 This episode of the podcast is supported by Audible. You can download and listen to the world's best storytelling. I use it all the time to and from work. You can listen to audiobooks, original series, and more on their free app to get your free 30-day subscription, which includes a free book. Click on the link in our show notes and enjoy. Hey, folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I was joined by George Rawlings, who is co-founder of a really cool dating app called Honeypot, really interesting concept built around micro-dating. So we hear about how we started the business and raising cash. The idea behind it in quite a crowded market, they seem to be doing some amazing things to really stand out. You might have seen a lot of the real and marketing activities around London, and so it's really cool to see someone innovating and doing things a bit different. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Hey, it's Lewis, welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Boom, and we're live. We're kid. George, thanks for coming in. Thank you very much for having me. How are you doing? I'm very well, yes. Good. Awesome to be here. So you braved it over walking over from Elephant Castle. Indeed, it wasn't far. Yeah, Elephant Castle. She been there what? Well, since January, it's an absolute hellhole, but I'm in a new build there, so it's all right. There's a lot of loads of development going on there. Definitely. It's a good spot. It is, apart from the roundabout, it's pretty nasty. But hey, it is nice. Most of the roundabouts are being taken down. So Elephant Castle roundabout is actually the busiest roundabout and the most dangerous roundabout in the UK. All right. Bit of a fact. You need to change that. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's crazy. So, Honeypot. Yes. How did you, I guess what was your story? How did you get involved? How did you do it? So it's a dating app, and I thought the most efficient way to find a girlfriend is to make your own app. So... Is this to get yourself a girlfriend? Oh, absolutely, completely. Me and my co-founder, we had our frustrations with current apps. We found it very boring. It lacked spontaneity. It wasn't exciting. I thought the whole thing of the small talk when you match with someone and the chances of actually meeting that match is so low now. What is it that we can do to... Meeting us in... Actually going on a first date. First date. Correct. And we realised, you know, people are just now swiping for the sake of it. We've got so much choice on the apps that it's affecting our ability to actually meet people because we've got information overload. So we always think that there might be one person who could be better just one swipe away. So how do we make something that is a platform that allows you to effectively date on your terms? When I say that, I mean, when you're... I want a dating app. And this is what we're getting to and what we're building, which we've made a start at it, is you use the app when you're available to meet instead of, you know, sitting there at home swiping on the sofa and just getting a bit of an ego boost when you get a match. It's an actual app if you want to meet people. So you want to meet someone... I want to have a date right now. Correct. Yeah. See who's around. Yeah, exactly. See who's available by limiting the choice the people in that area, which we call a honeypot. It helps people make a decision because the choice is limited by actually having thousands of profile that potential matches that you wouldn't meet. It hinders our ability to meet. So like not to dissimilar from back in the day. Exactly. Like at a bar, a few girls or guys around. But you haven't got the confidence to go and chat to them. Interesting. So the way it works is it's very much, you know, we've broken up London into different boroughs and the borough is the honeypot. So it's visualized on a map. It's a predetermined area by us where if you're inside the honeypot, you see who's also in the honeypot. Oh, so you have one... No, we don't have one. We've currently got about 50 honeypots in London. Oh, wow. So if you're not inside the honeypot, the app won't work. So you only see people who are inside the honeypot as well. So how big's the honeypots? A borough size. A borough? Yeah, a borough. So I could be in Camden, for example. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Fine. Yeah, so that's kind of the idea of it. Cool, cool. And then what were you using before then? So you were in London trying to find a girlfriend, swiping, logging any matches. Yeah, well we were on... We were on Bumble, when Hinge, Tinder, that I've actually been banned from them all now because I've been using them for getting through to my potential market. Yes, I'm not allowed to use them. And it was just... It's hard graft. Also pressure, I really believe. Dating, there's a stigma around that first date where it's very formal. The whole point of what we're trying to do is de-formalize dating through this concept that we've effectively pioneered called microdating. Microdate is basically a short, sharp, supercharged date. Could be a half an hour coffee with someone in your lunch break, a quick 40 minute beer after work with someone new, a walk around the museum for 50 minutes with someone. To see if you know, literally, in two minutes, if you've got a spark with that