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Sometimes you have to start slow to go fast
106 Plays1 year ago
Rob Smith is Co-founder at Slick, the fastest growing online booking solution for Hair and Beauty. In this episode of the First-time Founders Podcast, Rob shares learnings from his experience building complex business software for low-tech, highly-creative Hair & Beauty industry users.
Interested listeners can reach Rob Smith via his LinkedIn (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robert-wp-smith) or Rob Liddiard (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertliddiard/) at Rob@mission-group.co.uk (or to book some free time with Rob L, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/rob-liddiard).
First-time Founders on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7hcdluu5ywrZ6qFhhI8EVH?si=840a4f564e6d4ea4
First-time Founders on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0SfnHZhV747su-Wnd-9Z0Q
First-time Founders on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-time-founders/id1697488388
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Transcript
Introduction to First Time Founders
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the First Time Founders podcast, the show where we talk about how to take a business from nothing and grow it into something meaningful. I'm Rob Lydiard. I'm an Exited Software Founder, Reform Corporate Lawyer and Professional EOS Implementer. EOS stands for the Entrepreneurial Operating System. We work with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leadership teams to help them get more of what they want from their business. In particular, getting crystal clear on a vision for the organization, where a company's going and how it's going to get there.
00:00:28
Speaker
getting people executing with more discipline and accountability in service of that vision, and then helping leadership teams build more functional, healthy, and cohesive team dynamics. Because the truth is, in startups, we can be a little bit chaotic and dysfunctional. That's what I do for a day job, but when I'm not working, I love to talk to other entrepreneurs about their experiences.
Meeting Rob Smith: Slick's Journey
00:00:50
Speaker
And on this episode today, I'm speaking to Rob Smith, one of the founders of Slick. Slick's a disruptive, fast-growing,
00:00:58
Speaker
platform for the hair and beauty industry. It does bookings, payments, payroll. It's a really wide product that's growing quickly now under Rob stewardship. In this episode, Rob talks about what it's like to build for very demanding low tech users like creative stylists and building what is a pretty complicated product.
00:01:19
Speaker
Now in this episode, the key insight that you'll get from Rob is that sometimes you got to go slow to go fast. Got to understand your market, the nuances of the users that you're trying to sell to so that you can build the right product and ultimately get on that exponential curve, exponential growth J curve that we're all looking for in the tech startup universe. So without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Rob Smith.
00:01:49
Speaker
Rob, welcome to the First Time Founders Podcast. Thank you for doing this, my friend. Hey, Rob, how are you doing? Yeah, really good. Really good. Thank you. Rob, let's dive straight in because you are the only founder that I know, or certainly the only founder that we've had on this fairly new show that does something as cool as working with creative stylists and hairdressers. We've had people running restaurants and boring B2B tech like my background. So I'm hopeful that this is going to be the most exotic episode so far. How the hell did you fall into doing what you're doing?
Challenges in the Analog Industry
00:02:19
Speaker
Yeah, great question. So it all probably started when I started learning French. I've always loved France. So I did French at school, spent a lot of time out there skiing, and then ended up doing it at uni. So I became fluent in French, worked in France for a couple of companies, a ski company, a furniture company. And then I was really keen to use my, I guess, my sort of newfound skill. So it ended up first at Renault, so in the automotive industry, and then ended up at L'Oreal.
00:02:49
Speaker
So slowly the story's starting to make sense. And spent six years at L'Oreal in the professional division. So that's very much focused on the B2B professionals, so Salons, Barbers, Spas, working on commercial marketing roles. And I guess great kind of grounding in some FNCG marketing, commercial.
00:03:12
Speaker
But it's a very, very old school industry. And it was quite challenging because you're looking to drive.
00:03:21
Speaker
digital traffic, looking to drive footfall, both in terms of sub-service sales, so color sales, but also in terms of retail products. And because it's a very analog industry, 70%, 65% of businesses still use pen and paper, so they don't have online booking. So you're faced with this conundrum of, well, how am I meant to be driving traffic when no one's got a website? I can't track anything because no one's taking online booking.
