family slash angel investment. Yeah. To do that. After going, Yeah, after opening for pre launch, we grew the platform growth grew the user base a little bit and platform and fully live in July, I believe. And since then, it’s just been trying to grow trying to learn trying to build a platform as, as best we can, based on the feedback we’re gathering.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, fantastic. Sounds like yeah, great, great progress. And so in terms of those kind of customer growth perspective, then how how did that look, you met obviously mentioned, you had some initial people to talk to to help kind of validate that problem side of things. But as you utilize that grant funding to start to build out that MVP, how did you go about attracting users onto that platform?
Dan Yates
Yeah, it was a very manual process. You know, it’s an early stage platform and the platform we were. So the way the platform works is it benefits usually from having an existing network. It’s a network effects kind of platform. So you need users to attract users. So when you’re brand new, you obviously haven’t got that user draw. So the businesses you’re speaking to, they are the early adopters who see what you’re trying to build. And they want to get involved in early stage, even though the value for them isn’t really there yet. Yeah, that they’re not going to be able to find a lot of matches, because we haven’t got a lot of companies on board.
So we’re essentially just going door to door where we could on and calling businesses who were doing interesting, sustainable work, or who seemed to care about sustainability in their supply chains. And we were like, look, we’d love to talk to you. We’d love to learn more love to see if you can help us to build a platform that can make this easier in the future. But it was it was very manual. So the and I would say that continued for about the first year. So yeah, we had a one year anniversary a few months ago.
And that coincided with some fundraising as well. So it’s all very neat. But that first year, was all about kind of just getting as much feedback as possible, getting as much data to work with to fuel future growth plans. But that first year was just about gathering as much information as possible. Yeah. And cold calling. Yeah, exactly. Cold calling odd. It’s hard, cold, cold. I think people aren’t very used to cold calling at the moment. So we had more. We had more luck with emails, I think.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think I see a lot of founders that fear those manual steps. And I think they often use the lack of scalability as an excuse not to do those uncomfortable things of reaching out cold over email or phone. You know, sometimes they fail. Oh, what if they say no, they’ll never talk to me again. But the fact is, they they probably will,
Dan Yates
Oh, yeah. Well, also, there’s going to be businesses who say no, there’s going to be people who don’t like what you’re building, there’s going to be people who are very critical of what you’re building, that’s just kind of part of the game, unfortunately. And you can’t stop putting yourself out there, because you’re scared of getting getting nose, you know, if you’re scared of rejection, and you’re scared of that risk, then maybe startup isn’t really where you want to be. Because I know when we were doing a door to door campaign, literally walking around the town with a greener hoodie on talking to business owners, and that’s a horrifyingly difficult thing to do, if you’re not used to it. I mean, I’m not a salesperson, necessarily. So I’m not the sort of person who can walk in and say, give the full sales pitch and all that. But it’s just part of the process, you know, you’ve got to see yourself as, you know, kind of a cog within this startup, and you’ve got to learn and grow. And if you’re not willing to put stuff out there a little bit, it gets very difficult to get that that data to work with.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. So just for context to kind of help other founders that are perhaps, you know, on the fence a little bit scared of doing some of those things, you know, how many what was the ratio of yeses to nose you know, when you were kind of going around, you know, cold calling or impersonal emailing or whatever it was.
Dan Yates
So emailing, emailing, we got a response rate of I think 4% For the first campaigns, I think compared to Yeah, I think for a standard cold emailing campaign so this is cold emailing. I don’t know if I misspoke for a standard cold emailing campaign. I think you’re expecting somewhere between like one and 3% response. So we got I guess, just above that, but still a pretty when when you’re when it’s a brand new company and you’re very close to it. It’s still quite disheartening to have you know, 95% of people not really, not really noticed or not respond. Yeah. We had a lot of luck on LinkedIn, actually.
So for a bit of context, as well, our users kind of fall into two camps. On the one hand, you’ve got kind of small business owners who are looking or seeking Sustainability Solutions. Yeah, these could be restaurants, cafes, and wholesalers or anything like that. But essentially, their priority is to find solutions. And on the other hand, you’ve got companies who are providing some sort of sustainable product or service, we call these providers. Getting in touch with the providers on LinkedIn are super easy. We had a great response rate from them, because the value prop was so self evident, you know, we were like, we’re building this platform, it’s early stage.
