Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Co founder is the first thing, the ups and downs that you meet along the way. You really need someone there that is committed to the cause. On days where you're down and low, you'd never get that kind of energy to keep going unless you're a co founder.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Hi everyone who's listening or watching at home. Welcome to the Ideas to Impact podcast with Codebase. I'm Natalie, I'm the head of our acceleration programs at Codebase Codebase, we build better startup ecosystems. And in this episode we will hear from Mohamed Zamzam about his story so far and dig a bit deeper into his experiences of a founder. So let's get into it. So Mo, I'll let you give yourself a proper introduction so if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself as well as the startup that you founded.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks.
So my name is Mohamed Zamzam.
Mo for short. Everybody calls me Mo.
I am the co founder of Use Neuron or otherwise known as Neuron. We are an early stage startup based out of Edinburgh and our focus is to try and help businesses adopt agentic systems.
So what I mean by that is AI has exploded over the last two or three years, especially with ChatGPT exploding on the scene and that opened up the imagination of many people on how business systems can be designed and delivered differently to how we've been accustomed to. The idea was born from that that you can rely on the underlying technology behind ChatGPT to automate or autonomously run a bunch of tasks. So that's what an agentix system is generally, I guess. My background, I used to work for an enterprise tech for the last 20 years. I come from a system architecture background, so fairly technical and I worked at service providers such as IBM, Amazon Web Services.
But most recently over the last four years I was working for a consultancy, a technology engineering consultancy called bgss and in that I was helping manage their partnership with Amazon Web Services. So I, I moved away from, I guess being a techie into more of a business development role.
And in that time I realized that there is a lot of experience and learnings that I could potentially use if I go out and start my own thing.
I also came to a point where it was midway through my career, I'm 40 today.
Back then I was 38 when I decided to I want to do something different with my life over the next 20 years.
So I signed up to do an executive MBA at the University of Edinburgh, which is essentially doing an MBA as a part time to a full time job.
And that coincided with ChatGPT exploding on the scene. So the discussions, the theories, the business theories that we were studying in the mba, I could, I could see it happening with the explosion of ChatGPT and I like all of a sudden I became very aware of what I want to be doing in the next 20 years of my life.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Wow, that's a very comprehensive overview.
You told us about the beginnings of Neuron, which is great to hear. You mentioned you're a co founder, meaning there's another founder on the scene. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your co founder, who for people watching I do know. But tell us the story of your co founder and how you came together to work on Neuron.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so.
So two years ago I wanted to go out and start my own thing, start my own startup and my, my first sense of direction, I knew that I couldn't do it on my own.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Why is that? Why did you feel you couldn't do.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: It on your own? Because first of all I want to build a technology startup and technically I am not a builder, I'm not a developer, I'm not a hands on person, although I have a technical background, but I have not been hands on keyboard for a number of years.
I knew my strengths and my strengths are I understand enterprise sales quite well, I understand technology positioning in an Enterprise. The B2B space is an area that I am very comfortable in and have a lot of background but when it comes to building I wouldn't be able to do it.
So the first thing I did was I needed to find a co founder. So I started off with my brother who's fairly technical and he was involved quite heavily but he wasn't ready to take on the risk of leaving his well paid full time job to start this.
And I found two or three other potential co founders and things did not work out in one way or another because of commitment or we were similar in what skills we bring to the table.
And I thought well there is no other avenues that would allow me to find a co founder. I tried to find different ways and that's where I came across the tech scaler program.
So techscaler first steps. I thought it was a great opportunity to meet other like minded people who by the title of the program are looking to start their own thing.
And that would have been the easiest way to find a potential co founder. And on the first day at the kickoff here in Edinburgh and this building actually I met Shiv and we started chatting, we got introduced.
Shiv's background was in product management but he's fairly technical and hands on.
He worked in startups all his life and he came on the program to network with Scottish ecosystem because he was looking to start his own thing at that time and and my background in sales and working for I guess corporates kind of complemented that. So he's worked in startups all his life. I worked in corporate all of my life.
He is a hands on builder, product manager into the aesthetics and like how to deliver an awesome customer experience.
I am in selling to prospect users, prospect businesses, the vision, the idea and helping partner with them to use our platform.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: Nice. So it sounds like you had a very good sense of your strengths. Shiv knew his strengths. Together you met and was it an initial I found you, let's go do this. Actually was there a bit of time what happened after that one day where you felt first met.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: So I, I, so during that obviously I'm, I'm more outgoing so at the end of that initial chat with Shiv I told him well I'm on I signed up to this program to find the co founder so it'd be great to chat further about what we want to do or if there's synergies there.
I think Shiv was a bit more cautious, a bit more like reserved.
But over the next two or three weeks we met a few times especially as the sessions progressed.
But also we met outside of Techscaler and like the conversation seemed to always flow like we, we were never in a disagreement around where the future is headed.
I think both him and I were in agreement that we wanted to start a business in the AI space.
We were both aligned in terms of the ambition to build something that is of large scale.
Although the steps to get there may have differed but we were aligned in general and I guess on, on my side I wanted to be forthcoming with showing my commitment to this.
Shiv had been building his idea and working on his idea for a few months and he was dedicated to it full time.