00:03:47
Speaker
how can I track if somebody's made a booking over the phone through WhatsApp email? I can't.
Founding Slick: The Beginnings
00:03:53
Speaker
And so it was a huge challenge and a huge source of frustration. And you're spending thousands of pounds on posters. And it's like, this is 2020 and we're doing posters. Well, how do we make this better? And so I've tried to drive a lot of change internally, but it's challenging because you're trying to move an entire industry. And so it ends up actually quitting.
00:04:13
Speaker
Went to Phillips and headed up their UK personal care marks and so male female beauty. And then just through my brother got introduced to my co-founder Steph who was tackling it from a subdital, had a different perspective on it of as a female consumer working long hours, I can't book my hair and beauty online. I'm going to do something about this. And she'd worked on the Juste IPO. So was looking at tech platforms, how they were
00:04:42
Speaker
changing fragmented analog industries and saw, well, look, I want to do something. I'm passionate about hair and beauty. I'm going to look at this. And we kind of got chatting. And so she kind of dragged me back into the hair and beauty industry.
Building a Flexible Product
00:04:56
Speaker
And that was really how so slick was born. And so it's quite everyone always laughs because she's got some little beautiful hair and assume everyone assumes that she must be the kind of the hair and beauty expert.
00:05:07
Speaker
and they assume that I must be the sort of product or tech guy, but actually it's very much a role we're going to learn on this. It has that grounding in the hair and beauty industry from years at L'Oreal. So it's been an interesting ride, but it's been great to come back and use all those learnings to build something that really does work for the industry. And I think that's always been the sort of challenges that so many businesses have tried to tackle the industry.
00:05:33
Speaker
and use them with an off-the-shelf booking system that does work for restaurants, it works for other resources, and it doesn't have that flexibility that the creatives in the hairdressing industry need. They are often, I think of them as accidental business owners. They've inherited a business from their mum, their dad, and they've been throwing the keys, and they're fantastic hairdressers, amazing colourists, real creatives, but they don't always have the strongest grounding in running a business.
00:06:01
Speaker
And so you've got to build in this hyper complex because it needs to cater for millions of use cases, but you've got to wrap that in a UI and a framework that's very, very simple to use because they are their owner operators. The average number of staff is three, four. So they're tiny, tiny businesses. They're very successful businesses.
00:06:19
Speaker
But they are the true growing
SaaS and FinTech Solutions
00:06:20
Speaker
operator. They're spending five minutes behind the tilt, 20 minutes cutting hair, then back behind the tilt, then cutting hair, then colouring hair, then cutting hair, taking a bill. They need to do a marketing blast. They need to then look at their inventory in place in order for their big colour house. They're juggling multiple tasks. And our challenge is how do you simplify that, remove a lot of that administrative burden, but then give them the tools to digitally grow, but also connect with their consumers and the end clients expecting that digital experience, that ease of booking that we get from restaurants, hotels, flights,
00:06:48
Speaker
and trying to bring that to the high street. So it's a very simple problem but with huge numbers of complexities. I bet they are so demanding as customer types. How close is what you're doing now to the original vision and how hard has it been? We're still very much on the original vision which is
00:07:12
Speaker
A lot of businesses have tried to approach this with a marketplace angle. And if we create enough demand through our platform, we can then sell that to the sounds and basically just drive new clients in. Our view on it is that your average person just goes, I don't know about you, but certainly I'm the same. I go back to my barber. I don't want a new barber. I just want to be able to book with them when I want to book.
00:07:37
Speaker
and broadly within the hair and beauty industry, that's the same. Your client retention is very, very high.
Understanding Customer Needs
00:07:43
Speaker
People have relationships with their hairdressers built over years. They don't want new clients, they just want a system to manage their existing clients. So we've always focused on that, so that SaaS and that FinTech angle and then payments, as opposed to going through the marketplace angle.
