 First speaker is Kevin, and when I first mentioned fuck-up, it feels like, oh yes, I completely identify with this. The question is, do you want the fuck-up story or do you want the clustered fuck-up stories? What level of fuck-up should I tell at this event? And then we got his bio, and his bio pretty much says, he did bank-telling, trading, programming, risk management, global IT, masters in AI, a number of top-level and money, and programming-related positions, and each time you're going to get a little bit bored and move on to something else, get a little bit of bored, move on to something else, and so now he's on his sixth startup after a number of exits, a number of positions. A lot of money going on. Today he'll share a very special story for us. Is that a good intro? I hope so. All right, please welcome Kevin Plottin. Six minute board. So, the talk's running. So I'm here to talk about my second startup, and it's, uh, we picked, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. Yes. Sorry. Okay, the technology's really helping us out. Sorry. I have a cartoon and all of that, please. Sorry. Grace, it's not the second story, I'm sorry. You stole a joke while I'm figuring out what you're doing. Sorry. So, I am a joke, can't think of anything. I've got lots of jokes in the slides, but I don't want to spoil that. Okay. Are we ready? Okay, so, here we go. So, I'm here to talk about my second startup. The thing that isn't talked about a lot in the current, sort of, failed fast, failed early, are the casualty lists, and every startup has casualty lists. And my second startup was no exception to this. We had 6,000 customers, we stopped being able to fulfill our promise to. 14 staff I had to let go. I spent more than $1.8 million chasing this dream over two years. And finally, it was me. And it doesn't matter what the books say or the blurbs say, there's an effect when you go through something like this and you screw up as badly as I screw up in this. So, we need a little bit of context though. This is a casualty list, who am I? Well, when I started this, I got pretty close to the top in investment banking, and I was younger, a lot younger than I am now, more dark hair. And I was, I had, of course, the requisite MBA, my master above all, I call it. And I had just exited my first startup successfully. So, what could go wrong? Because after all, I was a master of the universe. So, the idea was really simple. We were going to be, I suppose, in modern parlance, the Uber for PC services. Get us, we'd fix your PC. This is at a time now when PCs cost four or 5,000 pounds. They didn't work nearly as well. The hardware was unreliable. Windows called itself an operating system that was available. And, yeah, things screwed up. It was typically fixed by the techie next door, the guy you knew knew something about computers and you went and got him. That was what we called a company. We called it 10th techie next door. So, everything was lining up perfectly. However, I had a master above all, and I knew, I knew nothing about retail. So, we were going to do some marketing research. And I turned around and got one of the edgiest and most advanced advertising companies in London to go out and do a whole pile of focus groups and pay a lot of money for this. So, they were supposed to verify the product, verify the route to market, and check that our marketing plan was on course. When the initial results came back, I knew there was a problem. And this is going to sound paradoxical. The problem was we had an over 90% acceptance rate. That meant in the focus groups, everybody wanted this. Now, my master above all had taught me that that doesn't happen. That is unlikely because established brands, if they get more than 60, love it and then start up 40% as a hell of a win. And in investment banking, we have a maxim. If it's too good to be true, it is. So, I decided I was going to go on and check what was going on at these focus groups. So, I just tooled up the next one. And this is what we were getting back from the people in the focus groups consistently. That image, believe it or not, the violence is understated compared to some of the stuff they drew. And when you asked them to describe it, it was describing moments of intense frustration and impotence, right? These are smart guys. They're A's, B's and C1's, they're successful and this fucking machine doesn't work, right? So, it's intense and this is the emotion that came across, right? So, the only issue was they'd all heard urban myths about having to pay more to get it fixed than they'd paid for it and they're not dumb so they weren't going to get caught on that. So, anyway, about this session, about 15 minutes in, I mean, this guy. So, in the middle of the focus group, he stands up, throws down his clipboard and says, just give me the fucking number. And I'm like, what? I'm literally, this is what goes through my mind. So, you know, I'm a master of the universe. This is gonna work out similarly, order the art. So, my, what's this stuff mean? I go ahead, start it up as fast as I can, hire as many people as I can, buy all the scooters. That was our USP, we're gonna put the guys on scooters to solve the problem of going around the, getting around London from the logistics. So, it's up, go, and away we go. Do the marketing, it's all done. Just waiting for the phone to ring. But the phone didn't ring. Not nearly often enough, not after the first week, not after the first month, not after the first year. Not even at the end of the two years, was the phone ringing. So, what the fuck is going on? And I am pulling my hair out. I am confused, conflicted. I am ricocheting around like a bullet out of the high velocity rifle in a steel ring. And the basic problem was, we weren't converting. Our marketing wasn't converting, we were getting 10th of a percent in conversion, right? Nothing, no campaign broke, not 0.3% conversion, right? And you died when you're spending a lot more with marketing than you're getting in the door. So, what to do? So, all right, go on for about two years. I'm feeling a lot like this. So, at the end of two years, I happen to have a chance conversation with a guy who maintained our gas boiler in London. A lot of gas boilers. And this is a guy I trust to stop our house blowing up. So, he's the key guy. And when he turns around and he says, I know what your problem is, Kevin, you're the cowboys of the naughties. I go, what do you mean? And he explains, and it's a really simple concept. Trust cannot