Conor Moules

I think what we were trying to do is demonstrate that we want to be able to add value to your day to day.

And we need a little bit from you to be able to make sure that we're doing that correctly.

Because the last thing we want is like our own biases to be able to distract us from not hitting the mission in the way that we kind of needed to hit it for it to be successful.

We were trying to build it for barbers and hair salons at the very start.

I think like one thing that we've always been quite clever about, and it kind of goes off the back of this.

um initial kind of piloting work is that we took design partners in each of the kind of sub verticals so we obviously had the barber shop glenn owned to be able to design on that that got us out traps then we got a hair salon then we got laser hair removal clinics then we got a design partner so we take them in and instead of just spending an hour with them we would sit down and we would look at their systems and we would almost design out the workflows with them

okay to be able to you'd mock it up really would you essentially yeah and you'd take them through and they would then agree to be your because sorry we skipped over probably the most important part when initially we were trying to get going like funding wasn't really happening

To put it mildly, the rejection was pretty heavy duty.

Yeah, definitely.

I think people in Ireland kind of thought that this problem had been solved.

And two non-technical founders.

I'm sure I was like a madman at this point as well, like trying to get money in the door.

So I'm just... What were you trying to raise?

Oh, I think we were trying to raise 250 grand at the start.

To get the MVP built.

To get the MVP built, yeah.

And so it wasn't going well in the traditional kind of fundraising circles.

And we went back to, because of the 173, there's probably 40 that we developed deep relationships with.

We went back to those 40 and said, like, look, guys, we're really passionate about doing it.

We really want to do it.