00:08:00
Speaker
And it's really just been trying to build out the right features that our customers need and working very closely with understanding what your fears about transitioning from pen and paper. Why would you not offer online booking? What your fears about online booking? What could potentially go wrong? And then building the frameworks and the flows that
00:08:18
Speaker
gives them that flexibility and that creativity but gives them enough that they can do it but not too much that things start to go wrong because it's very different from a bookie restaurant. A restaurant has a table, the table seat's four, you're booking that out for four hours or two hours.
00:08:35
Speaker
you're not pre-ordering your food. So all you're doing when you're reserving a table at a restaurant is reserving a resource for a set period of time. If you are booking a colour, the length of time will depend on your hair length, on your texture, your porosity, what service you're doing, the complexity of that service.
00:08:54
Speaker
that will then vary between different staff members. One staff member can do a full head of highlights in an hour and a half, another can do it in two. So depending on who you select, then determines the time that's needed. That also then determines the price.
00:09:07
Speaker
So there's all of these flows that we've got to cater for and we have to cater for them in a way that reassures them to then actually get on board with what we're trying to do. Did you know it was going to be that complex from a product perspective going in or did that sort of dawn on you as you realised you needed to fulfil what the customer would need and want from you?
00:09:29
Speaker
I think the product complexity is, let's be frank, we're not putting people on the moon here. We're getting people to book blow dries and colours. It is complex, and it's trying to... The complex part is having those complex flows, but wrapping it in a simple UI that somebody can just self-serve who's come from pen and paper, who is...
00:09:56
Speaker
they are scared about technology. And it's reassuring them that actually, yeah, we can cater for this. We can design a system that actually reacts smartly. So people from an online booking point of view, they hate the idea of leaving gaps. That's why a lot
Go-to-Market Strategy
00:10:11
Speaker
of barbers don't take bookings. They do walk-ins because they want people to be booked back to back to back. There's no downtime maximum efficiency. So we've built a system that essentially looks at your diary and goes, well, I'm not going to offer that slot because it would open up and leave a 15 minute gap.
00:10:25
Speaker
it would promote inefficiency. So we're only going to offer the client certain times that basically allows that barber to be booked back to back. It's complex, but it's not rocket science. But then actually explaining to them, and this is the challenging part is a go to market, is actually explaining to them that we have solved this kind of one of life's great mysteries. And yeah, it does do what you want it to do.
00:10:48
Speaker
And they kind of, they're looking at you disbelieving and going, I don't believe you, you showed them that. Oh my God, that's amazing. And it's that mindset change that's the hardest bit. And I think that's the bit that was probably re-underestimated. That's interesting. Even with a marketing background, right? That kind of, would you say most of your first time founder learnings were around?
00:11:05
Speaker
Go to market, would you say, rather than product? Interesting. The product is challenging, for sure. But the hardest part is you've got there are 55,000 hair and beauty salons in the UK. 60% of them are still using pen and paper. It's a mindset thing. Can you just talk us through the funnel that you've landed on? Do you do like Facebook? Do you do like social ads to capture their attention? Do you do outbound? Do you do everything? I bet you've tried everything over the years.
00:11:33
Speaker
Yes, we've been lucky. We signed a kind of commercial partnership with L'Oreal and to act as a lead source. So that's a lot of learnings there. Paid works to a certain extent, but then your analog audience who are using pen and paper, they're not massive users of social. So they're not there. A lot of B2B SaaS people you speak to will talk about LinkedIn.
00:12:02
Speaker
Most hairdressers aren't on LinkedIn. So running LinkedIn campaigns is just totally pointless. Search, again, people aren't searching for software, they're scared of it. So actually, the most effective is, I mean, it's just a heresy to say in 2023, is old school outbound SDR. And so it's a, for us, what really works is that combination of actually outbound SDR.
00:12:29
Speaker
But then also we have a regional field team and actually being, getting out there, going and visiting people on the high street, it's not, you have
Product Development and User Feedback
00:12:39
Speaker
to be so careful that you're not over investing. You haven't just got people going up and down the high street where there's not an owner, but actually where you're quite targeted, having somebody walk through the door.
