Originally written by Anna Jordan on Small Business
Like many entrepreneurs, Daniel Verblis began a career in finance and launched his own business later on.
High quality packaging is a must – and difficult to get hold of out of hours – as Daniel discovered when he became a partner in his friend’s removal company. Customers would be ringing up during the week and at the weekend to ask for more boxes, which in turn was costing them time and money in terms of delivery. They weren’t the only ones: Daniel found that other companies were experiencing the same thing, to the great frustration of firms and customers.
That fed him the inspiration for The Moving Home Warehouse. They partner with removal firms to sell essentials like boxes, bubble wrap and furniture covers from their website and through partner websites using an industry-first free Dropbox API.
The focus on sending these items direct to customers has lent itself well during COVID-19, as there’s no contact between movers and customers.
Before coronavirus surged, Daniel entered The Start-up Series competition (and forgot about it!), going on to win with his innovative business. He tells us how winning the funding has benefited him and whether
Tag Archive for The Start-Up Series
Hot Business News Today
7 investor personas: how start-ups can understand their motivations
by Matthew Cushen • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Matthew Cushen on Small Business
No one should consider launching a product or service without getting into the heads of their consumer, digging into when, where and how often your offer might be purchased and what you are competing against for a share of their purse.
The same principle stands for understanding the motivations of a potential investor. After all you are selling something to them. Here are a few pen portraits of 7 investor personas that you might come across. Whilst you’re unlikely to meet exactly the investors below, you can expect to come across some combination of these characteristics.
1. Passionate Polly: she is intimately involved in your market, maybe professionally experienced or they have some empathy as a potential user of your product or service, for example a mother is more likely to understand baby products.
Tip: be careful in assuming that because someone knows your market that they will understand or appreciate your idea — they may be so entrenched in the standard thinking around the industry they find it hard to see a valuable innovation that could take a category in a different way.
2. Taxed Trevor: there are some highly attractive tax reliefs available for investors
Hot Business News Today
What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Daniel Verblis, The Moving Home Warehouse
by Anna Jordan • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Anna Jordan on Small Business
Like many entrepreneurs, Daniel Verblis began a career in finance and launched his own business later on.
High quality packaging is a must – and difficult to get hold of out of hours – as Daniel discovered when he became a partner in his friend’s removal company. Customers would be ringing up during the week and at the weekend to ask for more boxes, which in turn was costing them time and money in terms of delivery. They weren’t the only ones: Daniel found that other companies were experiencing the same thing, to the great frustration of firms and customers.
That fed him the inspiration for The Moving Home Warehouse. They partner with removal firms to sell essentials like boxes, bubble wrap and furniture covers from their website and through partner websites using an industry-first free Dropbox API.
The focus on sending these items direct to customers has lent itself well during COVID-19, as there’s no contact between movers and customers.
Before coronavirus surged, Daniel entered The Start-up Series competition (and forgot about it!), going on to win with his innovative business. He tells us how winning the funding has benefited him and whether
Hot Business News Today
What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Zaffrin O’Sullivan, Five Dot Botanics
by Timothy Adler • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Zaffrin O’Sullivan, 41, first had the idea for Five Dot Botanics back in 2017. She wondered why the packaging for skincare products listed impenetrable ingredients at a time when consumers were demanding ingredient transparency in food and cleaning products.
It was not as if O’Sullivan did not have enough to do in her day job as a senior lawyer at the BBC.
Plus O’Sullivan had no beauty industry background, so she partnered with a cosmetic scientist and spent two years designing the brand and a website.
The idea was to create a range of skincare products with only five easily understandable ingredients each. Five Dot Botanics had its first manufacturing run in the spring of 2019 and launched direct to consumer last July. The brand is already stocked in health food chain Holland & Barrett.
O’Sullivan says: “We created it in response to the growing complexity and lack of transparency when it came to skincare. We could see a market opportunity for us to offer a British skincare line that used only minimal plant-based ingredients, tying in with the growing vegan movement. We also knew that beauty was not super inclusive, so wanted the brand to be
Hot Business News Today
What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Shane Lowe, Vitrue
by Timothy Adler • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
On the face of it, there is not much to connect the villainous Snoke, Supreme Leader of the First Order, in the Star Wars movie The Last Jedi and a Premier League footballer with a nagging hamstring injury.
However, the same motion-capture technology used to create villains in the Star Wars movies is being used to help elite athletes recover from sports injuries.
Vitrue Health, a healthtec start-up, uses sophisticated computer vision software to assess how sportsmen and others are moving. In many ways, it’s a more advanced version of the running gait technology which some sports shops use to help you buy the right pair of running shoes.
>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Ed Bird, Bird Eyewear
However, it’s a long way from Snoke’s home planet of Exegol to a Starbucks in Camden, where Vitrue Health founder Dr Shane Lowe and his partner Alex Haslehurst spent six months eking out cups of tea while they developed Vitrue Health.
Dr Lowe finished his PhD in biomechanics at NUI Galway in 2012, creating an algorithm predicting a person’s future ability to move based on how they are moving today.
