 Good morning everyone So such asked me to come and talk about the first a thousand users I get to really interesting important journey for any startup and hopefully what I speak through today will help you get from Not sucking to from sucking to not sucking as fast as possible with as few mistakes as possible I'm going to talk about acquiring users as in consumers and also around Acquiring SMEs or enterprise businesses as well So hopefully relevant for whatever kind of startup you're running So I like to think of this kind of stage Clickers not working guys. Sorry. I like to think of this kind of part of the story as the maze So how'd you get out of the maze? How'd you get your first a thousand people and lots of startups never make it? they literally won't find a way out of it and That's that's a kind of challenge and I got this. Sorry guys. I've got this kind of dystopian Picture of a maze kind of squig games s because it's really brutal. It's really hard. It can be very demoralizing And you don't quite know where you're going. You'll make some wrong turns. You have to go back But that's all part of the journey and all part of the fun So a little bit about car wow just to set some context So car wow is a marketplace for helping consumers buy cars and sell their current cars So what happens is a consumer goes on they want to research what color looking to buy they use us They then build their car receive offers and ultimately we connect them with a dealer and they buy it And then we help them sell their current car in a similar way So I started this company 12 years ago. So straight after after university I did finance at uni and then I did an internship at a fund management company And it put me off that world of finance for life Those two months were the best two months my life because it meant I didn't spend the next 10 years in finance And I the advice I always got was set up something in an area that you enjoy and I've always loved cars And I've always found that lots of people come to me and say This is a massive financial decision What should I buy and that's our vision as a company to help consumers work out the best choice for them when it comes to a car So to give you an idea of scale So this year alone will have sold over four billion pounds worth of cars That's across the UK Germany and Spain where we operate. I got about 350 employees now And we also run a kind of side part of the business. We run a huge amount of content So we have the world's largest car channel on YouTube So we get about 60 million views a month an average six and a half million Subscribers and lots people know car. Well because of the YouTube stuff So it's kind of weird side business of it, but really really good marketing channel for us And as the host said we've got we'd be very very lucky to have Europe's best investors behind us So we've got Excel, Balderson, Vitruvian and Daimler Mercedes-Benz But this has taken us many many many many years to get here and winding back to think through the kind of very early days What I kind of call the hustle because this is the bit where it's potentially just you on your own as a sole founder or you and a Couple of co-founders or maybe early employees and it's really really really brutal again It can feel very demoralizing if you're not getting the traction But that's all part of the journey That's all part of what you have to go through so don't get too demoralized by it and you got a work hard on it I think don't go in with unrealist unrealistic expectations. There's very very very very few overnight successes They just don't really exist people underestimate just how long this stuff takes So I looked up in the database how long it took car. Well, so it took us just under 250 days To get our first a thousand users so a user for us. That's not people spying a car So there's a hell of a longer to get a thousand sales That's just people giving us an email address so they can configure a car and get offers So that's a long long long long time Lots of sleepless nights during those 250 days thinking what are we doing here? But so just to give you an idea and then we launched in Germany Five years ago now so by then we had the technology we had quite a lot of funding had lots of people Still took us nearly a hundred days to get those first a thousand users and what we did in the UK We couldn't just copy and paste we had to do things differently. So again, just set expectations that this is not going to happen very very very very fast and Then we got a little bit quicker in Spain, but still this is this is substantial amount of time So I think because it takes a time so much time You got to find a way to survive that you may have raised some money you may have not raised some money We hadn't raised money at this point So my co-founder David He had to do three months with car well three months contracting as an engineer. That was the only way he could survive We couldn't pay a salary. We had no money in the business. I had to do quite a lot of kind of side consulting I had to rent out my spare room on Airbnb So I'd be running the business then changing bedsheets that every morning to get new guests in and that was the only way We could survive we couldn't raise money at the time and so we had to find kind of side hustles just to keep going and Again, you just got to find a way to make sure you've got enough Incomes somehow personally as well to survive those kind of first maybe year or so. I think when it comes to listening to your Customers again be their consumers or businesses. You got to listen and build a lot of empathy with them But you're gonna listen but not too closely So if I'd have listened to everything that everyone told us as a consumer or as a potential customer We wouldn't have been here. We had car manufacturers saying we're never gonna let you do this We had car dealers saying we're never gonna pay for this and there and they ultimately they were wrong They pay for it now. They let us do various things So you can't listen too closely and the same when it comes to VCs or angel investors There'll be some people who give you some advice and they may be wrong You just got to ignore it But you got to build that empathy with the consumer try and understand what they want what you can offer Because it's gonna change your proposition a lot So keep you here to the ground, but don't take everything too seriously I think as the host said Paul Graham said do things that don't scale and this is critical You've got to keep it manual I've invested in quite a lot of angel investments and I and they talked to me about the scaling their invoice process Although getting ready for scale and it's just a waste of time. Just keep things incredibly manual because it'll evolve It'll change So when we first when we first started We had to do we tried to get car dealers to a load of work We tried them to manually put together offers to send to customers and they got bored after sending about 10 So we had to do it for them. We had to do it for them with literally a calculator So we had to every morning we get out our calculators work out office for dealers and send it on their behalf Now the customer the consumer they thought it was all automated They thought it was all super smooth in reality. It wasn't it was me with a calculator doing it for them And the same with when it came to invoicing Same when it came to sending out contracts anything like that We didn't bother automating it whatsoever and I'm very very glad we didn't because had we have done it It would have been it would have been wrong anyway because everything was evolving everything was changing so quickly So don't be afraid load of hard work a load of hustle and keep it very very very manual I think a very very critical point is try and work out how to explain yourself So the words you use to explain what you do as a business to customers to VCs You've got to keep testing this because there's a lot of ways to explain what you do They can be tiny little changes little tiny words that make a massive difference So we spent