00:12:50
Speaker
to somebody who is analog. It's a human business. You don't go into hairdressing to make millions. You go into it because you love working with people. And so when you're analog and you're being faced with a tech proposition, having somebody walk through the door and go, hey, look, let's sit down. Let me show you. Suddenly, it removes a lot of those barriers. Did you do any physical cold calling back in the day? Oh, yeah.
00:13:17
Speaker
Really? How did you find that? Did you find it horrifying? Were you quite natural at it?
00:13:24
Speaker
I would say natural, it's something you've got to learn, but it's a great way of, I think one of our greatest strengths is it's a product that is built almost by our users. And so a lot of that early feedback that we took, both from a sort of genuine user research forums, et cetera, but also just stuff that you're gleaning from a core of, I'll never use a system because of X.
00:13:52
Speaker
Okay, that's interesting. Okay, could we build it so that we can counter that objection? Yeah, actually, that's something we've also heard. And you're piecing together different threads from existing users, prospects, people have outright rejected your category, not even your product, your category. And you're building up a huge knowledge base, we've got 8000 pieces of kind of tagged feedback that we can analyze.
00:14:14
Speaker
and look at when we come to build something. What are people's fears? What are people's objections? And we can then build it in a way that works for them. And it's often, this is the compliment I often hear the most, and it's for me the greatest, is when people say it feels like a hairdresser has built this. Or a guy said to me, like, you must have been a barber because it's like you're in my head. Everything I've been doing in the system, it's here. It works the way I would want the system to be made. You must have worked in a barber shop. I was like, no.
00:14:42
Speaker
we've just listened to our customer and that's why we built a very hopefully intuitive sticky platform that does work and you've got people that were adamant they've never used tech and would always be analog who are now using it and are growing their business and that's the biggest joy that we get is you see somebody who's gone from pen and paper to sunny
00:15:02
Speaker
They're online, they're promoting their services, they're selling new gift vouchers. They're doing everything. And they've got their life back. They're not having to respond to Instagram messages or WhatsApps at 8 o'clock on a Saturday night about, can you book me an odd Monday? People are just booking it and it's the way it should be. That's awesome. For how long were you doing kind of all of the outbound or most of the outbound? I mean, do you still do any of that like walking stuff now? Some founders do try and delegate sales away very, very quickly, don't they?
00:15:31
Speaker
Yeah, I'd say that was one of my biggest learnings.
Market Fragmentation and Scaling Challenges
00:15:35
Speaker
I wouldn't, yeah, maybe mistake if I could maybe go as far as that. He's probably stepping away too early. Interesting. And we got in a great head of sales who was very structured.
00:15:51
Speaker
Um, but I probably still wasn't close enough to it. And actually we ended up, I've come back in, um, because I think found that, I mean, people will give you different metrics of you should be found lead sales until X million of ARR. And then you can do this that I think everyone has to work out what's right for you. But I think it's getting to the point of you've got that repeatable sales process.
00:16:15
Speaker
But yet our product's changing the whole time, the environment's changing the whole time, so there's new regulations coming into the industry the whole time. So you've got to be on top of that. And I think you as a founder probably are closest to what those true paying points are, what's going on in the industry, those success stories, and helping the team tell those stories, I think it's been, this is the biggest learning.
00:16:40
Speaker
So yeah, I still directly manage the team. And I think that will probably continue for a good while. Yeah, I made the same.
00:16:48
Speaker
Like Sam's calling mistakes a funny thing to call it. So I agree with the reason you hesitated to call it a mistake. But I, I think that what make it's clear in my mind now that I think about sales as a gateway to doing decent product management. If you're going to be the CEO or a founder of a product led organization, like getting too far away from the customers and like doing the odd bit of user research or something, it's just not the same. Is it as getting your ass handed to you from a cold call? Totally.
00:17:14
Speaker
And I think that you've got to, when you are, especially, it's one thing when you've got, I always think of this as we have to create category awareness and category consideration. If we can do that, people will choose Snickers a brand. The biggest challenge is the category.
00:17:31
Speaker
It's actually, why should I use paper versus software? You've got to make a case for why should people be using software first. Once we get that kind of mindset change, suddenly it's, okay, well, yeah, have a look at Slick and our price point, our support level is the product. We don't do contracts, we do the setup, we onboard them.