But if we get it up and running, then you’ll be able to get your product seen by the ideal customer very easily. Yeah. And they were like, great. This is this is worth a shot at least. And those sorts of businesses were much more active on on LinkedIn. Yeah. The Seekers, a lot less LinkedIn based, you know, there’s not many cafes who have a LinkedIn presence, for example. So they were more about walking in or calling and that kind of stuff. And that was where it was a bit harder to kind of get our feet in the door to start with.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And then, yeah, I suppose you’re right, you do have that two sides to that marketplace, essentially. And I think with those kind of businesses, you’ve you’ve got to choose a side that you want to kind of seed First, don’t you? And I think your usually is an easier, more logical side and start building first, isn’t it?
Dan Yates
Yeah, it’s, it’s something it’s something you need to think about what these kind of, you can call it a kind of marketplace model where you have different parties interacting with one another. For us, it was about where where were we reap the most rewards for our efforts? You know, we’re still a small team with limited resources, how can we make the most of that, we realized quickly that was getting the providers on board and using them as a drop off for the seekers. Yeah. So it’s just a little a little way that you can understand the dynamics of how your platform is viewed by different stakeholders and user groups, and how you can make that make the most of that?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think it’s important not to lose sight of not your perspective of how you’d like to bring those people together. But what are those different parties looking to get out of that interaction?
Dan Yates
Exactly. Right. Yeah, exactly. Right.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. So obviously, you mentioned the matching platform, how are you? Or are you monetizing this at the moment that that platform?
Dan Yates
As an early stage founder, you may think I want revenue, and I want to be self sustaining as fast as possible. And that’s totally understandable. But you also have to think, How can my product be as good and as accessible for as many users as possible?
Dan Yates
So we’re not monetized at the moment? So we had a very extensive chat about this at the beginning of the Innovate UK project, actually, we were like, you know, we have this we have these resources, we could build in monetization functionality. But do we have the data to build a perfect monetization model? And what impact will monetizing have on growth prospects? Yeah, what we decided was that we’d rather have a totally free platform at this stage with No Barriers to joining. And we’d work out monetization at the next round or the round after that. Yeah. So it is a, it’s a difficult choice to make, you know, as an early stage founder, you may think I want revenue, and I want to be self sustaining as fast as possible. And that’s totally understandable. But you also have to think, How can my product be as good and as accessible for as many users as possible? As soon as possible? Yeah.
Matthew Todd
No, I think that’s an interesting choice. And I’m kind of glad to hear it’s one you’ve made consciously, because I think it is there are two models, and they are they’re not ones that kind of you can do a bit of both. It just doesn’t work too well. You end up kind of in no man’s land with no value prop?
Dan Yates
Absolutely. No, you’ve got to commit. I think it’s something that so I spend a lot of time talking to startup founders in the US as well. I think us founders are much happier to forego revenue at the beginning because they’re confident that they’ll be able to raise it’ll be able to build this in the future. Yeah. Whereas you UK founders have a tendency to be a bit more conservative. And UK investors as well. I will say UK investors, I think expect revenue a lot earlier. Whereas US investors, if you have revenue, they’re like, Why do you have revenue, you know, big grow more, you know, get more customers first, and then we’ll work out revenue in the future. Yeah. So it’s a totally different ethos, you need to work out who you’re trying to hit with your fundraising strategy as well. Yeah, interesting.
Matthew Todd
So I guess, being based in the UK, then, you know, what was it that gave you the confidence to commit to that approach? Was it US investor relations? Was it something else? But what was the key factor there?
Dan Yates
Yeah, so I think what what kind of swung us was we were having quite an easy time starting conversations with investors, quite big investors. Like I mentioned that there was one in us, a large US firm who got in touch with us quite early on and they were like, this is interesting. And that gave us the confidence to say, you know, if we do this right, then there is interest in what we’re building.