Whilst when we met I had my full time job which is quite well, well paid job. I was also doing an executive MBA and my, my time was not fully allocated to this and I guess the first hurdle we needed to overcome is me showing that I'm committed to building.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: A startup, showing commitment to the partnership that you're hoping to build.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Interestingly you came together brilliant that you had kind of the same philosophy in terms of where you wanted to take it. That alignment with ambition and the vision of where you want to go, but different ideas of the steps to get there. So in terms of what came first, the co founder or the idea where you want to go, it kind of reads as though it was kind of there was a priority for co founder and the idea came after. Where do you think the kind of balance of those came in?
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Absolutely. Like co founder is the first thing.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: Do you believe that very strongly. Is that what you would advise other founders?
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. Because what happens, the ups and downs that you meet along the way, which there has been many in this past year alone.
Yeah.
You really need someone there that is committed to the cause.
And on days where you're down and low, they are the energy that pulls you back up and it works vice versa.
And you'd never get that kind of commitment to the cause or, or energy to keep going unless you're a co founder.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess what you said there, it's, it's just as much about finding like the skills audit where the gaps are, but equally that you're aligned at that final goal because it's all well and good having someone who is your yin to your yang, but if they're not gonna be able to push through in those difficult moments, then it's. Yeah, it's for nothing. But would you give any other advice in terms of finding the right type of co founder? I mean, it's something we get asked about a lot and it's not an exact science, but any sort of suggestions? Kind of. You mentioned you there were different ways that you had tried to find a co founder to that point.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Yes.
As I said, I spent weeks and months on end trying to convince my brother to come on board and for us to start something together. And I like, obviously we're family and you wouldn't trust anyone else more than you would trust your family member on such a venture.
But we weren't aligned in terms of the risk appetite.
So I came to a couple of years ago when I decided to go out, I had this inner belief that, that I was willing to give up my job and be happy to meet the challenges of not earning the same amount that I was earning before and living the same lifestyle that I was living before.
Because I just felt I wanted to build something that is not financially motivated. I just want to build like a product. I want to bring some value to, to the market that did not exist before. And that in itself excites me more than any financial reward that comes off the back of it.
And my, my brother wasn't at that level or willing to give that same level of commitment.
Other co founders that I dabbled with, one was more on the business development side. So both of us were essentially salespeople without the know how of building a tech company.
Others were in completely different sectors, so their backgrounds were from a different industry, which is compared, like compared to mine. Being in the tech world, again, there was no alignment there.
So I think my advice would be you just need to be open minded and meet people, go and attend events, networking events, be out there and be willing to speak to as many people as you come across and when you speak to them, be as open minded and open in discussions as possible because you never know what will come exactly.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: And by you being open and they, by being open, you can actually assess if there's an alignment here rather than keeping your cards close to your chest. So I've written down their trust, commitment, strength and ambition alignment as like really key pillars there to finding someone and also just circled their time, the time that it takes to kind of actually work out if it's the right fit. I mean you could tick every single box there, but only the test of time can prove whether or not.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of like all of that has nothing to do with the idea, so.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Absolutely. So hence why you're pro co founder, then will come the idea. Yes, absolutely.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: So actually if we talk about that like signing up to techscaler first steps, my intuition was like ChatGPT, the underlying technology behind it, as in the large language models are so good that it can solve the data problems that businesses have. And again, I was working for a consultancy so I know the kind of business problems that consultancies would be hired to deliver and help achieve. And if you have a very capable LLM, you can ask IT questions that otherwise you'd have needed a data scientist or a data engineer to extract out of the data that you have access to. So my idea was to try and build a platform that does business reporting and makes business reporting as easy as just chatting away to a system and accessible to any non technical user. So many business users have the intuition they know what they want to find a measure of or a metric of, but they don't know how to get to that.
And if you have an LLM that has access to all the data, then it would be able to surface the insights. So it was a very simple idea and actually now everybody's doing that. All big and small companies are doing exactly the same thing.
But that was my initial idea two years ago. Shib's idea was more on the operational side. So there's a lot of tasks that require manual inputs or require admin staff to perform.
And for small businesses that could are looking to grow and scale, that could be quite expensive. You can train an LLM to perform these tasks on their own and actually both kind of complement each other. And as a, as a very basic idea, it essentially uses LLMs. And today we see that with all of our customers.
Some are looking for data analysts or business reporting, others are looking for operational improvements. And finding a way to deliver that value is basically what we're trying to do.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: I love that it sounds like you both had an intuition on where you think the future is for a sector or a piece of tech. And you've both sort of found your way to align, but kind of led by customers or by the people you're speaking to. So this goes back to you. You're not coming in with a fixed idea.
You're working on committing to solving a problem for customers in a certain area and you're going to be open to that. Which actually leads me over to a little bit on kind of mindset and how you've approached neurons. So last time that I caught up with Shiv, he shared an article that was titled find your winning idea by selling products that don't exist yet, which as an article was about a startup's founding team's journey to reaching product market fit. And so that's what it comes across. It's the approach generally for use Nora, and that you kind of have or hold the sort of sell before you build approach, is that correct? And would you in general encourage others to do the same or is it more complicated than that?