person, why do we need to give up a whole evening, make it really formal? And you tell your housemates or your friends you're going on a date, it's all, oh, I'm now going on a date, tell me how the date goes. I just want to be much more chilled. Oh, I'm just meeting someone. It's just a microdate. And that's a hashtag we're incorporating into our branding. And how's that working? Good. Yeah, yeah. We've only been live now for, gosh, three months. We have been doing it in a very unusual way to spread the message, which we'll go on to in a bit. Yeah, just hit 10,000 downloads now. Amazing, that's really good. Off a marketing budget of about 300 quid. Nice, nice. Yeah, so we haven't done any paid yet at all. We're just holding out for all that. But yeah, we've had lots of people reporting the meetups that they've been on dates on their lunch breaks and everything like that, so it's all going the right way. So they're microdating things really taking off? For where we got to in three months, what's for us is, yes, we're selling in a new app and it's a very saturated market anyway, but it's also a new concept for people where we need to educate people that it's okay to microdate. It's a new, it's not speed dating because the speed dating is literally a minute in front of someone. It's just a term and a way of thinking about dating that's a lot more chilled. We have to be like really on your game. First impressions you need to make. Well, the thing is, I mean, it's a dating app that actually, if you don't feel that spark, you've got an excuse to be like, well, piss off. If that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Crazy, crazy. When I was, I'm sorry, it made me sound really old now, but anyway, the dating apps had just started when I was dating. I met my girlfriend, now wife, when I was 27. Okay. I think. How old are you now? If you don't mind me asking. I'm 38. Okay. Yeah. Nice. I know, don't look at it. Don't look at my age. 27. 27. Fine, yeah. So I met my girlfriend about, well, like 11, 12 years ago. And then my sister set us up on a blind date. Yes. And then we went on a blind day. It was the best day of her life, obviously. And then, you know, went from there. What was the date? What was it? The funny thing is, firstly, I called her. Okay. And nowadays you find like people aren't really, like it's a bit weird. Anyway, I called her. I was like, hey, my sister told me to call you. So I've called you. Give me a call back. Wasn't so smooth. She called me back. We went out to Camden, to the Loch Tavern. Okay. You know the town opposite Camden Market? Oh, yes, okay. So I was living in Camden at the time. And then we had a few drinks and then another day and so forth. Great. Which is cool. Nowadays, though, it's different, right? It is. Like a friend of mine, he's my age, single. And when he hit 30, I mean, he was having like a different girl every night. Yeah. There's so much choice. Yes, exactly. And so now I think it's hard for him to actually have, like give someone time to have a meaningful relationship. Because you can just, he now has to delete all the apps. That is the issue with it. We've got devices that are fingertips that facilitate connections like that and relationships all about, as you said, putting the time in someone, giving someone the time of day. And that's where also our concept of our app is we want people to get more face-to-face and give someone the time of day. You match with someone, you bloody well meet them, to see if you've got a spark with them. You know, what's the point in matching with someone? You don't actually meet them. You both said you attracted to each other and dating always starts with a degree of physical attraction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get face-to-face. And if they're in your vicinity and available right now, why the hell wouldn't you meet them? No, it's good. I like that. Because if it's not that way, if it's another dating app, you're messaging, you're chatting, you might, you might not. And it's a bit of a game. You can talk about what films you both like on when you meet in person. You don't want to hear that on a dating app, it's boring. Yeah, no, no, it's true, it's true. Interesting. So you've got 10,000 people like downloads and then active users. Probably about 5,000, about half. Some have downloaded. Yeah, some have downloaded outside of London. It simply won't work. And the thing is we're still so early on. We've had bugs, massive bugs that have been affecting us a bit on notifications, the messaging stuff. Classic, it happens with tech. There's always going to be issues and niggles. But we've got a great feature coming out that's going to sort of supercharge everything, which is a story feature. Oh, nice. We're talking about that cool. Yeah, exactly. So within the app, you can actually record a quick video or you're with your friends in a bar saying, hey, just chilling out and you want to come join us. It appears, posted two minutes ago. You see, oh, okay, they're available. Let's go chill with them. You can group up and stuff. So that's going to make it a lot more real time and visual, especially with the profiles dating. Dating app profiles, people just choose the best pictures. And which is a good thing to do because you want to look good, but people use heavily filtered pictures. Sometimes you see someone with bloody dog ears. I mean, do you look like