be bought, it can only be earned. That was a big insight. So, what to do? Two years in, I've blown all my cash. I don't have a business that's viable in any sense. I'm feeling a little bit like this guy. And it's kind of, uh-oh, there's no way out. So, I shut it down and fired all the guys, rescinded our promise effectively to the customers, and pulled it out. And part of the reason for that was, there was a window for this business. I mean, I knew enough about technology, but you could see the internet was going to come, and it was going to change the way software was delivered. Windows was starting to get better, even though that took even longer than I thought. But USBs were coming, peripherals were getting better. You could see that, you know, the industry was slowly but truly upgrading its game. Two years previously, there was a window. Two years in, no resources, there's no internet. And now, more importantly, understanding that it was about trust meant that you could only build that soul. You could not build that quickly. Trust was never going to be a marketing campaign away. It's a much slower, harder road. And steeper road, decline, than a marketing campaign or a marketing one, that you believe. So, what are the takeaways? So, that was it. This is as close. The takeaways are simple. Try not to do startups alone. If you noticed, I never talked about co-founders. I did that one on my own, spectacularly. So, a Homer's life. Homer's a good guy. Nothing else matters if you ask the wrong questions. Right? And, you know, market research. Let's be honest, that's my view of market research now. And I had asked the wrong question. I had asked people, does your PC piss you off? Do you want it fixed? And the answer was a result. And, of course, we fucking did. So, the question should have been, do you want a stranger in your house, rummaging around your expensive toy with all your personal stuff on it? Are you comfortable with that? If I'd asked that question, I'm pretty sure the marketing would have been quite a lot different. In fact, I pretty much know why I'd have done it. It would have been a slower burn, a more about presence, permanence, and creating that association, because that would have been the only way to build trust. The other takeaway, and this, by the way, describes the state of technology even today, I've been using this for about 14 years, JFDI, and I don't mean the incubator down the road. I mean, my software engineer has been just fucking doing it. Sometimes, you have to chuck away all the strategies, all the planning, all of that, and just already well do it to find out. Sometimes, that's the only way you're going to get an answer. So, I will leave you with those four thoughts. Thank you very much. You're not free to go yet, yeah. Oh, was there a ready question? Okay. Thank you to Kevin first. Go ahead. I kept the results for about 10 years, and every time I got pissed off of market research, I'd play it back again and go, fuck, never again. No, the company was making money, but about half of that was my own. The difference was, effectively marketing campaign, I blew a huge amount of money at marketing. I mean, I believed in marketing. I did then. And the problem is, trust is a really hard road to plow, right? You can't build it quickly. We don't naturally trust people until we've known them for a while. So, we've got to know them. And that's what I mean about permanence. Marketing would have been different. It would have been literally on the back of a bus. Why? Because it's the longest dwell times on the back of a bus. You're stuck in traffic, you see it. You see it day in, day out, perception that they're around. They're here. We had all the branding. I mean, the scooters were ureth and orange, but you couldn't miss them. And the guys were out in Polish shirts, because I wasn't going to let greasy little IT guys go into somebody's house, you know. I'd accept that, but this is also pre-internet. Well, pre-internet. The problem most people had was I couldn't get on the internet. So, we didn't advertise, for example, on the internet. There was no points, right? But you can't reach the dead channel. Thank you. What did you do to recover psychologically? I started in the other company. But this time I was chairman. Recovery. I think you carry it with you. I mean, it's a scar, you know. I'm cynical about market research, beyond belief. And it's interesting. I was at a thing today with a guy from Google about early adoption or whatever. And Google, it's like Google. How did they sell Google apps to CIOs? They started bringing up people. They just... In a sense, you know, there's that great essay by Paul Graham, do things that don't scale. Right? I had two mistakes. The wrong question. But the other thing was, I believe that marketing and market research would work where doing things that didn't scale and then the interesting thing was in the business plan I had forecast rebuy every two years. Rebuy at quiet rates were eight times better. People loved us. Just not enough people. Sorry. What was mentally the hardest issue for you when shutting down? I was actually trying to figure out what had gone wrong until that conversation. Just to give you an idea how dramatic that was, I had that conversation, went into the office and fired everyone. Because I knew. The minute I understood the problem, I knew I couldn't fix it. And that was it. I got calls in my personal phone for three and a half, four years afterwards. The idea is good. It was just my approach. And that was down to the fact that I did it on my own. I did it on my own, believing I was. A master of the unitary set. As you say, dug a very large hole. Potentially fixed it and made the business work? Not because you're going to understand. I was trying to build something with scale. I wasn't trying to build a lifestyle business. I figured the window was closing faster than I could get at the point where it would be interesting enough for somebody to acquire it. That and the fact that I'd run out of money. My wife was not going to let me write another chapter. She wanted to let me write two more. That was the budget. Fantastic. Is there a question that you wish you could be asked or you could answer it? Or is there anything you would like to say to the audience at this point? No, I don't think the detail is don't do it on your own if you can't. That doesn't mean some people can't. They've got all that touch in a row. That's most of the stuff. Thank you very much. Thank you.