Solo founder in London
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What’s it like building a startup and raising money in London? I interviewed Antoine Asselin, the founder of UpMail, about his experience. He’s a solo founder, who has built out a team. He’s been operating the business successfully for 10 years. UpMail is a sales tool for hotel groups that helps sales people use media to make email more compelling. How did you get your first client and did you build software beforehand? Since I was working for a hotel group at the time, I knew what the team's challenges were. I was looking for a solution online but couldn't find anything. That's the moment I thought, there's something here and I started planning.
I had a pretty good understanding of the client's needs, or so I thought! We started building the product and then got our first client. When I had two or three clients it was enough to convince me that, okay people will pay for this.
Did you raise money for the business? We did. What they call family, friends and fools. One of the benefits of the London ecosystem is you can understand the types of funds and where you're located, in terms of the types of funding available to you and the types of angel investors that might be interested in your business. You learn how to approach them and how to convince them.
We raised about $600,000 over the first few years, all from angel investors. And yes, the first ones are difficult. I was lucky because I had support from family, they agreed to put money in if I was able to secure external money. That made me feel well supported.
One strategy I used was following companies that recently got sold in London. I assumed if the company got sold, the founders probably made a bunch of money which they're looking to reinvest in startups.
In terms of number of investors, we have around 10.
Do you have an exit strategy or do you see UpMail as a cashflow business? Yes, we do have an exit strategy. We would like to get acquired and we have a few different target buyers in mind. In our case, we will need to sell at some point because what we're doing is part of a much larger ecosystem. We're really good at one thing, the sales communication and the proposals but that's only part of a larger industry sales funnel ecosystem. What is UpMail's competitive edge vs competitors? One thing is how we position ourselves, we target hotel groups. Some of our competitors are going for hotels themselves but we target hotel groups. Obviously, where you position yourself has different pros and cons.
In terms of distribution we are not necessarily that strong in SEO. People may find our product online but it's not our strategy. Instead we're trying to find partners who will introduce us to the right decision maker at hotel groups. So, I would say we are doing more traditional sales.
What advice would you give yourself, if you could go back in time to when you started? This is perhaps unusual for a solo founder but if I had to start again I would have tried to find a co-founder. I knew it was important, at the time, but I never found anyone. If I had found someone on the technical side, I'm not saying it would have been more successful because I don't know. Or perhaps I would have let this business go and found something else! But when I started the business I put a lot of time and effort into the commercial side. If I had someone doing the same on the technical side we would have been able to iterate a few more things and push them to the market.
It's difficult when you start as a non-technical founder, you always believe in your product, obviously. It's the opposite for a technical person, they typically don't know as much about the market and commercial side of the business.
I found it difficult to convince someone at the right time. Early on it was difficult to convince someone that the business is going to be big. So I started building solo. Then once I reached a certain scale I heard technical people say "I don't want to join now, everything is set. I want to join from a early stage".
From an engineering perspective, technical people often feel they don't need to partner with anyone because they can build everything themselves. Perhaps they don't need a partner, but being able to build things is not enough. You must know how to market and how to sell. It's easy to build a product and not have any customers. I think there are processes which can help prevent people losing their time. One of them is selling before building. That's definitely something I strongly believe in. We're doing it currently. Selling features that are actually not built yet. Especially in B2B sales, customers don't expect to purchase and get the software right away. Thank you so much to Antoine for this interview. My takeaways are:
I hope you found this useful. Thanks, Tom |
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