Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: All right, welcome, everyone, to the onion, which is a podcast by Codebase. You may be used to hearing Stephen Droth's voice, or chief strategy officer, but the way we designed the onion was always to have multiple hosts. That's when I come in. My name is Ana Guillermo, head of online community at Codebase, and we are keeping the same question as usual. That's how we've designed it. And today I'm joined by Chris Hughes of Essenio. Welcome, Chris.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Thanks, anise. Nice to be on the pod.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time today. I think we're going to get started straight away.
What's your background?
[00:00:42] Speaker B: My background is business, really. So I think, like a lot of ceos, you're kind of thrown into a lot of different aspects of the job, but I guess I'm most comfortable on a kind of more sales and marketing side.
I started the business when I was at university, so I'm a bit of an all render. Really makes sense.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: And you mentioned university. What actually made you build at the startup?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Yeah, so I was a student with dyslexia, and I had to give presentations a lot in my degree, and it was one of my biggest challenges, and effectively, there's a lot of great support and funding available for disabled students.
So I went in and met with the university, discussed what support was available, and effectively found that a lot of people had similar challenges to me, but nothing was being done in that problem space. So after learning that there was millions of other neurodivergent people struggling with the same challenges I had with no solution, I really decided I wanted to do something for myself. And it was more of a kind of fun project, being kind of two weeks into my, or a couple of months into my kind of undergrad degree. But just always something I've been super passionate about is method, cognition, understanding my own kind of how my brain works, and being near divergent is just something I'm really passionate about and really own.
So it just kind of came naturally.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: You mentioned it was a couple of months to your undergrad. How many years it's been now coming up for ten years.
So what's your startup called?
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Sustainable.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Yeah. And what's the biggest pitch?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: So our mission is to make inclusion the standard, not the kind of afterthought that a lot of people kind of have when it comes to supporting neurodivergent people.
There are over a billion disabled people in the world. A lot of that is a real kind of underrepresented community, especially when you look at how many people are disclosing disabilities in the workplace and education. So our mission is to support the billion people with disabilities across the world. Really?
[00:03:16] Speaker A: My next question already touched on it as well, but how did your startup change the world actually those billion people that you were able to potentially support and you mentioned institutions or could be the workplace as well.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So our first product is a tool called Projectpal. It's a presentation support software that aims to help presenters overcome challenges with working memory. So it's a real kind of common challenge that neurodivergent people have is working memory and processing challenges. And that's really elevated when you are giving presentations, especially on content that you haven't really had a chance to learn.
So really where we are focusing is universities, so higher education and the workplace. So today we are supporting students and professionals in over 150 institutions across the UK and US, which is something we're really passionate about and we've been working really hard in the last year on how we can continue to support an even wider audience.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really good to hear as well.
Again, I think you sort of touched on it as well. You're clearly passionate about what you do, but what excites you the most about the space that you're in is that potential impact?
[00:04:41] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. At the moment I'm super fascinated with AI. I think in the accessibility space there is just so much massive room to make real societal impact. If you look at a lot of challenges that a neurodivergent person has, the kind of opportunities to solve so many problems with AI can be life changing.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: To a lot of people. No, definitely. Yeah, definitely. Lots of things happening around AI as well.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Again, you touched on it. I'd be curious to see how big is your sort of total available market out there. You've mentioned billion. Is that global world as well? Is that something you're more focused on and kind of what is a. For the future of the space that you're building it? What does it look like?
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Absolutely. We've done quite a lot of work looking at our cam, Sam and so on. The wider total addressable market is over a billion people that we're trying to support. Obviously at the moment we are only supporting people with presentations, but that's something that we are really looking at how we can really try and solve some of the wider societal challenges that near adverse person has.
So in terms of our total address market, it's really kind of wide a challenge that I think a lot of people have with accessibility. Is our accessibility products, is it's not accessible in pricing.
So if you talk about the billion people with disabilities, how many people can actually get access to support? So it narrows down quite a fair bit where there's a lot of government grants and support for assistive technology and things like that, but not everyone can access that.
It's a wider challenge there in terms of looking at how we can help people who can't access grants and support access.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah. Is that something that you also make quite exciting in space you're in is maybe the way AI technology could enable that accessibility? Again, widely accessible.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: People.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: So back on that, who is your ideal customer?
1 billion people. Are they all the same? An ideal one in 1 billion as well?