[00:18:42] Speaker A: No, obviously it depends on who you are and where you're at and what level of skill sets that you bring.
So you have startups in the past that their founding team or founders have like, are very smart or have PhD level knowledge specific niche research.
Yeah, they have this niche research and like 1 in 100 they use that. Like the Google founders for example, they've used that research to build a product that then became very relevant and like dominated the market for the next 20 or 30 years.
Shiv and I knew from the onset that we're not that type of people.
So the alternative approach is to go and find customers that have a problem so ingrained or so deep that they are willing to pay to solve it.
And as long as what they are willing to solve is aligned with what we want to build, then that makes a win win situation where the customer gets value that they are desperately need to solve for. And we get learnings and validation that we can build something that a customer is willing to pay for.
So actually for the first six or seven months of us working together, Shiv and I, we just went and spoke to as many prospect customers as we could come across.
I remember, yeah, some of whom were willing to pay us for building prototypes or building agents or building POCs.
Others gave us validation that that wasn't the sector that we could deliver value really quickly in. And we came across other sectors where we realized there is value to be delivered here and we are capable of delivering that value and the customer was happy to pay us to get that over to them.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: So it sounds like you've went through quite a few pivots as kind of this area or the tech that you have can work across multiple verticals.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wouldn't call it pivots as such is more finding markets that we can quickly deliver value in.
Essentially like AI will be so pervasive or is very pervasive and it will impact every industry out there.
And it's we as a small startup, although initially we thought we can deliver agents and value in all sectors and whoever is out there, any business out there can leverage AI agents.
But as we spoke to more and more customers, we realized that there are sectors that the value that we can deliver is far more valuable to them and it's easier to build a platform around.
And that's what we're focusing on now.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: How do you stay on top of it all, especially being in the AI space? I mean, it's becoming quite competitive. There's lots of people in this space now.
The tech is constantly developing.
It seems on an hourly basis there's something new. How do you stay relevant? How do you stay ahead of the curve? How do you, how do you project? Predict the future?
Big question on predicting the future.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we, I think we, we, we try to avoid predicting the future.
So what we tend to analyze is present trends and like what things that are coming out that will make our lives easier and make our product development much quicker.
And we tap into that with your intuition.
Yeah, so like we.
And I guess the primary focus is finding customers.
So I think what will differentiate one startup over another is how many customers you're delivering good value to.
You're delivering an awesome customer experience and they just believe in your vision.
And I think longer term that's what will stand the test of time over what other startups are doing.
And I genuinely think that because this is a New technology platform that will exist for the next how many years?
The market is still massive and the wider market is huge, and there is plenty to go after.
So actually, in our engagements with customers so far, we've rarely come across a direct competitor that they were chosen over us.
And there is the incumbent players, so the likes of Microsoft and Google and the services that they offer.
But the vast majority of businesses still need help in adapting those tools to how they operate and how they run.
So that's what we're banking on currently.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Do you think this customer LED approach is giving Neuron an edge that some of your competitors just don't have? What is?
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Yeah, again, it's very hard to call it an edge. I think our approach to go to market is we want to be very quick at delivering value.
So from the moment that a customer engages with us to the moment they see a working MVP that meets their problem, we want to cut that down as much as possible.
And I think every other startup out there, early stage startup, that is their unique value, is how quickly they can deliver value to customers.
And we've had teething problems.
Like seven months ago, it would have taken us four or five weeks to get something shipped out of the door that the customer realizes value out of.
Today we are onboarding customers and giving them access to dashboards that visualizes their data in a day.
So, like, there is always progress and learning.
As long as you're taking that and applying it back in your product development, then that's great.
Another thing, we're also.
We've been very lucky with our hiring. So, like, we attended like a tech meetup last summer and we bumped into someone that was lost and couldn't find where the meetup was. The one.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: The fanjul.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
So we started chatting as we were climbing up the lift to the tech meetup. And now Ewan is our CTO and we had a really good chat and then we met a couple of weeks later for coffee. And he comes with bags of experience and has been helping us a lot in building an engineering culture which ultimately will differentiate us as well in hopefully the coming months or years.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Wow. So get lost more often.
[00:27:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Get lost. Yeah.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: Is one of the. Write that down.
No, but it sounds like the way you've been able to respond to customers so quickly that turnaround time has. Has been a really big part of helping you progress up to this point, which is excellent. I want to touch a little bit back on kind of the shared mindset of the founding team of yourself and shiv you both come across as having a real clear sense of your vision of where you want to be, the life you want to lead by having and the kind of startup you want to lead and coming across as very ambitious and determined, which is excellent to see. Would you agree with that? Is that fair? Are you ambitious, determined?
Where do you think that comes from? The two of you as two founders? And would you say it's had a real role in Neuron's growth up to this point?
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Yeah, without a doubt. I mean like where we were a year ago and where we are now is like blight and day.
We have a bit of a business now and we have systems and we are ISO 27001 accredited or certified, which is, which is quite like an achievement. We have a bunch of customers that are using it. So like we've raised from a vc, which again has helped a lot with where we're at.
But I think in general the mindset is more around we want to build an awesome product or an awesome service that helps businesses out there be better, grow. And I think there's fulfillment in the fulfillment comes from. We've had this embryonic idea and now it's being used by businesses not just in the UK but in many other countries out there.