But you know, we you know, it wasn’t a it still wasn’t a foregone conclusion. You know, I spent a lot of time talking to UK angel investors and they were like, No, you need to get to you know, you need to get to 10k Mr. As quick as you can. Otherwise, you’re not gonna raise any money in the business is going to die. Yeah. And you know, you’re you’re taking a lot of these different thoughts and it’s, you know, you never have perfect information to make these decisions decisions with but you need to kind of commit to it. And we I guess we just believed in ourselves and that we could do it, to be honest.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, great to hear that you had that strength of commitment to do what I think isn’t a typical model, as you say, in the UK, but it is not unheard of in the UK, you know, there are many startups going down that same route. So I would certainly encourage, you know, other founders to make a conscious decision.
Dan Yates
I think so, you just need to be aware of the decision you’re making, you know, like you mentioned earlier, don’t don’t kind of sleepwalk or don’t kind of try and hit a middle ground, you know, understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and commit to the strategy. You know, startups have a very short amount of time to hit targets and to make progress. If you’re kind of uncertain. And if you’re kind of keeping an eye on too much, then you’re just wasting time that you could be doing to deploy to a specific strategy.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think I’ve seen other businesses that will, you know, maybe have that first conversation with one investor that leads them towards in one direction, then they’ll talk to another investor that tells them something different. So then they’ll veer away from that direction, and they can end up just doing a lot of busy things, but achieving nothing in any direction.
Dan Yates
Yeah, but it’s so difficult, you know, like investors are, they all have very different investment theses, they all have very different opinions as well. And you can speak to 10 investors to get 10 Totally different takes on what you need to do next. Yeah, it’s very hard, especially if you’re like, maybe a younger, maybe less experienced founder to know what to do with that information. So what we try and do is take what we need to from these meetings, kind of listen to everything that’s being said, Yeah, but you don’t need to implement everything is being said, you just need to listen, hear it, process it and make the decision yourself.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s great advice. And presumably, then when you’re having good conversations, building relationships with investors, you know, finding the ones that match your kind of thesis and strategy, you know, is gonna be pretty important as well.
Dan Yates
Absolutely. And I think, you know, there are a lot of investors in the world, I think I spoken to some founders who they have one bad meeting with an investor, and they get incredibly disheartened. And they feel like they’ve done everything wrong, and they don’t really know what to do next. But there are so many investors, and your job just as much as their job is to find the right investments for them, your job is to find the right investor for you. And you just got to keep at it. To be honest, it’s just a numbers game of trying to speak to as many trying to learn as much and keep creeping towards your, you know, your perfect investor.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s a great way to look at that. And I think there’s looking at your business, as a business in its own right as its own entity, and not making the decision that feels easiest to you, or whatever, or makes you feel better in that moment. But it’s making the right decision for that business,
Dan Yates
for sure. Yeah, another example, actually, we had one meeting with an investor quite early on. And they actually they had an offer on the table. But the offer was contingent on us making some quite substantial changes to our overall vision we wanted to build. And we were thinking, so initially, we were like, Oh, we got to do this, you know, we got to take this, you know, who knows when money is gonna be on the table? You know, we have to take this.
But then we took a day, and we started thinking we were like, but do we want to really take this, if it’s not really investing in what we want to build, you know, they’re investing in what they want to build. Yeah. And then we, ultimately, we decided to turn that one down, which was a very daunting decision, you know, especially for me, my job, essentially, in the company is to keep money coming in and keep the company going the right direction. So to walk away from money on the table is hard. But it might be the right decision for your startup as well. So don’t just take the first offer, if there’s, if it doesn’t quite align with what you want to do.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great, a great point. So I guess, then kind of building on, you know, from where you are. Now, obviously, you know, being successful in bringing money into the business, you’ve moved beyond the kind of the MVP phase of the platform. So what’s what’s next, then if you’re kind of going down that traction route, what does traction at this stage of the business look like?
Dan Yates
Yeah, so there’s, ultimately it’s just about getting the user count up, really, with this kind of platform. So like I said, for the past year, we’ve been in that MVP stage where growth has been, yes, getting users on boarded, but also about listening to them and gathering feedback as much as possible. Now we’re in a situation where we have quite a lot of feedback, quite a lot of data to play with. And now our job is just to take that and take the investment we’ve secured and to do something with it, yeah, prove that we can convert this promising data into strong growth figures. So essentially, my job is to deploy the funds, look how, look at our customer acquisition cost, and essentially work out how effectively we are securing customers with the fund with the money we’ve raised, and use that as a starting point for future fundraising efforts.