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Not necessarily. So at the moment, we've really kind of focused hard on students and universities has been our big kind of focus. But I guess where I'm really fascinated in at the moment is the knowledge worker space, a reference that's billion people with disabilities, but it's actually 20%, one in 5% of the population, or one in five, should I say, of the population, have a disability. So it's a massive, massive kind of percent of us effectively in the workplace, roughly only about 4% of people disclose their disabilities. So if you can imagine, you've then got 16% of people who are masking.
So it's a really interesting concept looking at how we can support that additional 16%, because that 16% are people who are doing their job and they're probably doing a good job, but they're having to overcome additional challenges that hopefully we can provide extra support which can allow them to really enhance their own career opportunities and really excel, I guess.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: No, that makes a lot of sense as well. You mentioned you primarily work with institutions. You're not directly b two c, so your ideal customers are still going to be existing people in place. Do you see that changing or do you see that on the way to that wider impact to go direct to consumer, or do you think.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah, possibly. Possibly direct to consumer. Longer term? I think a b, two b play is probably what's coming up next for us.
Yeah. As I've said, we're really excited about looking at how we can widen our offerings in terms of supporting a much wider group. So I'd say we'll have more to share on that soon, but we should have some really exciting news coming in a couple of months on how we can do.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: So. You've mentioned products as well. With present power. Do you think you have product market space at the moment?
[00:09:30] Speaker B: Definitely. In our core group, I think from, from our perspective, is we're very kind of data obsessed. So we're really kind of very metric driven in our core markets of higher education and the kind of neurodivergent student space. I would say we definitely do, yeah.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: You're a sole founder, aren't you? You've grown a team. How many people?
[00:10:02] Speaker B: We have 19.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: Yeah, that's pretty cool. And if I ask you to project yourself five years from now?
Sure.
Where do you see yourself? How many people are working for your startup? What kind of turnover are you aiming for? Where do you send you?
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Our mission is to be a world leading or the world leading accessibility company.
So that really is kind of where we want to go, is really trying to support as many people as we can.
In terms of employee headcount, I have next to no idea in terms of how that could look at the moment.
We've got really aggressive plans to continue to grow. Like in the last few years we've seen really strong growth from the most part. The business is relatively bootstrapped.
We've had two profitable years where we've seen really strong growth. So we're supporting our full team on our cash flow. So we're a really kind of self sufficient business. The plan is either to continue to do that or to look at avenues where we can really expand and accelerate.
But yeah, we want to have a suite of products that are really making societal impact as we go.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Yes, February products and not just a while. So it'd be really exciting.
I've got one other question, kind of around market and what you're building at the moment.
What are bottlenecks for growth for you at the moment? What's stopping you from growing?
Because it was interesting hearing you talk about you being profitable, being able to make payroll every month, sometimes how they're going to make payroll. So it's just about that achievements and that kind of being comfortable on that. But yes, what's stopping you from next.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: Steps at the moment?
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Is it funding, is it market times, it resources? Talent?
You clearly have an organization wanting to do that wordly kind of company.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Yeah. So as I said, we'll have some pretty big news coming in the next couple of months. I guess what my focus has been in the last year or so is really getting the plans ready for this big announcement coming soon. I guess what we've been trying to do within that is really define the ICP for a much wider offering. I guess so really that's been my focus on this trip, actually. We're recording San Francisco just now. We are, which is really cool and effectively what I've been doing in the last couple of months is really trying to focus in on root to market ICT on this news of what's coming soon.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: How it works. I'm also curious to know because obviously sector is a stigma as well. When you approach people that you want to work with, you might think that maybe something more that charities should do, maybe not a business should be focused on. How do you push back around?
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Absolutely. I think within the accessibility space, a lot of people consider it as the nice to have as a box tick. We're meeting legislation and things like that. But I think what we're trying to do in the next six months, the big focus for us is how we can prove return on investment, of investing and supporting neurodivergent people to companies. As I said, you've got one in five people are neurodivergent. You've got 17% of a team are masking, so they have to disclose. So if you can actually address that, then you could potentially have 17% of your talent or your workforce being a hell of a lot more productive. So that's a measurable ROI that we could hopefully try and provide to a business which takes near diversity and accessibility from our and nice to have kind of softer kind of emps kind of metric to hopefully a productivity metric, time saved or time gained. It's really what we're trying to drive sense.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: I remember reading a lot of things about where are your next million customers? And we're just looking at the impact market from lots of diversity, whatever that means. And I think neurodiversity is definitely one. And it's for me, a good balance, ethical side, but also financial side, and making that one talk.
Thank you, Chris.
Got few more questions this time, a bit more about startup culture.