He then worked
Hot Business News Today
What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Shane Lowe, Vitrue
by Timothy Adler • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
On the face of it, there is not much to connect the villainous Snoke, Supreme Leader of the First Order, in the Star Wars movie The Last Jedi and a Premier League footballer with a nagging hamstring injury.
However, the same motion-capture technology used to create villains in the Star Wars movies is being used to help elite athletes recover from sports injuries.
Vitrue Health, a healthtec start-up, uses sophisticated computer vision software to assess how sportsmen and others are moving. In many ways, it’s a more advanced version of the running gait technology which some sports shops use to help you buy the right pair of running shoes.
>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Ed Bird, Bird Eyewear
However, it’s a long way from Snoke’s home planet of Exegol to a Starbucks in Camden, where Vitrue Health founder Dr Shane Lowe and his partner Alex Haslehurst spent six months eking out cups of tea while they developed Vitrue Health.
Dr Lowe finished his PhD in biomechanics at NUI Galway in 2012, creating an algorithm predicting a person’s future ability to move based on how they are moving today.
He then
Hot Business News Today
Start-up valuation – an investor guide to valuing a start-up
by Matthew Cushen • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Matthew Cushen on Small Business
A start-up valuation is an area of business where entrepreneurs are least confident.
This is not unusual. Valuing a business is the area where new entrepreneurs, and many an experienced one, are least assured. It seems like a black art, with its own language and with few rules.
As an example, yesterday I was chatting to an entrepreneur who’d had a stellar career in large business, had a very different view on a (large and growing) market, and from that had innovated a very interesting proposition. She was, quite rightly, super confident — until I asked what valuation she hoped to place on the business when raising some equity funding. The conviction evaporated. After some circling around the question she mumbled a number, with no rationale other than some sense it might be what other businesses had raised at. Only one thing was clear — we’d both thought her number was incredible (both astonishing and unbelievable).
Starting at the very basics, here is a starting off point when thinking about a start-up’s valuation, highlighting the important language and an example:
Valuing a start-up is only vaguely related to valuing an established business. A mature business will usually
Hot Business News Today
Start-up valuation – an investor guide to valuing a start-up
by Matthew Cushen • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Matthew Cushen on Small Business
A start-up valuation is an area of business where entrepreneurs are least confident.
This is not unusual. Valuing a business is the area where new entrepreneurs, and many an experienced one, are least assured. It seems like a black art, with its own language and with few rules.
As an example, yesterday I was chatting to an entrepreneur who’d had a stellar career in large business, had a very different view on a (large and growing) market, and from that had innovated a very interesting proposition. She was, quite rightly, super confident — until I asked what valuation she hoped to place on the business when raising some equity funding. The conviction evaporated. After some circling around the question she mumbled a number, with no rationale other than some sense it might be what other businesses had raised at. Only one thing was clear — we’d both thought her number was incredible (both astonishing and unbelievable).
Starting at the very basics, here is a starting off point when thinking about a start-up’s valuation, highlighting the important language and an example:
Valuing a start-up is only vaguely related to valuing an established business. A mature business will usually
Hot Business News Today
What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Ed Bird, Bird Eyewear
by Timothy Adler • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
The idea of launching fashionable, eco-conscious eyewear came to drummer Ed Bird in 2015 after developing a product idea for drummers using sustainable materials. Fast forward to April 2020, Bird Eyewear became the first UK eyewear company to become a certified B Corp in recognition of its outstanding commitment to sustainable and ethical business.
There weren’t many brands out there making well-made sustainable eyewear says Bird. So, Ed and his younger brothers Lawrence and Paul decided to launch their Bird Sunglasses brand with a triple mission statement: people, profit and planet.
Bird says: “We wanted to fill the gap in the eyewear industry with affordable frames that made a real difference in the world. We wanted to demonstrate that we were a more-than-profit company and a force for good.”
>See also: What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Les Dawson, Uniblock
Each pair of Bird Sunglasses helps distribute solar lights across Africa through their Share Your Sun partnership with charity SolarAid. They help create micro businesses in communities, weaning people off toxic and polluting kerosene and paraffin burners.
Bird spent the whole of 2016 researching the sustainable eyewear market and creating prototypes. He settled on working
Hot Business News Today
3 ways start-ups can create irresistible investment proposals
by Matthew Cushen • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Matthew Cushen on Small Business
This article will explore how start-ups can create irresistible investment proposals.
Imagine you saw a tinned soup on a supermarket shelf, you might have seen something like it before, but possibly not the exotic flavour. You’re intrigued enough to pick it up and take a closer look. The packaging is poorly lined up, some ingredients are missing, the allergens are unclear and there are some spelling mistakes. It’s unlikely to get into your basket.
So I ask myself why, over 16 years of seed investing, and thousands (upon thousands) of investment decks, have I seen only a small fraction of investment proposals that have been thoughtfully constructed to sell the investment? With the right amount of information to give confidence and the creativity to instil some emotion?
Any pitch document should be aiming to make any investment proposals irresistible, and land in the investor’s ‘basket’ (their portfolio). So the ingredients of a compelling pitch to investors are the same as a compelling offer to consumers — differentiation, distinctiveness and price.
1. Differentiation
• Insight: It is difficult to create new ideas out of the same view of the world that everyone else has. A real innovation is usually