William Neill

The MVP was purely just to get a sense of what's it like to save a link from a browser to an app and store it and then represent it. The UX around the saving process was really key. So we wanted to make sure that we could achieve this idea of share from the browser and the sharing intent of that browsing session could be captured really well and brought into a mobile app that was there.

So we built that, as I said, in two weeks. It worked really well and it just gave us a sense of something in our hand that we could feel and go, yeah, this is a thing. My name is William Neal. I'm the CTO and co-founder of Baskin.

Basket is a smart wishlisting tool. So it allows you to save things that you're interested in and you can organize those things into various collections, share those with friends, family. There's a gifting functionality. There is a bunch of tools to help you to organize your shopping, which includes things like getting price drop notifications back in stock, that kind of thing.

We are only in the UK right now. We've been building almost three years now. My co-founder and I met in a coffee shop in London after I'd moved there. We just got chatting about a whole bunch of things that we'd been working on prior to that. Yeah, we just found that there was a lot of overlap in terms of the things we were working on together and thinking about.

And Lex went on to continue some other ventures for a couple of years after that initial meeting. But there was always this kind of, we should do something together. We should build something together.

we started off with a bit of a couple of side hustles building a pitch deck tool actually for startups thinking that'd be fun it never really got off the ground and basket was something that i guess came off the back of my co-founder lex and i going there's a really interesting space in e-commerce aggregation place

And he kicked off sort of the start of it with saying he's going to build this tool for families to create wish lists for their kids. And he's got three young kids. It's really frustrating as a parent when you're trying to raise your kids with things around them that

you want them to have around them sewing toys or gifts and things like that and you get a lot of plastic crap as a parent it's a thing you're trying to reduce the amount of plastic that you just can't recycle or put anywhere or just it's just literally like plastic crazies trying to just reduce that kind of gifting disconnect between friends of the family or whoever's doing things for birthday parties and stuff so anyway we lex actually started building this tool with his wife

called Kinderlist and I came in after that's built and maybe three or four months worth and jumped in as like a CTO role to help them out building up the rest of the platform. We'd got a platform out, got it live, had a good maybe 10 something thousand users and then COVID hit and all these people suddenly were at home and couldn't really mix and mingle.

People started to use our tool for a whole bunch of other stuff than what we anticipated they'd use it for. We had people adding their household supplies, their wish list for when I get out of COVID, I'm going to go and buy this thing because it's going to be my release from the house kind of stuff.

Or it was literally people just going, I'm sick of staring at this wall in my house for days on days. I'm going to have to do something and remodel this place. So they were buying paint, they were buying furniture, they were buying all kinds of things. And it was totally unrelated to kids. Of course, we're looking at this going, surely there's an opportunity here to do something.

If people want to buy a three-seater sofa for five or six thousand pounds, why not clip the ticket? For sure, there's got to be something here we can do that helps people to find the stuff they're looking for, make that decision about, yeah, this is actually something I want.

And then, I guess, three, find a way of making the introduction so that actually people get a good deal on the thing that they're looking for.

Yeah, we built a really quick MVP in two weeks. We hired a guy from Central Europe to help us build that in native code. I think it was Objective-C at the time and Kotlin. And the MVP was purely just to get a sense of what's it like to save a link from a browser to an app and store it and then represent it, the UX around the saving process was really key.

So we wanted to make sure that we could achieve this idea of share from the browser and the sharing intent of that browsing session could be captured really well and brought into a mobile app that was there. So we built that, as I said, in two weeks. It worked really well. And it just gave us a sense of something in our hand that we could feel and go, yeah, this is a thing.

It's not massively novel at that point. There's other ways of like, you know, apps sharing to other apps and storing our data. But it gave us a sense of, yeah, we could feel how this would be if you found a product you liked and wanted to save it for later into a sort of a wishlisting tool and how fast that could be. Because that was probably the key thing is,

You're on a website and you're browsing. We don't want to get you out of that flow state. We want to keep you shopping and you want to stay shopping. So we don't want to interrupt. And so that process had to be as seamless as possible. So yeah, that was our MVP. From there, we looked at the process and the cost of building out an actual tool that would then give to the customers.

We decided that actually going the native route was going to be both costly and also fairly high maintenance for a tiny team to take on. So we took on Flutter at the time and decided we're going to build out with Flutter. That was interesting. So we'd shopped around with a bunch of agencies and asked, what are your thoughts on this?

And we'd raised a little bit of capital at that point to say, look, we're going to go and tackle this problem. And we were getting told that React was the only way to go. And yeah, we decided we'll fly in the face of convention and we'll take a stab at Flutter because we felt the community was growing pretty well and there were some opportunities.

So yeah, we dove into that and we're really actually happy we did. We felt like it's been a good decision. We've built out with, I guess, a lot of the Flutter tooling for the backend initially. Had to rewrite that quite often to make sure it stays fast and performant for all of the backend side of things. Yeah, we've crossed a lot of bridges to get to the point that we are now.