What's your favorite thing about startup culture since university?
What was your favorite thing?
[00:15:53] Speaker B: So it's actually one of our core values, but it's adaptability.
It's being able to be in a lot of kind of first time experiences where you are very much learning on the job, you're learning as you go. And so I think for me there's been an incredible kind of learning curve and even for my team, for example, being able to see some individuals who came, joined us about three or four years ago straight out of university, who they were very much potential, but no real kind of experience.
And they've gone from being kind of like the juniors in the team to actually being seniors and in that kind of mid management side now, which is really cool to see. And that's just based on the aptitude of being able to tackle things for the first time with no experience or background in solving it. And it's fantastic to be able to be in a team where you can pivot really quickly based on any changes in the market or any kind of opportunities that are changing.
So I love the whole adaptability side and just being able to be uncomfortable all the time.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's very true.
That's brilliant. I know that you celebrate your team and you're able to support as well people going through it.
When you look back on kind of the first hires that you made, was it a bit more of a gamble? How were you able to maybe identify that those people will be kind of the right people for you, that you'd be able to support their growth?
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Yeah, on the first hires.
My first two hires were initially kind of interns straight out of the university.
They both super high potential, but just for me, I was also effectively like 22, 23. So there's so much learning and so many mistakes made there, which was actually quite good because I definitely made mistakes in terms of when I was managing them and effectively both of them.
It didn't really work kind of longer term in terms of lack of experience, and we're all just. I think it was a bit too rob at that point.
But shortly after, I was able to bring in two individuals who are almost like co founders to me.
My chief marketing officer now, Kara, she had kind of been through the very start of the scaling journey with turkey travel through Glasgow. So she was one of their first employees, grew with them to 30.
And then my ex chief product officer Ewan had his own startup as well. So we met at Scottish Edge and I think just got really tally. So the two of them were both extremely entrepreneurial. They were very scrappy, which is really what you need in your first five to ten hires. Really scrappy people who are very adaptable. And it just really clicked. So I think what I had with the two of them was just a really perfect storm, I guess, really complementary skill sets that really allowed us to kick on.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: No, that makes a lot of sense. I always love hearing stories about kind of early stages of album, looking back on it. Thank you for sharing that.
On to the next one. What is your least favorite thing about south and culture as well?
[00:19:50] Speaker B: So at the moment, I'm going to get a bit of a rap for this, but we are pretty much remote now, which I struggle with. Personally, we went through a pretty significant hiring kind of hiring period, I guess during 2021. So it was really kind of peak lockdown. We went from like four to about eleven people in the space of, yeah, pretty much.
And so a lot of the people we hired during that phase was I tried to bring in experienced people, and so what we brought in at that point was a kind of change in dynamic of the people we were hiring. So it was less kind of scrappy, less experienced people.
And I guess we were then kind of hiring people with like ten years experience upwards. And a lot of them were kind of younger parents, and for them, they love the vision and the tech for good side of what we do. But we also were able to offer a lot of flexibility and perks on flexible working. So for young parents, remote working, or certainly with my team, the flexibility with remote working is extremely kind of a massive advantage. And so personally, I don't enjoy remote working. I feel like I'd love to have a busy office with that whole kind of like cliche, stock up culture, and we don't really have that. Our culture is still great, we've got a really good culture, we spend a lot of time on our culture. But I guess personally, selfishly, I would love to have a busy office.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: That's fair enough. I can sort of relate to that as well. Love the billions of working hybrid. But I think especially now we see more corporates come back to the office. I think some startups as well, I've seen our 100% off the space and claiming that public culture as well, without any shame around us.
So it's quite interesting to see that. And then do you think that remote culture is stopping you from growing?
[00:22:12] Speaker B: No, I don't think so.
It certainly impacts my personal enjoyment of it, I think. But I guess we're able to get talent that I wouldn't be able to access if I forced everyone into the office, for example.
It's working really well. So I think that's the point is we made these hires during COVID and then it worked extremely well. So I know a lot of companies are kind of mandating that you need to come back in, but if it's not broke, then why fix it? And also, I think it would really turn a lot of people off and we would probably lose some of the people that we tried really hard to bring in.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. I guess as a founder, you need to make that compromise between what your team needs, what you need, what the change over time, as your team has grown and is it for people based on the UK now?
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Yeah, hardly in any of the hubs, to be honest. We've got a handful of people in Edinburgh, but people are pretty spaced out and for them it really works. And yeah, I really value our team and I don't think changing up for my own kind of enjoyment, for the best interest.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I respect that. Thank you for sharing that. You've already shared lots of little nuggets of knowledge along the way, but do you have any secrets or little bits of advice for the founders out there?