that? No, not at all. So it's just going to make it very raw. And the point is we're not allowing anyone to have any filters or any stickers or anything like on the story. It's just as you are raw right now, the real you. Love it. How did you get into all this? So 27, what did you do before? Before my first startup was a video communication tool that allowed businesses to send video email to each other. Cool. So this is straight after? Yeah, straight after, dropped out of university. Was there a Birmingham doing geography? It was also at Birmingham. Were you actually? Yeah. Okay. Although obviously like 10 years. Yeah. What did you, when you were in first year, were you on the veil? I was in a place called Griffin Place, which was just past Seliac, which one knocked down the left. Okay, okay. And then yeah, the veil was there. All the buildings are new now. Yeah, of course. I was in 10 schools. Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of mates there. I was there from 99 to 2003. Okay. Yeah. I think I was there 2011 or 2012. That's a good city. It is, yeah. I mean, you have to branch out and explore it because Selio is grim. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. But all the students are there. Yeah. So it's pretty fun. The actual city has improved a lot. I mean, it was really crap when I first went there. It's had a lot of regeneration on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was, dropped out of university, started that just, and when I said start to it, I white labelled someone else's software and resold that to state agents, schools, a few recruitment agents. But the thing, it wasn't my own software and like the IP and the value of the company wasn't in me. It was with Bonbon, who were the technology providers over in the States. And I merged the clients back with them and then came away and then came up with this idea. Fine. So you always wanna be an entrepreneur? Do you anything? No, not really. Accidental. Came out of uni and was like, well, okay, I need to make some money. I've not set out, I want to be an entrepreneur. And it's all very glamorous, this idea of being an entrepreneur. But this is where I am and I'm loving it. I absolutely love what I do. Especially now I'm in the business of love and dating and connecting people. I'm fascinated by it. So how did you find, so you have a co-founder? Correct, yeah, yeah. So he's my best friend's brother. Cool. So I've known him for a long time. It's cool together. He's a couple of years older than me. Yeah. And we were on a skiing holiday one time and we just went in the car back from Gatwick talking about ideas and then this sort of, this sort of blossomed into what it is now. But weirdly, it wasn't, Honeypot, when we came up with this idea, wasn't as it is now. It was actually all about events. So we were saying, there's a Honeypot on at this bar between eight and 10, go there if you're single. Not a speed dating event. We don't rent out the bar, we're just pushing anonymous people. Collective people. Yeah, exactly, to try to put them in the same bar at the same time, at the same place. But we had problems of, well, I don't know who's here because of Honeypot and how do I break the eyes of other people? I'm too scared to go say hi. People were just in their friendship groups, sort of. And it was all a bit, basically speed dating, but a lot of shitter. And it just wasn't, did you do a few events? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did loads. I mean, some hardly anyone rocked up and it was just me and my co-found. It was like, you all right, mate? You've been going, yeah, I'm just going. It was all a bit awkward. But there were a few that went well in Clapham and we were starting to move people a little bit. We did a few in Fulham. We were starting to move people to different locations, but the problem we had, you know, people didn't know who was there because of Honeypot. We had very much anti-dating app and we went full circle and yeah, it was all about ditch the dating apps and we realised, oh shit, we need a way to connect people who are at the same venue. So then the Honeypot became the bar, the coffee shop, the cafe. And that's where we started to, we did a crowdfunding round last year to get this all off the ground. Yes, correct, crowdcube. Cool, how did you find that experience then? Great, actually. I mean, when we had the idea of the Honeypot being the bar, the coffee shop, the venue, which is not what it is now, we thought, right, because we need that. We're not technical enough where we can develop this from scratch. We need to get a team on board to help us with this. Right, we don't have any money. We need to raise money for this. Right, we don't have any traction. We don't have a prototype or anything. No funds, no investors will really look at us if we're right. It's an idea and an idea is worse, you know, nothing really. But we managed to value an idea at half a million quid. Wow. Put a valuation, yeah, put a valuation of half a million quid on a landing page, an idea, and just a massive ego, probably. And people bought into it. Correct, we managed to line up about 75% of the round of just friends. And you were raising for how much? We raised 120K. Awesome, nice. How long did it take? Four days. Four days? About that. That's crazy. That's so easy. So we had money committed before of people saying, yep, I'm in, okay, I