And I think that in itself is exciting.
Like I'd love for us in a couple of years time, if we look back at this podcast today, and I would look back and think, I'd love to have customers that are using Neuron in the US or customers that are using Neuron in the Middle East. And if between now and then we've achieved that in two years time, then that sense of fulfillment gives me excitement in its own right. And I know that it's the same for Shiv.
Like he, he has that again, same level of fulfillment that he will feel from having customers use the product that he's built.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: And it's not just about what you said earlier with bringing value to the market, but at scale. Yes, that's the ambition to be. Yeah, big.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: Yeah. To be like, to be a known B2B provider of services, building, delivering a platform that businesses like have no experience of today. And if they use our platform, it will bring them so much value that otherwise they would have never been able to achieve it.
So that's the hope that we are building towards that future.
How we get there, we have no idea.
[00:30:41] Speaker B: Do you have any sense of timeline? Where do you think? Do you think five years, 10 years, two years, six months?
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Yeah, again, I have no idea. I think you look at other startups and there are many examples in the US and in the UK that have found early signs of product market fit, like within weeks and they had explosion of growth in terms of usage or users and revenue that comes with it. But the question still remains whether these startups have something that actually is lasting in terms of value.
And nobody knows.
So from my perspective, the market is still figuring out how AI or applications of AI would work in, in a business context.
And whether you're slow today and then accelerate in the future or you're very fast today and then your growth slows in the future, that is not clear. So there's no timeline as such. It might be that we will take two or three years to get to 100 customers, but then six months to get to 10 million customers.
Or it could be that over the next two months we will get to a million customers and then things might slow down or explode from there.
It really depends on finding the right product that is scalable and repeatable.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: And you and Shiv's mission is speaking to these customers to try and work this out and sort of keep the ship going until that moment happens and you find long lasting value that you're able to add.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: And a lot of the customers that we.
And again, the pitch has changed over time. So and our positioning, like last year it felt like we were like customers expectation where that we had a finished product and they can start consuming it and using it today.
And that happened with a couple of customers or prospect customers.
But now we're being very focused on finding customers that are willing to partner with us and understand that we're on a journey. And by them coming on board and help, they will be helping us, helping them figure out how AI would work for them. And it's slightly different to a services model where you're a consultancy that is focused on billable time. Our focus is how can we build a platform that businesses can leverage and use that meets their needs over day to day billable time.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: So it feels like they're having a VIP experience, they're going to show customers and that you're able to tailor the solution or the product to them until you fine tune the product.
Fantastic.
I'm sure there's been a lot of hard days and you mentioned it. I mean it's been a year, there's been a huge amount of changes and that will have required commitment from you and Shiv and resilience from the team.
And I want to ask you about what the challenges have been so far. But would first like to start with what have been the highlights for the past year.
If you compare your kind of consultancy and kind of corporate career before this in big tech conglomerates to your lifestyle now, how have you dealt with going from that to this? Has it been worth it and what have you loved about it? No regrets.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's quite a complicated question. So.
So I guess over the last year my lifestyle has definitely taken a hit, so it has been hard to adjust.
And my wife, she's been very supportive and very patient but she also like keeps reminding me that our way of living is now different and we need to adjust accordingly and make sure that we're making the right choices and sacrifices so we can withstand the coming few months until something comes out of it.
But the highlights for me is like getting your first customer payment, landing in the bank account like that, that was a little win because we spent ages speaking to prospect customers and, and then one day you wake up and there's this money that appeared in your company's bank account that just before that day there was nothing. So that is a big highlight.
Another highlight is customer more recently logging into what is our kind of UI user interface and actually typing in a username and password and something opening up regardless of whether that was the thing that they were expecting to see or the final value that they wanted to get from us. But the fact that they are logging into something that we've built is another highlight.
I think getting the first term sheet from our, our, our VC and investor was another highlight. It just validated that we are onto something and that the precede check is usually like a check that comes from an investor who sees that as founders we have something good together.
And, and, and that was validation. Like it felt like, all right, so like my intuition about Shiv and Shiv's intuition about me were right up to that point because an investor now sees that value that we can bring to the market and is willing to give us a pre seed check on it.
Now the proof is whether we can turn that pre seed investment into something that scales and so far we are on the right path, which is good.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: So it seems like a lot of the highlights that you've experienced so far are related to moments of validation that kind of prove that you're on the right path and that has been naturally a key highlight.
You touched a little bit on the impact to your life of being a finance founder and the kind of challenges that's brought. So I wonder if you wouldn't mind Talking a little bit more about any sort of challenges you've encountered in the past year that you would like to share with finders or just anyone else listening.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there are so many variables that could impact the direction of a startup.
Like it's just, it's never.
There is no formulaic approach to like figuring out how to deal with challenges as they come along. So as an example, we've chosen to go to market through selling to customers first before building anything.
And the more you speak to customers, the more you find ones that are willing to work with you and they have expectations that you will build an agent or build an AI based technology that delivers some form of value that meets their needs.
And in the first few months, especially after we've raised from the vc, we are a team of very limited resources. So we at the moment we're four FTEs full time employees.