00:17:50
Speaker
It makes a very easy decision to choose our product but it's really a kind of category thing. A lot of these competitors were built for the big chains. They were built in the 2000s and so these are enterprise pieces of kit which are great if you're running 15 salons and you've got a marketing director, you've got a finance director, you've got an ops director.
00:18:10
Speaker
but they're not suitable for somebody who's got two staff, one of whom only works three days a week. How is the market spread? I totally get the individual barber. I think many of us will experience that, literally a single site, and we all know
00:18:28
Speaker
Tony and Guy. What's in the middle of that? What does the mid-market of salons look like? Is it common? Because in restaurant world, you see new restaurants emerging all the time, don't you? And growing and scaling, becoming niche, boutique, casual dining brands. I'm not so aware of that in the hair industry, but is it? What percentage try and scale up?
00:18:53
Speaker
Very few. Really? So I think it's about 90 odd percent of UK hair and beauty businesses are under five staff, six staff. Wow. It's the definitive. I mean, one of our kind of advisors is extra steep. He helped them sort of scale an IPO.
00:19:13
Speaker
And the similarities with the kind of the fast food industry are very, very similar.
Insights and Systems for Founders
00:19:20
Speaker
You mean like local takeaways, right? No, exactly. And I think
00:19:30
Speaker
It only came to me about a year ago. The reason that it's so hard to scale a hair and beauty business and have multiple sites is it's a creative industry. And so what I need to do is if I want to open a branch in Chiswick, cool, I need to find a couple of good colourists, a couple of good stylists in Chiswick.
00:19:48
Speaker
If I then want to replicate that and have the same brand, the same look, feel, vision, I need to find other stylists who then want to cut hair, color hair in a similar way. And that's one thing to do over two market towns, like Ewan from Essex. So I'm going to have one branch in Saffre-Maldon, one in Faxford. But if I then want to have one in Surrey, one in Hampshire, one in Bristol,
00:20:13
Speaker
Everyone's got different ways of cutting hair. Everyone's got different visions of what good hair looks like. It's very different to a restaurant where there's only so many ways you can cook a burger.
00:20:21
Speaker
I've got a recipe for a burger. It's a patty. It's two slices of lettuce, not three, two. One slice of cheese that we all kind of buy on bulk. Like it's a very kind of precise formulaic way of doing it, which you can scale. Hair is much harder to scale. Everyone's individualistic. Everyone wants to do it their own way. And I think that's why it's been so challenging for people to scale. So it's a very, very fragmented market.
00:20:46
Speaker
I suppose also that if you're a talented local stylist, like the only barrier really is being willing to sign for a lease and then some fit out as well, right? So I guess a bit like recruitment business. I mean, there are some scale recruitment businesses, but like it sort of lends itself to small scale entrepreneurialism as well. I can see why you're so attracted to and interested in the market. So, so it sounds like most of your learnings have been around go to market. When you and I have talked previously, you've always been
00:21:14
Speaker
really generous with other founders about sharing what you know kind of outside the mainstream VC marketing industrial complex. Would you just mind riffing on some of the things that you've learned that maybe folks won't have heard on the Big Venture Capital podcasts? Yeah, I think
00:21:37
Speaker
I think a lot of it is staying very close to, you know your market well, you should know your market better than anyone. And I think we've heard a lot of people kind of try to apply parallels from different industries that we in theory should learn from. I think you've got to treat it with a pinch of salt. Some of it can be useful, but I think you've got to ultimately back your own intuition and your own knowledge.
00:22:09
Speaker
Um, there's a lot of basic learnings that are out there that do get missed, like how to set up the basics, like good CRM system, like think about it, right. What do you, what are you going to need in the year's time? What data should you be starting to collect? Like if I'd been, if I know what I know now, the stuff that we'd been starting to collect on payments, you could have, you could have built up a real ecosystem of data that you could be then using further down the line.