want it. And we just went, right, let's get on this, let's do it. Mad. That's crazy. I think it just shows if people have got an idea, as long as, you know, it was a pre-C round. And at pre-C, people are buying into the entrepreneur, people that then see they're buying into the team, literally had, we got it correct. And we had, we told them about our concept and our project of trying to move singles and we had a bit of a community behind me. It wasn't really anything valuable. But I think it just shows if someone does have an idea, they can go out and get people their own network. That's why I think networking is so key. Not just to milk people for their money, but just who people can put you in touch with. Because as I said, that pre-C round is people buying into the entrepreneur. And if people believe in you, sometimes it doesn't really matter about the product. It's, do you see my point? No, no, to be honest, I mean, you can have an average idea. I mean, a company ultimately is made up of the people. And you can do something quite average, but a bit better than the competition. Have a great team and kill it. Totally. An amazing idea with the wrong people and it just doesn't work. You're saying this, you're right. You're right. So you've got 75 shareholders. No, got 119 shareholders. 119 shareholders. Yes, correct. Just from that round, we did another. So when I said, we lined up 75% of the round before we went live on CrowdCube to their registered investors. Right, right. So we went out to our network, our friends, and people friends of friends. And then we had a few 15Kers, 10Kers, a couple of 20Kers. And then we just went out, minimum investment was 10 quid and just went out massively to our own network. Is it? So get pretty serious when people have given you money. Oh, it does. Yeah, you do feel the pressure. You really do feel the pressure. But I think we've got something I really, I totally believe in what we're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are putting everything on the line to try and make this work. And of course, when being a tech company and you raise 120K, runways are not huge. It's really not, you know, development's extremely expensive. So we're now sort of looking at next round to take us to the next level, but to bridge the gap between the last round and closing on the next round. So obviously there's a bit of time where it's like, oh, things are a bit tight. So when I say putting everything on the line, I'm selling my flat and shelter them. I need, I'm going to support this whole thing just to keep this going. Because I think we're making ground, as I said, three months in and we're starting to do some damage. And then when I say damage, in terms of the marketing, we've done some damage, which you may have seen. So I thought she did some guerrilla marketing. Yes, correct. So tell me about, how's that? Well, we just thought, well, we can't afford to pay Facebook, Instagram, do it the usual way, where it's, you know, you're just dumping money on ads. Everyone's doing that. And our competitors right now are doing exactly that. They've got much deeper pockets than us. And also their apps are a lot better than us. We have to get people to bind to us and personalize our brand to begin with. We've very much put the people, the entrepreneurs behind the brand to start with and being sort of personalities about it. So weirdly, with not having money to do the usual route, it was a bit of a blessing in disguise because it's allowed us to sort of reinvent ourselves, be completely unconventional and do something completely different. So we've gone guerrilla with everything we've done. And I've always liked the idea of just a simple classroom size whiteboard. So we bought one on Amazon, wrote a message out saying, left outside Waterloo station. And it said, download a honeypot, London's new dating app. We didn't get a single download. I think we got one download. But of course with the dating app, it takes two to tangos. It was a bit of a waste of time. So it was a bit of a waste of time. But there's two of you on there, right? Yeah, exactly. So I think there was one download from it. So we thought, right, back to the drawing board. Let's tell a story here and try to do something that's just, get a reaction out to people, create drama. So we wrote the message, the first whiteboard we did. We left this outside Liverpool Street Station six o'clock in the morning. It said to my cheating ex boyfriend, don't bother coming home tonight. Enjoy seeing this on Instagram the same way I saw you and that girlfriend. P.S., you're deluded if you think honeypot's the next hinge. People went, everyone was stopping to take pictures. They would walk past and go, you're joking. Angry girlfriend, shamed a boyfriend, stolen an office whiteboard, this is gold. Gove out the phone, picture. It went absolutely ballistic. Amazing, amazing. Within a few, you know, within about half an hour, we had all our friends saying, this has popped up on my WhatsApp group. I'm so sorry, George. I'm so sorry. I was like, no, I'm in on this, okay. This is what we've done. We've logged this damn whiteboard to get this here. And in terms of the marketing behind that, it's the first thing was. So this was like in the morning? Yeah, morning. Everyone's come for training. Yeah, exactly. So on the whiteboard, my Instagram was tagged, george.rawling. So people