And back then it was Shiv, myself and our CTO Ewen and we hired like a couple of contractors to support us immediately after the raise. And each of those customers require kind of a bespoke build and they are in different sectors.
So the more you have of those, the more as a team you're not working together and you are focused in one area or one project to try and deliver something for a customer. And we quickly realized three months down the line that this doesn't really deliver what our startup is meant to be doing and like building a platform that serves all of our customers.
And we decided to change the approach and try and dictate what kind of proof of concepts or what kind of automations we're going to be building for our customers.
And since then actually our engineering cadence has improved dramatically. The foundations that we can build on top of has improved because we allocated more time as a team to build those foundations.
But then two months or three months into that a customer says, well, we really want to work with you, but we're not going to work with you unless you have some form of accreditations or like that you will be handling my data appropriately like ISO 27001 for example.
And we wanted to show that customer, given their willingness to want to work with us, that we will do it, we'll get it done.
But then what that entailed is six weeks of writing processes, how do we onboard employees, how do we afford them, how do we handle our systems and actually getting independently audited by an external auditor that these policies are adhered to and usually that takes about a year to do.
We did it in six weeks.
And like in those six weeks it kind of derailed our build momentum that we had.
The ending result was we did get accredited and we, we now are able to cater for maybe larger businesses, needs to give them assurances that we can handle their data appropriately. And we did end up signing that customer because they wanted to work with us. And actually the signs so far are looking very positive that they will become a really good customer of ours and an advocate for what we're building.
But that was a challenge that with very limited resources we needed to figure out how to achieve it whilst keep our existing customers happy.
[00:42:29] Speaker B: You're spinning all the plays and in this instance at the early stage you're working out how to prioritize building your business versus building your product. And it's all interlinked and all intertwined and how do you balance the short term fires that are happening around you versus is the long term vision of what you want for the business?
[00:42:47] Speaker A: It's very hard.
I think we're getting better at it. So as I mentioned earlier, we've just hired a small office in the Edinburgh city center and it's like we're turning it into our own little home and I think it's helping improve our culture as a team.
We were talking a lot more where an office based team.
We obviously have access to the office 24 by 7 so we're quite flexible in terms of people wanting to go and work at any time and come into the office. But the more we are present together in the same place, the better we are as a unit and I feel the better we will become at making the right choices when these challenges come up again.
And not that I regret anything that we've done in the past because it's all learning, but I think now we.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: Are.
[00:43:57] Speaker A: In a better place to hopefully make better choices in the coming few weeks. When customers come to us with asks or requirements, we know whether we'll be able to deliver against those requirements or not and we can set expectations accordingly.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: And just on customers. So you've got this customer led approach.
Where are the boundaries? At what point do you decide this is the right fit of a customer? Is there a customer fit that you're looking for or are you being led by.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: And again that was challenge a few months ago we were led by what the customer sees as their need and their and their asks.
And we I think like one example we spent weeks with one particular prospect going back and forth on what they require from us and how can we help. And we done like process maps and we went and observed them in their office to just understand how they operate and work on a day to day basis and identified areas where we can build an agent to automate their environment.
But after weeks of engaging it led to nothing. And they didn't end up working with us because they didn't have the budget to do it in the first place. And although the engagement was valuable in the sense that we got to observe users in their day to day operations and understand how we would engage with the customer, but that was resource that we allocated for four or five weeks to get to a point where we're writing a detailed proposal, this is what we can build for you. And then nothing comes off the back of it.
Where today we know from the onset that what this customer is asking for, we know we can deliver because we have six or seven other customers that we've done exactly the same thing for and we have the capability to provision or vend that environment for them. And it's a case about like fine tuning it to their needs. So like the more you engage with customers, the more you learn about what you are good at in terms of delivering and what to say no to.
And that's always evolving.
[00:46:43] Speaker B: So what you're good at, what to say no to and what the gaps are that you need to fill as well in terms of. Okay, there's a bit of a risk here where we're not able to respond to that. This type of ask yes, yeah, got you, got you. So there have been instances where you've said no or where you've been like there isn't quite a fit here or we can't quite service this or is that only come from the customer saying.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: So like I don't think I cannot recall a time where we said no to a customer from the onset. Actually there is a couple of customers or prospects that asked us for very specific things and we told them no, we can, we're not going to deliver that. But in general, like conversations tend to come to a natural conclusion where we, we position what we can offer and we discuss customer needs and the natural conclusion is that we're not a good fit. And like without needing to say no, people that we engage with, it's quite easy to then find out where, where you're at.
I think on a couple of occasions and that is still lingering till today. In fact one prospect customer that we've been attempting to deliver like a proof of concept for, for the last few months, this last Monday they said, well, where we're not delivering or meeting their expectations at the rate that they thought we would be able to deliver at. And they're not going to become a customer.
But the door is still open for us to work in the future once we have a fully fledged platform that is able to deliver value much quicker rather than them being on that journey with us.
So, like, still positive? It is positive. Like I think in general, in general, when we speak to customers, all the customer prospects that we've been speaking to, it's clear that we are an early stage startup.
We are still developing and building our platform.
We set with them what our vision is for the future.