00:22:28
Speaker
but I think also there's a lot of
00:22:36
Speaker
Can you get, can you, is there an example that's kind of, that's in your mind's eye at the moment as you talk about that? So we, with Stripe, we launched our in-store payments earlier in the year. So massive opportunity, both in terms of revenue, but also in terms of stickiness. And one of our investors wants to have called us Shopify for Salons. And so we are, we ultimately provide everything they need, CRM, marketing payments, e-commerce, online booking, inventory management, you name it.
Sales Frameworks and Customer Understanding
00:23:04
Speaker
And now if we'd known that we were going to be, if I'd known the importance of data and actually having a really strong CRM, yeah, we could have started capturing it in the year one, people's payment rates, what providers making it, starting to understand what the makeup of the UK sell and barber market looks like, what type of profiles are cash only, because that still exists.
00:23:28
Speaker
While our bank transfer only, that exists. Who's got the lion's share of the market? What are the price points? And you can start to build up that data very, very early. And again, it sounds obvious and I think if you're a second time founder, you'll know that. If you're a first time founder, a lot of the VC kind of advice is almost
00:23:51
Speaker
much more macro and it's not actually that applied and I think there's a real often a dearth of applied learnings and applied guidance that could be given in the recessive.
00:24:04
Speaker
as in when maybe if I do ever get the credibility to write that kind of, so that go-to-market playbook. It's the simple shit that you wish you had learned. And that is almost everyone thinks it's so obvious that I don't need to teach anyone that because everyone surely must know that. And everyone else is going around going, well, no, I wish somebody had told me that.
00:24:24
Speaker
It's so true. Pricing, think about hiring. There's so much stuff I think is obvious in hindsight and I think a lot of people do overlook because they want to talk something more glamorous and something deeper and something they sound much more intelligent because they've got a great point about X but actually a lot of it is just the basics. Do the basics really well and you're going to be successful. I completely agree with you and I found that
00:24:54
Speaker
A sort of related example to that, I really misunderstood the difference between delegation and abdication earlier my first time found the journey. And it was, I think it was because it's very popular and lazy kind of fortune cookie advice that you hear to say, you know, hire great people and then like get out of their way.
00:25:13
Speaker
Like it's slightly more nuanced and it takes more time to say, make sure you understand the jobs that you're asking people to do and roughly how you want them to do them so that you can be like ultimately accountable and responsible for supporting, making sure you've got the right person and then supporting them and being successful in the role. Like kind of to do that, you need to know what successful is.
00:25:31
Speaker
literally nobody ever said that to me until I'd spent three years not having any idea like why things weren't working exactly the way I expected them to in my organization. I had to go all the way back to the root of like one of the roles what I might expect them to do. How do I measure performance or otherwise? And it's just not glamorous, is it? It's exactly the same as when you talk about setting up your systems of record so that it tells you
00:25:54
Speaker
Like it's your cockpit for the business, right? But it's amazing how much advice first time founders get is just go fast and don't worry about flying blind. Yeah, exactly.
00:26:06
Speaker
one of our earliest investments was from L'Oreal. And so we, they were keen, very keen to sort of to roll out. So we went super quickly. And we probably did, we went to market far too early. And actually, if we held back and had some confidence in our opinions, and actually stood up against the big, the big corporate and said, look, no, we're not ready to launch, we need XYZ.
00:26:32
Speaker
and then we can go to market. We'd have probably been even more successful. But again, they're the hindsight that you just don't realise. And again, it's great to take that away. And that's the kind of stuff that you do want to share. Because I think it's very easy. You get money and you want to go and spend it all.
00:26:50
Speaker
And everyone's saying, oh, you need this, you need a great marketing person, you need this function, this function, this function. And yeah, there is a broad playbook for B2B SaaS or FinTech with D2C, but I think everyone's different. And you've got to work out what your audience want, who your audience are even, what is your ICP, keep it really tight and think that again.
00:27:09
Speaker
that's where we've potentially slipped is not being tight enough because you want to fish in a big pond whereas actually yeah often you want to fish in a quite small pond to start with because you start to know your audience better.