thought right that. So they thought you were the cheating boyfriend. Yeah, exactly. Cheeky. So people were driving all the traffic. It was like, shame this person, shame this person. Again, the tag is in. Again, the people are messaging me like, you're a horrible human. Like, and the people were checking me out. So they went to my profile and then they saw the first post. My bio said, read my latest post and my cheating will make sense. Went on post and it said, what you saw wasn't real. I put up the whiteboard. I had to get your attention without paying an expensive Instagram influencer. Download Honeypot, it's totally different to anything else just like I'm marketing. Amazing. People liked it. But in terms of the board, it was the singing out the guy, the subtle trigger of association of enjoying seeing this on Instagram to prompt people to put it on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Deluded if you think Honeypot's the next hinge. Of course, people who know what hinge is, they're now making that association with Honeypot being a dating app side by side. Love that. That's great. And yes, it worked really, really. And you've got some good downloads. Oh yeah. So we've done about five or six of them. Do you sell in Oxford Street as well recently? Yes, we've done two cheating campaigns. And I know it's not the best. I know it's not the best as a dating app. The best reflection on the brand to begin with. But right now we don't have an established brand. We're just two guys in London trying to spread the word about a dating app. You know, there is no real, oh, we've got to protect the brand. We're just doing it in such a unique way. Unfortunately, more people are interested in cheating stories than my boyfriend's the best boyfriend in the world. What I then thought, okay, let's not just do a whiteboard. Let's take this to the next level and actually put a human in it. So I strapped myself up with cardboard and wrote, I cheated on my girlfriend and this is my punishment. P.S. do not download Honeypot. And I stood outside Fenchurch Street actually for the whole day. And that was another one that went ballistic. And classic red button theory when it says do not press the red button on P.S. do not download Honeypot. Everyone was like, well, what is this? I'll download it. So I got spat out that day. I had all the cabbies sort of driving past. I hoped you was worth it, love. I was just like, all right, okay. Brilliant, brilliant. Any women's stuff? Well, a few people were like, this is not good, but fair play, Matt, you've done a good stint now. Walk past your first thing in the morning. Yeah, here's my card. Give me a call later. Well, actually, so the next thing we did, I mean, as I said, we've done lots of them, but we'll cover sort of the three ones we've done. Did the first board outside Liverpool Street, then Fenchurch Street with the cardboard. And then we thought, well, how do we, we're getting all this digital engagement of people taking pictures and tagging. How do we get real life engagement combined with digital engagement? So we bought table and chairs and topped that upside Tonkall Road with a blackboard that said, I got dumped, now single and ready to date again. Quite literally, got five minutes, hashtag microdating, take a seat. There was some flowers on the table, cups of coffee. Do you want to sit down? I had 91 dates that day. 91? 91 dates in one day. Yeah. I'm surprised you didn't sit on LinkedIn. I'm actually a bit offended you didn't sit on LinkedIn. Why did I see that? I know what's going on. I've been working to you. No, no, for sure. 91 dates. So people would, yeah. So people were sitting down. Is it a picture of LinkedIn? Would you want to stick it in the show notes? Stick it in the show notes. So people were sort of sitting down and actually thinking, okay, cool, let's just have a date now. And I was in black time as well. I had a black time. Guys and girls? A few guys. Well, I'm straight myself, but a few guys did sit down. And even when the girls sat down, I did say to them, but thank you for sitting down. Can I explain this to you? This is a marketing of our app of... Are we okay right? Yeah. So I explained that this was a bit of a PR stunt. And they liked it. In case you got too excited. Exactly. But for me, that was probably our cleverest one because it was a true representation of everything our app wanted to do, but it was just in real life. That's really good. And it had a nice positive spin behind it without labelling me as London's biggest cheetah. That's brilliant. Thank you. So what's the age range, then, of people that are... It's our market at the moment. It's probably... We thought it was going to be sort of 20 to 30. It's probably 24 to 34. All right. It's a little bit older than I thought. Yeah, 24 to 34. And in terms of our ratio right now, I think it's sort of 65, 35. We need to... What, guys? Yeah. It's always hard on a dating app to get more women on it. Really? Yeah, it's just guys are more willing just to download and just try it. And also, it's quite a bold concept. You know, you're available, you meet someone quite spontaneously. You're going to be in the right mindset for that. Exactly, exactly. And I think... And, you know, there's people that have said to me before when I've explained it, okay, so it's a hookup app. It's like, well, no, if you're using it at 11 o'clock in the