a huge amount of time a be testing this So using things like visual website optimizer to test using Facebook ads Google ads Just all the time tweaking and serious serious serious uplifting conversion right here And some words just really hit home some just didn't and when we took it into Germany we thought We'll just explain ourselves to customers like this And in reality in Germany we explain ourselves in a very different way to a german consumer than we do to a british one And that's fine We've got to keep testing it to see what works and you'll get very significant uplifts and conversion rates if you keep testing it Very very very critical You've also got to be very surgically focused Don't be crap at a lot of things be great at one thing So when we first raised investment, we only sold volts wagons So you could call on our website and buy a volts wagon and know of the car brand So we did this because we thought we're going to get great at helping anyone who wants to buy a volts wagon We're going to work very closely with volts wagon and their dealers and become really really good for them So forget about everything else and we raised money just by doing that one brand Because then we got confidence in ourselves that look if you're going to use this to buy volts wagon It's probably going to work for any other car if you're going to as a dealer pay for it It's probably going to work for any other car dealer as well So just do one thing And again, it's a lot of early stage companies. They try and do everything As an example, I invested in a great little startup called lick They do home decor And they do lots of stuff now loads of different types of paints loads of wallpapers blinds about to do curtains But what they started with is just a few paint colors in one type of paint They got really really good at that ready to shitload of money and then they could expand out But don't try and do everything because it you just won't be that good at it You won't be that relevant to that consumer that that supplier And vcs get that if you're good at one thing within a market that it'll probably extrapolate So just do one thing really really really well to start with I would fully recommend charging from day one. So don't give away what you're doing for free Particularly to SMEs or enterprises. This is a few reasons one is purely psychological If you're paying for something you value it more So if you've got if you've got a business using your your products your service if they're paying for it They're just going to value it a lot more. I'm going to take it more seriously The other thing is obviously you want to bring in some form of revenue to help the business grow And then thirdly you want to prove assuming you're going to go and raise money You want to prove to investors that people are willing to pay Investors aren't going to be particularly impressed if you've just got a load of people that you're just giving it away to for free Now, obviously that's a little bit different on the consumer side Or taking a freemium model, but do try and get particularly Businesses paying for your service. It'll really really really help you out And then also when it comes to selling to businesses Go very very junior. So go to the person who you're really going to help So we made some mistakes in the early days. We went to some big card dealer group We spoke to the CEOs They got quite excited But we were tiny so them for them selling one or two cars couldn't care less. They don't care However, you go to an individual sales person who has a target of only say two car sales a week If you help them with one you've done 50 of their job for that week So they really really care about it. They love it. They get really really engaged So don't go super senior. You won't be relevant. You may get a meeting But you're not going to impress them because you're just not going to have that volume So go really junior find the pain problem that you're solving for that almost individual or little team And get them using it. They'll get engaged. They'll be able to then get budget for it They'll be able to then sell it to their colleagues Or get it within their their financial planning. So don't go to the CEO As tempting as it may be go very very very junior And then when it comes to fundraising so you go to your stereotypical Vest wearing VC. What are they going to say? What are they going to think? I think getting to that a thousand users is a kind of key point They're going to want to see you do this quickly They're going to want to see you evolve as well So don't worry if you spoke to them at one point and then you change what you're doing. That's fine They'll like they'll understand that and they'll be impressed. They want you to be agile I want you to be nimble and they want to see you hustle and make it happen very very quickly And mark sester when it comes to uh raising money has that great quote of vcs invest in lines Not dots So what that means is the first time you meet a VC or an angel investor you're a dot you're a single data point So that you come along they may be impressed and they think okay. Yeah interesting The next time you meet or the next time you send an update you're another dot and hopefully you're drawing a You're on an upward trajectory. So they see that line growing the third time Hopefully the line of the kind of velocity you're going at is increasing all the time So make sure you keep in touch with vcs So when we we got our first I think seed round or series a from bolderton We met them two years before they invested in us. They gave us some really good advice We followed up a year later with a meeting. They said brilliant nice progress still too early So only after two years did they invest so we'd become a bit of a line for them And I see it now with angel investments The best CEOs are sending updates to potential investors every three months every six months They're sending a few bullet points a little deck some of the sending video updates And it's a really really good way to build that relationship Even now when we're raising fundraising most the the vcs or PE firms that we're talking with I've known them for already for two years. So I've kept to make kept the dialogue We're too early for some of them now But hopefully in two years we're raising that we're in that sweet spot So do keep in touch with investors Don't get dissuaded if they say no because that's their job You just got to keep going back to them and keep engaging with them so that they build that line for you Embrace the challenge. It's going to be hard work. There's going to be highs. There's going to be lows But this is a key kind of critical journey You won't you won't end up exactly where you thought you'll deviate your propositional change your pricing will change What you think you are will change your vision may even change and that's all absolutely fine That is all part of part of this journey Make sure you celebrate the wins as well. So this is was this was my co-founder alex now wife Co-founder david now cto. This is when we sold our first car So we had that bottle of champagne in the fridge for a very very very long time We're waiting to sell our first car. We had it in the fridge waiting And I think it was a monday morning or something when we finally sold it cracked it open and celebrated So celebrate your first user your tenth user your hundredth user your thousandth user and keep celebrating because startups are hard And you've got to celebrate the wins. It's never it doesn't actually get easier So just keep make sure you celebrate have fun and smile Because in reality this is just the beginning so getting those first a thousand users Again, then you've got to get ten thousand then you got a hundred thousand you've got to keep scaling But this is just the beginning. It's a really enjoyable part of the the startup journey It's where it feels most real and you're most evolving and it's the fastest change So you should enjoy it Smile don't get demoralized. You'll make it through and I hope that was useful. Thank you very much