And over time we've become better at setting expectations correctly. And I think it's expectation setting that it's very hard to get right at the beginning. So one customer, you could tell them we can deliver a proof of concept within a month, but then once you get into the detail, you realize that actually we don't have enough resources, we don't have the right skill sets, the data that we're being given access to is not that great and things tend to linger longer than expected.
But then what that gives you is learnings to understand how to qualify an engagement early on to set expectations about what you can deliver.
And I think we're getting better at.
[00:49:55] Speaker B: That the more customers you interact with and speak with. So the more customers, the stronger you've gotten at this point? Yeah. Fantastic.
I want to move the conversation over to funding which you, you've talked about having VC funding going down the VC route and currently receiving pre seed or accessing pre seed funds. So we'd love to hear a little bit about your journey with funding, which is a massive topic of course, as everything feels about funding more. So were you and Shiv always very clear on what your strategy was for funding, where you wanted to go, that you wanted to go down B.C.
and what has it been like so far going down that journey and any lessons learned?
[00:50:36] Speaker A: Yeah. So at the beginning actually Shiv was of the mindset that we, he wanted to build a startup that is bootstrapped and grow it to a certain size and then exit and then build the next one and then grow it to a unicorn.
And that was his thinking of that journey, startup journey.
And I think as we started engaging and working together, we quickly realized that the market is moving very fast and the technology is advancing at a rapid pace, which is what we see today anyway.
And I think that the opportunity is now to actually go and build something that is big from the beginning.
And we came to the Conclusion that going down the VC route is the, the right approach and I think we, we also spend a bit of time looking at other funding routes so we, we looked at obviously gvation.
We, we are part of, we are an enterprise in residence for gvation Scotland.
We, they've, they've been kind enough to give us access to their office. We've been using it for a few months now.
But we weren't like going down an accelerator route seemed like wasn't the right path for us and in terms of the funding that an accelerator would provide wasn't enough for us to go and hire and build a business.
The other funding routes we looked at is local angel syndicates and their expectation was that we needed to be revenue generating, have the foundations of a product before they would invest and, and the mindset was not aligned whilst what we took from or what we knew from startups in the US that VCs tend to invest in founders first at a pre seed stage believing that they can go and build something and actually finding a VC locally to that want to do that like it was.
We were very limited in choice but there was a VC. So TechStart was a VC that was willing to do exactly that and invest in a startup using the safe mechanisms in the US that the US startups are accustomed to.
We knew that we wanted to go down the VC route. How do you go about it? It's very hard. Again the US is YC Y Combinator. They have an approach called SAFE that essentially allows an investor to invest in a startup with the promise of future equity at a certain valuation which makes the whole process of raising much quicker.
So from the moment you start raising to the moment the cash landing in your account, it's three to four weeks versus a fully priced round where you go through like six months of due diligence before the money landing in the account. And for us we wanted to execute fast because we had a pipeline of customers that we've been speaking to waiting for us to build something for them and we needed to hire and invest in a team so we can deliver on the promises that we had for the customers. So the choice of raising became like it became apparent we wanted to go down the VC route and then as customers wanted us building we wanted to know how can we get access to funds really quickly and the fastest way of doing it is via safe.
[00:55:03] Speaker B: And so what was your route to the us?
Have you been heading over to Silicon Valley?
[00:55:09] Speaker A: Yeah. So our first trip was Shift with Techscaler.
He went along with the cohort last summer I think in August.
And I think Shiv was very prepared in that.
So he, he had a number of meetups and that he, he lined up that wanted he attended. He had a number of founders that he reached out to and met and including some Scottish base, Scottish founders that are based in sf.
And they were all very helpful in providing him and us an understanding of what the funding landscape looks like at a pre seed stage.
And we took the decision really quickly to do the flip because the Delaware flip. Delaware flip, yeah.
Because that, that just by starting that process meant that we are setting ourselves up to hopefully attract investors and VCs in the US and it makes it far easier for them to invest in a US entity.
The UK entity or the Scottish based entity still today owns the IP and it's the entity that we are contracted and employed by.
But we have now an investment arm or a topco that is U.S. based to attract U.S. investors.
[00:56:55] Speaker B: So you're able to take investment from the U.S. but the team is based here and actual operations are happening in Scotland.
[00:57:01] Speaker A: Yes. And like we think we like we believe we can build a really good engineering team out of Scotland, especially tapping into graduates from the University of Edinburgh and Sterling University, Glasgow. Like there are really good universities that can provide us a good stream of talent that we can use and leverage.
But realistically customers, the big customers are not based in Scotland. So and what tends to happen as you take on larger enterprises as customers, they would want some of the operations, especially the support and sales team to be local to them. And that's where we're, we will look to into the future as we grow.
[00:57:54] Speaker B: So at the moment us for funding, but future it could be there is a Neuron base, sales base or customer service based in the us. Yeah, exciting things coming.
It's great to hear that you've experienced a positive, had a positive, positive experience with accessing talent in Scotland. It's a wonderful resource, an opportunity that we have for local people, but also people from further afield who come to Scotland for higher education and we'd love for them to stay and have the opportunity to grow their career in Scotland.