morning, not really, but if you're using it at 11 o'clock at night, maybe. But people use dating apps for hookups anyway. But you've just got to be honest with your intentions. Yeah. I mean, you've got to get a response and stuff. Exactly. So what's it been like, like founding your company? Is it what you thought three months in? It's exciting. Every day is a different challenge. But at this stage of a startup, you're very much firing from the hip constantly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just going for it. You know, we're at a stage now, especially with this next round of funding coming into play, we'll be taken very much to the next level. Yeah. So you're busy, like, raising that now? Yes, correct, yeah. But until we can't really start actively raising until this update's done. So you've got... So you do your update and then you can... Exactly. Yeah, on crowdfunding as well? No, we're going to just go privately. So VCs? Not VCs, just angels. OK. Yeah, I think we'll probably... We thought about going out for about the 800 mark, but we'd have to, you know, sell about... If we were out in terms of valuation, we'd have to sell about 30%, 40% of the company. So we're going to get out for a smaller amount, about 150, 200, and actually sell less of the company. Fine, fine. Makes sense. And that gives you more runway for another, like, six months? More, more, more. Oh, OK, fine. Sort of year to 18 months. But at that point, the focus of this round is actually monetization really in the app, so... Fine. And how are you started to monetize? Three ways of monetizing. So we've got premium features in the app, just things that add-ons that you can buy, that sort of not increase your chance, they've kind of increased your chances really. Yeah. That's the idea. So more visibility. Yeah, exactly. That kind of thing, visibility, but also amount of them, you get five nudges per day, unlimited on premium. Next one, in the story feed, we will have ads sometimes popping up and then hyper-local deals of businesses, like a bar being able to push two for one on cocktails, and they also featured as a suggested date spot. Yeah. So they're the three main revenue streams of what we're looking at. But it's easier said than actually done. Yeah, yeah, it's fun. This is what we want, but actually... You know, it's great to see people doing their own thing. Yeah. I mean, it's great. Yeah, thanks very much. It's very easy just to, like, become an employee. Yes, correct. And that's the one thing I've luckily never, you know, had to do. I've not been an employee before. And it just doesn't suit... I like to think that I'm quite a creative out there, entrepreneur now, found myself as an entrepreneur. I can't work for someone else. I just couldn't do it. But hey, touch word, I don't have to. No, I hope you're not. Do you have any mentors? Yes, I do. Anyone you chat to about business and... I do. My chairman is kind of my mentor. One of my investors is a mentor who's a motivational speaker called Jim Lawless. He gives me lots of advice. That's good. He talks... A really interesting guy, actually. He's all about... So he's built this framework that is about taming the tiger inside you. So when someone says, you've got to go do this, or have you thought about learning to play the piano, there's always a tiger inside you that says, no, no, no, I can't do that. It's a framework that helps you overcome that fear. Nice. Really interesting. Nice. So he's a good guy that I talk to pretty often. It's about it, really. That's good. Mind sets are the most important thing. Yeah, have you got me mentors for you? Yeah, I've had a few over the years. After uni, I set up a fashion distribution company. Then I was an employee. Then I set up this 10 years ago, nine and a half years ago. And over the years, I've had lots of different mentors. And there have been a mixture of people. There could have been clients that I regarded highly. I've got three advisors now for my executive search firm. I meet once a quarter. It's quite nice to... Because you get so caught up in your business. Yes. But it's nice just to step away. And it's like classic but work on the business rather than just in the business. With people that aren't involved in my industry or stuff. So for the question of you, for having your own business, do you find that it is just constantly on your mind? But I love it. Yeah, I know I'm the same. But it's just always there. In fact, you're just constantly thinking about it. The thing with running your own business is... I mean, it's ultimately your life. Yes. And it's 24-7. And you have to find... If you enjoy it, it doesn't feel like work. So you have to do things. So I do a lot of exercises really great for my mind. So I'm doing a lot of running. I do CrossFit. I do yoga. Nice. When you're lifting weights in the gym, you're not thinking about anything else apart from... Of course. I don't want to weight up here. Of course. This is something I need to get better at. So you have to... And also I diarise it. Because you can get so like... I mean, everyone says it right. You meet people, I'm so busy, I can't... Haven't got time for this. We've all got 24 hours in a day. And you only really need to do half an hour. It's half an hour out of 24 hours. You can fit that in. And it's just brilliant for your mindset. And you feel better. So I am thinking about it all the time. But with