A telecoms business that is solving the problem of bad signal and expensive roaming has grown six-fold after a stinging rebuke from Dragons’ Den star Peter Jones.
Millions of viewers watched Honest Mobile’s co-founders Andy Aitken and Josh Mihill walk into the Den seeking £110k for a 1 per cent stake in their business.
The duo eventually accepted two offers totalling £165k from Steven Bartlett and Deborah Meaden but only after Jones had chastised them for only having 8,000 customers.
“I think that’s poor,” he claimed. ‘You don’t have anything here to invest in.”
However, Aitken and Mihill, who have been best friends since school, have had the last laugh after growing their customer base nearly six-fold to more than 50,000 since the episode was filmed last summer.
Honest Mobile’s co-founders Andy Aitken and Josh Mihill on Dragons’ Den
Honest Mobile’s turnover has increased over the same time from £1m to nearly £4m after making more sales on the night Dragons’ Den was screened than in their first three years of trading.
The company has also raised £6m in investment and was most recently valued at £17m.
“It was staggering,” admitted Aitken, a father-of-two, who revealed the company’s online traffic went from 22 people to 100,000 as soon as the show was aired.
Dynamite
In an exclusive interview with BusinessCloud, CEO Aitken compared appearing on Dragons’ Den to handling dynamite.
“Dynamite can send you any which way,” he said. “I think there’s a much bigger risk associated with going on than people maybe think and we had a great experience.
“Yes, Peter Jones didn’t like what we presented and that’s alright. We’ve grown 6x in the last year. You win some, you lose some but that could have been the end of it.
“That could have been the clip at the end of the episode and it would have been terrible for business.”
The pair also revealed that the offers of £55k from Meaden for 1.5 per cent of the company and Bartlett’s £110k for 3 per cent have still to be finalised. Aitken said discussions were ‘still ongoing’.
Approached in Instagram
The pair’s journey into the Den started when they were first approached on Instagram by a BBC producer asking if they wanted to appear on the show.
Explaining their decision to accept Mihill said: “It was a mixture of different elements. Getting the exposure was definitely part of it. Getting the investment, the cash, would have been nice and getting the support from the Dragons would open doors for us.”
The Lincolnshire schoolmates, who founded Honest Mobile in 2019 to make mobile fairer, smarter, and cleaner, entered TV’s most famous Den last summer and pitched for around two hours.
“They take your watch off you so you lose sense of time,” admitted Aitken. “We’re about giving people access to the best mobile signal possible wherever they are in the world.
“We always knew we were going to get two weeks’ notice of when the episode was going to air, if it was going to air.
“The really exciting part of the project was you were about to get on national TV.
“What you don’t know was what the impact was going to be on the night.”
After giving a polished pitch Jones, who has appeared in every series of Dragons’ Den since it was first aired in 2005, quickly waded in.
The Dragon had been a target of the 36-year-old pair having previously sold his Generation Telecom business to Vodafone.
“There’s no doubt that you’re here for me,” Jones told them. “I’m just a little bit concerned about the size of where you’ve got to. Why are you at 8,000 customers? To put this into perspective when I started (Generation Telecom) in year two we ended up with 46k-50k subscribers.”
Aitken said: “It’s almost harder to persuade people who are inside the industry.
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“It was quite brutal but my job is pitching. I’d spent a lot of time in the run-up to Dragons’ Den pitching other investors. You get pretty thick thinned to people saying no. You speak to 100 investors and one says yes, if that.
“I’ve had a lot of no’s in my time and some are more dramatic than others. It’s par for the course. It’s like the first time we put adverts on Facebook and someone said ‘this is crap’.
“I remember that very first Facebook comment we got and I felt traumatised. We now get thousands of Facebook comments a day and we read every single one of them.”
Jones quickly told the pair he wouldn’t be investing but fellow Dragons Meaden and Bartlett did make offers – although neither deal has finalised yet.
“It was really exciting,” said Aitken. “You don’t go into the Den not wanting to get an offer.”
Mihill added: “Deborah gave us a grilling on our sustainability credentials on the Den so to get her approval when she’s the Queen of green was fantastic.”
Pivot
The entrepreneurs have pivoted their London-based business since the programme was recorded and their main product is now called Smart Sim.
On the morning after the episode was aired the company did some gorilla marketing around Waterloo Station, which ended with Frankie the Honest Mobile mascot being escorted off the premises.
Mihill said: “It was quite surreal seeing people recognise us and the Sim cards the next morning. It demonstrated the impact we had the night before and that exposure we got.”
Honest Mobile currently employs 23 people and raised £1.2m earlier this year in a crowdfunding campaign – smashing their original target of £500k.