Startup founders have to wear many hats – and chief among them is fundraising.
Mike Rhodes, founder and CEO of ConsultMyApp, has a solution. “I’ve seen companies obsess about funding too early on rather than focus on the importance of building something amazing first,” he tells TechBlast.
“It doesn’t apply to every company, but if you’re prepared to put the hard yards in and grow organically, you can achieve [great things] without taking external funding.
“Funding is great and might make things easier, but building a solid, profitable company with a great service or product first is much more important. The rest can follow.”
£10k savings
Rhodes, a data security specialist, founded CMA in 2016 with just £10,000 in his bank account. Having worked for Silicon Valley startups, he had a good feel for the app landscape and was able to identify gaps in the app strategies of even the world’s largest brands.
He has taken the business from a one-man band during its first 12 months to 40 staff today serving some of the world’s biggest brands including O2, Deliveroo, King.com, Tide, Virgin, Trainline and Pure Gym.
It focuses on three main areas: implementing app management, growing apps and engaging users. It helps brands to build out strategies, design paid media budget plans and implement and optimise app campaigns to drive the highest quality traffic at the lowest possible cost.
Bootstrapped to this day, it recently signed up US automotive giant General Motors, its largest client to date.
“This is extremely exciting for the business,” says Rhodes. “To have such a historical and established company like GM trust our expertise feels like a ‘pinch yourself’ moment.
“When it comes to international expansion, we may need to consider investment; but because the business is highly profitable and rapidly growing, this opens up other avenues for funding that don’t require the release of equity from the business.”
The hard yards
In the last 12 months alone, CMA nearly doubled its EBIT and the company grew by 1.7x. Rhodes admits that building the business single-handedly was a huge challenge.
“For the first 12 months, I was very much a one-man band, servicing clients and trying to secure new business at the same time,” he reflects. “At that point, it was incredibly hard to pay the rent, let alone gain market awareness!
“However, thanks to a great network of connections – and a few companies willing to take a chance on a startup – I eventually managed to establish some more long-term contracts and to employ people into the business to support growth.
“However, in the first few years, awareness was very much down to existing clients and word-of-mouth.”
He says the key was to be flexible, dedicate time to identifying new business opportunities rather than just focusing 100% on delivery and, most importantly, to adapt the business model from one-off projects to ongoing retainers.
Gherkin
The company has even moved into one of the City of London’s most iconic modern buildings. “Moving into the Gherkin has been an experience to say the least!” he says.
“Coming off the back of the pandemic, we hope to start to fill the space with talent and are looking forward to making the office somewhere that employees want to come to.”
CMA already works across 21 countries, with clients based in the UK, US, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Sweden, Gibraltar, Thailand, South Africa and Cyprus.