these things, I never really get stressed. My mood is usually pretty stable. You're kind of like... Once you know what game you're playing, you never... There's ups and downs and everything. You know, like with you, you're raising money and then it's high and you're raising money. You know, it's just like that's the game you're in. You know, we're tied with tech startups. It's like one round to another round to another round. And it's going to get stressful, but it's fun, it's exciting. But that's where you've chosen to play. It's a high-risk game. So it's cool. You've got to just roll with it. And I think also as well, with... Yes, there's a great business opportunity here for what we're doing. But in terms of my own personal story as well, I'm on a bit of adventure because it all started as a bit of a project with me and my co-founder to actually find a girlfriend. So there's kind of a bit of a bigger picture, which is quite exciting to be like, look, it's not work, it's personal. But they always say, never mix pleasure and work. But you know, the funny thing is you'll probably end up finding your girlfriend in real life with your app. Oh, I know. And I just, you know, at a bar. I couldn't do anything worse than finding my wife on a dating app. How awful! But plenty of people have. Oh, I'm lucky to know that I'm joking. I should not be saying that on a podcast whenever I have a dating app. That's great, because, you know, talking about, like, thinking about work all the time, you know, like, so when do you get to... How do you meet people? And, you know, so it's actually really important because if you are working hard and a lot of people do work hard, having got time to rock down to a bar. Yeah. Not everyone has the confidence to. Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing in terms of cognitive. It's difficult to, you know, it's easy just to be like, oh, we're going to go into a bar with a few friends and we're going to get chatting to some women, which just doesn't really happen that way. It's hard. You can be the most confident person, but I mean... You see that in the films. You're very deal-up to do. I know, I know, you know. So I think the apps are great to connect people. Yeah, exactly. And then, but the thing, the most important thing is just this, like, face-to-face thing. Because people, the problem with technology I find is people hide behind these things, right? So if you're chatting to someone on a dating app, there'd be every excuse not to meet them. Yeah, well, it's people get very witty and they're quite funny on the chats. And Hinge have got this really cool thing called prompts where everyone thinks of a really good answer to put it on their profile. And they do a great job by the way. Fair play to them. What happens if you're better in person? I mean, I think you may. Yeah, true. It's an opportunity. Someone just wants an opportunity to meet someone and they might go on really well. So yeah, I think this micro-dating is cool. I just think it's a more efficient way. And dating, within reason, for the right reasons, is a numbers game, you know, to find someone that you really click with and you also put the right amount of time into it to give it a chance. But it is, it's just in a more efficient way. You know, if you meet someone every three months on a Hinge date or a Tinder date or even in person, you know, or you could meet 10 people in three months, the chance of you finding someone that you really, really like is higher through actually going on short to sharp state more often. True. And just people need to give people a chance. That's anything. I see your point and it's good to challenge that. Yeah, yeah. But like meet someone in a honeypot. Yeah. You get on with them. Yeah. But then see them again. Yeah. See them again. Yeah. Give someone a chance. If they're not right, fine, you get back in. But my thinking is, you know, you do know, I'm talking about initial spark. Initial spark has got to be there for sure. Exactly. Which does happen where people, they might go on a date every three months. They go on that first date and there is no spark. But then because it's very difficult to actually line up a date, they go, all right, this'll do. Ha ha ha. You've got one life. I know, you've got one. No, but do you know what I mean? It's trying to get people to be more open to just meeting more people. Meeting more people. And that's why we'll eventually move to becoming more social in terms of friends, meeting friends, also business connections. I was at the Excel actually on Tuesday. And I put one on the conference around the Excel, just the Honeypot, just drew it on it. And in my talk, I said, right, there's a Honeypot in this place. I had loads of people using it. It was really cool. Really? Yeah, but it was for dating obviously, but I wanted it to be for like business connections. So it was like a business meetup thing. Yeah. Oh, it's great. Awesome. Well, it made great a chance to you. Yeah, thank you. Glad to see it's going well. Yeah, it's going well. Thank you very much. How can people get in touch and find out? Instagram, the Instagram handle is honeypot.dating. And the app is called Honeypot. And it's on App Store and Android. Yes, yes, correct. Cool. Thank you very much for having me. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Hey, folks. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.