00:27:22
Speaker
I totally agree. So if you're angel investing, say sometime in the future and you take on a portfolio of first-time founders, do you have any kind of sense of when you'd be pushing someone to step on the gas? Because it does feel like a very European thing. I feel like in America, I used to think it was crazy that they'd put potentially millions of pounds into an organization with zero revenue and not put them under any pressure to generate revenue early on. It was only having rushed to accumulate revenue too early in my own journey that I started to see
00:27:52
Speaker
when it's not taken too far, the wisdom of that. If you arrange an investing, do you have any feel for like at what point you start to be uncomfortable that the portfolio company isn't accumulating really material revenue growth? It's a good question. I think it's all about understanding what does
00:28:15
Speaker
What is your kind of product market fit look like? And how does that intersect with revenue? Because you can start generating revenue from something relatively basic, but then equally you could then be, you're then pushing water uphill. You could wait a little bit longer and actually build out something kind of more substantial, provided you validated it, knowing that you're then going to go quicker.
00:28:40
Speaker
And I think that was the, I guess that's what we did was we actually probably went a little bit too early. And so our kind of our revenue graph is just constant solid progress. And no point do we have a real kind of sort of kick that as a classic hockey stick.
00:28:57
Speaker
And I think it's trying to understand that intersect between, okay, what point does the product get to a point where you can make meaningful revenue, whether that be pricing and commensurate with the market, not underpricing, your conversion rates, your top of the funnel awareness. I think that's the crucial bit for me.
00:29:21
Speaker
Yeah, and actually, I admire the fact that you did give a nuanced answer because here I am criticizing sort of industrial complex VC literature that misleads a lot of first-time founders. And then I'm like, hey, Rob, can you just give a pithy one-line summary of when you should put on, like,
00:29:35
Speaker
put on the burners of building revenue. But it's hard because we've seen it before. You deliver X feature and you think, right, that's going to be the thing that really unlocks X percent of the market. Does it? No, of course not. The only thing that's been probably the biggest learning is that
00:29:52
Speaker
Again, this sounds very obvious, but it's easier said than done. No one gives a flying crap about your feature. It's the story you can tell, it's the benefit you can bring. And especially with, I think, fragmented B2B. I often think of it more like, in some ways, B2C or D2C. It's that you're building a community.
00:30:20
Speaker
people want to be using something that other successful people are using. And there is a bit of a herd mentality and we see it of about 30% of our inbound comes from organic referrals. And it's very hard to track because they're in Facebook groups or WhatsApp chats. Who are you using? I hate my current system. Any recommendations? Yeah, you slick, they're great. We love them because of XYZ.
00:30:48
Speaker
And so there is that, we get some real pockets of where we probably have 30, 40% market share. Because actually we've got a couple of people on board, they then refer another couple of people and you become almost the de facto choice for a business in that town, that village. And I think that gets super exciting. But that's because of the, it's not because of X feature, it's because of the brand, the community that we've built.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, it does take time for that because that's not really something you can fake, is it? And so I think first-timers do have to be patient, make sure that they're financially sustainable. However they do that, revenue, investment, whatever, get their life in order to be able to take the time to get to the point where it starts compounding and starts getting fun. Yeah. And I think you've made the right point of take time because I think it's very easy to
00:31:40
Speaker
and very exciting to go and scale and hire a massive team, whether that be sales, whether that be customer success, or whatever it might be. But again, you need to understand what you said, you need to understand the role first, you need to understand what good looks like. And one of our investors, a guy called Nick Tellson, he founded Design My Night, and he talks a lot about this of actually almost going a lot slower.
00:32:06
Speaker
both mostly from a product point of view, but also from a team point of view, understand what your sales cadence looks like. Once you've got it, then you can start to invest, then you can start to actually hire. Whereas a lot of people just put out, right, we need four AEs, we need four SDRs. Okay, do you actually know what you want?
Pacing Growth and Competition
00:32:27
Speaker
Do you know what the frameworks are? Do you know what the common objections are? Are you really clear on your ICP?
00:32:32
Speaker
Are you clear on your onboarding process? Because once you've got all that really clear, then you can turn up the dial.