[00:23:56] Speaker B: I think things always take longer than you think.
So this is me coming up for ten years. The first five years were far longer than they should have been. I think I can try and argue I was 1819 in early years, but really when I got the right team around me, that's really when things kind of kicked off. I think you just need to be scrappy.
I've been on every campus in the UK, for example, so I have literally been everywhere. We've got a go to market team of five or six people now, but I've literally walked every single step of the way that they have. So I can really understand our customers, our users.
I think it's being able to just have an attitude where things need to get done, but you also need to be hungry to learn and understand the best way to do things.
I've always had an excellent mentor. I would say something that's been really kind of critical based on the stage of the business. So you've always got someone who you can lean on, but in the most part, you need to be hungry to learn, get your sleep rolled up. And another thing that we've done in the last year is we've really embraced this fail fast mentality. Obviously, we're up here in the Bay Area just now, and that's just such a common theme. But I feel like we've invested a lot into projects that we probably should have called earlier, and that's something that we're doing. Up until about 18 months ago, it was actually a trip out here where I really learned just the pace that people work. You set a whole series of assumptions and then you actually go and test it. And effectively, we've been able to make a lot quicker decisions based on the fact that we can set a series of goals. And basically I create frameworks for quite a lot of thing decisions beforehand. So you've got a time frame.
I love a framework where you have to have a constant score of seven or above, or you're killing the project basically.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: So we did that last year.
One of the kind of new products we were looking at was an AI presentation builder. This was in January last year, so it was really cutting edge. No one would talk about AI. The chat GT came out in December 2022 and basically January 2023. We were like, wow, we can use AI to create presentations because obviously that was one of the angles that we are supporting as presentations now got really excited, we kind of broke out into cross functional teams where I pulled maybe three or four individuals into a kind of task force team.
We got to a stage where we built a prototype, probing market traction, and had validated the need within about six weeks.
Really exciting. Effectively, at the start of it, I created this framework called burning bridge for us. So six kind of key metrics we had to have a confidence score of one to ten on.
So the need, the budget and commercials, the actual total addressable market, all of these kind of good metrics were things that we were measuring, but effectively it was eight or nine for five of them. And then one final metric was competitive landscape, which was two out of ten.
So the team were super excited about this project. Board, the investors, everyone was loving it, but effectively the competitive landscape was going to kill the project. So we killed it after nine weeks, which was a really bold move, but really kind of allowed us to find our new focus and brought us really back to the purpose, which is accessibility, and allowed us to kind of focus in on what we're really, what we've been working really hard on for the last year.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: Everything you said that talking to customers, del fast mentality and the idea of the framework as well, all criteria, they all have the same weight.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: Yeah, at the moment it is balanced equally. But to your point, I think if you're really going to get scientific, probably not. I think a lot of it is just what it really allowed us to do was focus in on ensuring we're ticking all these boxes effectively.
The goal is a framework to try and create a really high growth product effectively with what we're trying to do.
And it just gives you the focus, or gave us the focus in terms of what we had to establish and understand form. We kind of kicked off on that. So it gave us real kind of laser focus there. So I'm a big fan of it very much.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of task course as well that you put together. Sort of trying to love it from time as well.
Quite interesting.
On the self accidentality, we could be here talking about flowers. I think as I said, we're in San Francisco right now and it's one of my favorite topics.
How much the non topic here.
Very interesting as the way that failure is being and normalized. It's definitely something that we can learn from also at the heart of entrepreneurship, isn't it?
And the more you do it fast cycles, the better things will be. And you first experience it in the way that you're in about two years as well.
All right, thank you so much for that. Great things in there. Any kind of last thing that you would like to share with us as well? I know you mentioned he's going to come out here a bunch of times before as well. That's something you recommend founders to do?
[00:30:41] Speaker B: Highly, highly recommend. I think coming out here and just being able to listen and meet other founders is very eye opening.
Every time I come out here, there's such an infectious kind of drive, I guess, ambition.
So I think you need to take a little bit of a pinch of salt as well because I think my team hates when I come out here because some really wild ideas come back. But then there's also some nuggets in there, too.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like everything. You got the frameworks in place as well. Now, you built that team retaliation, that culture where people can feedback as well. So that's where bring back the food, saints, and let them cook.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: All right, well, thank you so much, Chris.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: Great to be here.