You mentioned when Shiv first went out to Silicon Valley, he was really well prepared. Just any advice or things you can suggest. I remember at that time I think Shiv's location on LinkedIn was down as based in Silicon Valley. Something so small as that as a way to kind of pop up in people's timeline. I felt like that was such a small but intentional decision there from Shiv.
[00:58:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, and it still is actually, I think it still says San Francisco on his profile.
I think, I think because what that helps is as the location change in LinkedIn, things start popping up on the timeline that then he can capture insight from or know of an event that is happening or a connection that he can reach out to on LinkedIn and meet while it's out there.
So it kind of helped in that regard.
I, I have been to San Francisco twice as well since last summer and it was my first ever visit back in November to sf and I, I used that week to just learn about the place and understand what's happening and what's going on. And it's a, it's a massive learning curve. Like you need to build your network of other founders, other folks that have like a good knowledge of SF to know your way around.
And I think that will only come with several visits over the coming few months and years, hopefully.
[01:00:12] Speaker B: So you mentioned a huge learning curve what kind of sticks out as being. It's very different over there and you really had to adapt to.
[01:00:20] Speaker A: Well, something very little. But in, in Edinburgh we have maybe three, four tech meetups, like good tech meetups a month in San FRANCISCO there's about 10 a day or like quite a big number and actually they all happen around the same time and trying to figure out which one to go to is in itself quite a big learning curve.
The other is probably knowing where, how to access maybe other founders. And I think there's a few Scottish founders that are based in SF that actually have been very open and supportive in meeting up and making introductions and connecting people locally because they've seen it, they've done it before, they've raised from venture there and kind of know the ecosystem quite well. That's been quite positive as well.
[01:01:29] Speaker B: Right. So tapping into connections locally out there I suppose to help you with that in and just generally taking a moment to try and navigate the mass amount of activity they have going on there, which is quite different. Very exciting.
And so any other sort of reflections or lessons learned from raising that you would pass on to a founder or do you feel it's a very too individual of a journey to pass on advice?
[01:01:54] Speaker A: I think, I think 1, 1, 1 key learning is again, you need to treat investors as customers.
So sometimes you expect that you'll just prepare your two minute or five minute pitch that you keep practicing and if you deliver the pitch at the right way, investors will just put a term sheet in and invest in you. Was in reality there is relationship Building that needs to to be put in place. So and if, if you identify a number of investors that you think will work well with you and help you on your journey with a startup, you need to go and build relationships with them. So meet with them without the intention of wanting to position yourself for a raise.
But more so I know that you will be raising at some point in the future and here is what I'm doing now and here's where I think I will be at when I come to raise.
And as long as over the course of a few weeks or a few months you coincidentally come across those investors at events or you provide them with an update that shows that you're making progress towards that vision.
[01:03:35] Speaker B: This is reminding me of your co founder journey and that it's been a, you know, you're proving yourself in the long term, you're proving your commitment, you proving your resilience that you'll follow through and there's like a two sided aspect of it where you're also trying to gauge if it's a right fit there. So at least that's my observation that you approached it in the right way and not necessarily desperately trying to make one specific or your first interaction with investor the thing that follows through with.
[01:04:01] Speaker A: Investments especially at pre seed stage. Because pre seed what an investor is looking for is to invest in the founders and like sus whether the founders as a team are able to deliver against that vision.
I think later stages. So seed series A metrics come into play and how you're executing comes into play and it's a different ball game then.
But precede if you're going to race for, for the first time it's about building the relationships with the right investors that you want their support on your journey as a founder and being deliberate in showing them the progress you're making towards that vision.
[01:04:51] Speaker B: Absolutely. Earlier on you've not got the metrics or the data to back up that you can go all the way but you have yourself and you have how you show up to every interaction.
[01:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah and I think there are like again speaking to our example, like we've met with a bunch of investors and with, with all of them. Like we would meet with them in various events and various points of contact and at every time we would say like here is the progress we've made. So last May we had our first paying customer.
Last July I resigned from my job and gone full time.
And that shows kind of commitment.
Last August we had our second customer paying customers and that kind of like just making Little updates, tiny updates to show that you're making progress towards what you're building helps a lot when it comes to then pitching.
[01:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it shows momentum rather than waiting until you have something really shiny and perfect for them. It's that they're more interested or not everyone but you know, more interest at this stage to actually see are you going to show up every day, are you going to push things forward on a day to day basis rather than holding off?
[01:06:11] Speaker A: And actually when, when then it comes to the actual pitch, you don't pitch, you just have a chat, you sit in a room and you talk about what that vision looks like, what your beliefs are, what your background is and, and you end up chatting through what a startup journey looks like and then there is back and forth.
So if the investor that you're dealing with and we're quite lucky with, with, with, with our investor that we went back and forth over a period of two weeks to just make sure that there's alignment in our thesis where he was comfortable investing in us and our thesis matches what he's looking for. And it was.
[01:07:03] Speaker B: So you're looking for clarity of vision within the founding team which is something you and Shiv have share very strongly and alignment of alignment with the investor as well what they want to see and that they can be up for coming on the journey with you all and then just showing up and showing validation and showing you're meeting these proof points no matter how big or small they may seem.
Good advice.