But it’s it’s kind of transitioning from being a very manual process. We are trying to work out to scale user acquisition as well. You know, ultimately, we don’t want to have You know, three of us going door to door, you know, I’m not a salesman, and my two, two of my team members have their PhD. So they don’t really want to be going door to door doing sales, they want to be doing science, they want to be learning, they want to be using their skills to build an amazing platform. Yeah. So we were torn between either hiring a, an in house business development team member, yeah. Or working with an agency. And again, pros and cons to both of these, obviously, agencies bit more expensive, but kind of more for service. Yes, having someone in-house maybe a bit more affordable. But there are some risks about whether they’re going to perform to the standard you expect. That’s also considering whether how much you’ll have to train and manage them as well. Yeah.
So we decided to go with down the agency route. So we’re working with a essentially a Business Development Agency. Yeah. So we’ve only just started working with them. Hopefully, they’ll live up to the height, they seem very promising so far. Yeah. But by working with them, we can essentially take some of those more manual manual tasks, like you mentioned, you know, the cold calling the cold emailing, given to someone who really knows what they’re doing. Yep. And essentially give us the best case scenario for what we can do with with that funding allocation.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no sounds sounds exciting.
Dan Yates
It is exciting. It’s daunting, it’s always scary to bring more people in, you start to feel like an actual company at some point. Yeah, you know, you in the early stages, just a few of you, and you’re just chatting. And you’re like, you’re building stuff, but it doesn’t really feel like a like a company. But then suddenly you start hiring, you start working with quite serious contractors and consultants, and it’s a lot more legal paperwork, for example. And suddenly you feel like a very, an actual company. But it’s fun. Hopefully, you know, we have quite high hopes for the next couple of months. So we’ll see how they do.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no sounds. Sounds very exciting. And yeah, I think that’s a good place to leave the conversation for now. And I think will be great to pick this up again, you know, maybe a few months down the line, kind of see how that growth strategy has worked and, you know, fingers crossed, you’re, you’re seeing really good kind of growth in, in user count. And, and using that to kind of get that next round of investment, whatever that may look
Dan Yates
like. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if all goes to plan will raise again, end of this year, and hopefully a good sum there. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s always really cool to sort of talk about this kind of stuff. Hopefully, people can learn a little bit, and I can share some of my findings, because it’s, it can be very tough to figure out exactly what you’re doing. As a startup founder, it’s always good to kind of hear some opinions of people who have been through it.
Matthew Todd
Absolutely. And I think we’ve such I think was a bit you know, obviously a very, very us bias in media. And that’s certainly what we’re trying to bring here is a bit more of a UK stare. And I think, for sure things like Innovate UK, raising awareness of that a lot of startup founders don’t know about these kinds of results have been great to hear your, your journey through that and how it’s helped you.
Dan Yates
Yeah, I guess one last thing I’d say is, it’s the joy of being in the 2020s is you can access all these different investors, all these different resources from around the world. But you can kind of pick and choose what works best for you. So if you’re a UK founder, then yeah, go for that Innovate UK funding. But don’t be you can still email us investors, you still talk to Americans, you can still talk to investors from all around the world, and to see what sticks you know, you don’t really know what your path is going to be unless you put yourself out there and start talking to people.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely great, great advice, a good place to leave it. But just quickly, for anyone that wants to find out more about greener, either as provide a supply or just interested party, why should they where should they go?
Dan Yates
Best place to start is the website. That will be greener.io. You can also follow our socials, our LinkedIn page, you can find us I believe, as greener underscore IO on Twitter. LinkedIn is Greener IO. So you can usually find us if you search for greener on these different platforms. We’re quite well SEO.
Matthew Todd
So that’s good. I will drop links in the in the notes as well for everyone to see. So awesome. pleasure talking to you, Dan. And yeah, look forward to speaking again.
Dan Yates
Great, thanks so much Matt.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the Scale Up. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from.
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