00:32:39
Speaker
Yeah, I completely agree. The temptation is to go super quick because everyone sees these companies hiring, raising lots of money, you get the pressure from VCs, institutional, but often going a little bit slower. And I think with a current climate, I think there is probably a bit more of a trend to let's build slowly, organically with more capital efficiency. So I think the trend is certainly pushing that way, but certainly that's been my experience. I think that's why I would be 100% advocating.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the great mistake I made in ramping, trying to ramp sales too early and then burning an inordinate amount of the capital that I had on that was I didn't understand the difference between early adopters and the majority of the market. So I had a good pitch down for early adopters that were excited about what we were doing. There just weren't that many of them. They weren't representative of the market. So I sort of understood one subset of customers, but not really the customer. But I
00:33:36
Speaker
I really hope people listen when they hear advice like that to don't be a wimp. If it's working, then fine, scale, but don't be bullied into rushing to scale if you don't get it yet, because you might not get another try, right? You might not survive if you run out of money. No, if you've got money, you're in a great place. And I think there's always
00:33:58
Speaker
I think everyone's always worried that someone else is going to come and eat your lunch. There'll be another person that launches a similar idea, and yeah, sure, there will be. But you've got to have confidence in your execution, your brand, the way you're going to do it. That extra couple of months isn't going to be make or break. If someone else launches, cool, so what? We've seen, we take market share from companies that have raised
00:34:20
Speaker
millions, literally two, three, 400 million. We stay in your lane, concentrate on what you do well, keep tight on ice, you'll be fine. And I think it does sound very unglamorous. In some ways it sounds quite defensive, but I think it, certainly in the current climate, allows us hopefully to build us a very profitable business.
Future Plans and Expansion
00:34:44
Speaker
That's very cool and amazing advice. What's next for Slick as you look one to three years over the horizon? What should people be watching as they follow your stuff on LinkedIn and Story from the company?
00:34:56
Speaker
So payments is a big thing for us. A lot of, so 60% of the staff in the wider industry are sole traders, they're self-employed. And so there's a lot of opportunity around essentially revenue share payments whereby on a £50 cut, £25 goes to the sole trader, £25 goes to the limited company in which you are currently renting a chair.
00:35:23
Speaker
and they have a revenue share agreement and if we can what we're looking to do is essentially automate that kind of that payroll revenue share. So that's a big opportunity for us. It's really building out to kind of that ecosystem so currently we've got very strong product market fit for hair, barbering, beauty's a big opportunity that's growing a lot in the UK so we're looking to expand our kind of our ICP audience.
00:35:47
Speaker
And then really, I think our view is very much the UK market. A lot of our investors and advisors have said the UK market is tough. If you can crack the UK market, you're in a very good position to then expand. And so for us, it's a SaaS product. It's very easy to expand internationally. We've already got a pilot in the UAE, but we could be in France, Germany in a month's time.
00:36:12
Speaker
But again, just keep tight, keep disciplined, and let's get to a really good point where we have some UK market dominance, and then we can then go international. So in the next couple of years, that would be what we'd look to do. But yeah, it's fragmented from a customer point of view. It's very fragmented from a provider point of view. So there's about 40, 50 providers all doing roughly the same thing. So it's a very inquisitive space. So there'll be a lot of M&A going on in the next few years, especially as obviously capital dries up.
00:36:42
Speaker
So that's going to be quite interesting to see how that plays out. That's awesome, though, to be like, OK, we're going to keep our head down. There's an amazing opportunity here. If we just keep executing, the next steps will become.
00:36:52
Speaker
evident. There he is, the fluent French speaker drinking his own champagne. Rob, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. I know you're very generous on LinkedIn with other founders. If people are interested in what you're doing, happy for them to reach out to you there. If I put your contact in the show notes. Yeah, 100%. Again, I don't profess to know everything at all. But I think there are lots of learnings that I guess we've taken away. And if I can help anyone, then very happy to help.
00:37:20
Speaker
Amazing. We appreciate that. All right. Great to speak to you, mate. Thank you. Brilliant. Cheers, Rob. Take care, mate. Thanks so much. Bye.