So on the topic of advice you know we've talked about like things that we've, I've taken away so far is how you've approached your relationship with finding a co founder founder, how you approach with actually finding a problem to solve and your development of your product development and having customer led conversations as well as how to approach chatting to investors and building on those relationships.
As founders we hear lots of advice. We go to multiple meetups and we hear different founders experiences, what worked for them, what hasn't. Do you have any thoughts about thoughts on what's the best advice you've ever heard that you've thought that really works for me. And what's the worst you've heard?
[01:08:14] Speaker A: I I think the best advice I've heard is as a founder you need to show up and turn up and actually that came through several founders but one of the guest speakers on the first day in, in on Tech Start, sorry Techscaler program last year, she was talking about how showing up and turning up just, you never know what comes Your way and what, like, what doors may open.
As long as you make the effort and make the time, things will happen.
And like, I can relate to that. In my experience, obviously I met Shiv that way, just turning up and showing up to, to an event and putting myself out there.
But also we met Ewan, our cto. We met a bunch of customers we like. The more you put yourself out there, the more you come across an ecosystem of people that are willing to help you and support you.
So that was good advice.
Probably the worst advice you tend to hear is we need to stop selling and just build something first and then go out and sell it and stop selling for like six months or seven months.
Just to make sure that you've got the platform, it's able to scale, it's able to meet expectations of customers of the onset. And, and I think like, what that has, like we've seen over the last few months that if you go into like build mode for a few weeks, what comes off the back of it is something that customers do not want to use.
And again, we, I can speak from experience. So we thought that customers want to interact with the WhatsApp agent so they can use WhatsApp to basically instruct our agent to go and perform some tasks or use WhatsApp to report, like, ask it like how much revenue I've made over the last whatever.
And we spent like shift. Spend a good two or three weeks trying to get an agent that works really well in WhatsApp off the ground. But then when we put it in front of customers, it's like radio silence. No usage, no consumption, because the expectation is the user will initiate the engagement with our agent. And the reality is from experienced customers just want things to work, they want things to happen.
And I think you only get to that level if you engage with customers.
If you go into building something, unless you have 100% conviction that what you're building will match what customers are looking for, then, yeah, go for it. But we're not that absolutely.
[01:11:26] Speaker B: The market risk is so high, if you don't know what the market is looking for, then you're setting yourself up for a failure. There'll always be instances where the thing you're solving is more related to the tech that you're producing. And in those instances, yes, you want the tech to be solid to solve that very specific problem. But if you're working out exactly what that solution is, why would you, why would you spend precious time, which is one of the only things you have as an early stage Startup and building something that hasn't been to some degree validated.
[01:11:57] Speaker A: And actually that is probably the best advice that I've heard or the most valuable advice I would give is time is your absolute precious thing that will define you as a startup.
It's not money, it's not your idea, it's like how much time you can allocate in the right direction to generate the maximum value.
[01:12:26] Speaker B: Super solid advice. Absolutely.
And we're wrapping up here.
I would like to give you the opportunity to find out how can they follow you and shiv your journey moving forward. What are you looking at in the next three months? Do you have any asks of the. The listeners today?
[01:12:45] Speaker A: Yes. So we're.
We. We str. So our website hasn't been updated for a few months now. We were because we're figuring out our go to market but there would be an update on our website soon.
So that would be an avenue to see how we change from our current website to and messaging and positioning to our new website.
We're on LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn, you can follow Shiv on LinkedIn as well. And we tend to be at all local meetups. So the tech meetup and FanDuel were there. Our CTO Ewan I think spoke at the tech meetup two months ago.
I'm hosting the next founders meetup at Think with Selby.
We're at the various meetups that are happening in Edinburgh and I think over the next three months the aim is to try and convert as much of the customer pipeline that we have into something valuable that they see as a good fit for them and would be willing to pay for it.
And for that we are experimenting currently with how we handle resourcing. So we've been hiring contractors that would come and help us on a two week engagement to build the initial proof of value or proof of concept for those customers.
And it gives us and the contractor an opportunity to understand each other's skills and if things work out and there is obviously the budget for it, then it's an opportunity to bring on board new engineers to join our engineering team. And so far we've done that with three contractors and if anyone is interested, we are based in Citybase. You can just pop by and.
And have a chat with us should.
[01:14:53] Speaker B: They reach out to you on LinkedIn if they're interested.
[01:14:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, please. Yeah, LinkedIn.
So yeah, it's quite easy to find me. I've got a black T shirt top with. With a big smile.
[01:15:04] Speaker B: Good to know the big smile. Good to know. And great to hear that you now know where the tech meetup is. And he's no longer getting lost on the way to the. No, no, he's leading it. What a turnaround for you.
[01:15:15] Speaker A: Yeah, he's actually, he he was one of the guest speakers two months ago, and yeah, he went from being lost outside, not knowing where it is to.
[01:15:24] Speaker B: Actually speak, and people are getting lost on the way to Fangio to see him.
[01:15:28] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:15:29] Speaker B: What a Turner. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time, Mo. It's been super interesting to hear your whole journey, your thoughts and advice to budding founders and current founders, and really excited to see what happens next with you and Shiv and Neuron.
[01:15:41] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you for having me.
[01:15:43] Speaker B: It.
