Acquisition Unlock: €210m in 5 Years

And in order to get all of your bills, you needed to log into your phone provider to get your phone bill.

You'd go to your bank, online banking to get your bank statement. And that was just bit of a pain in the ass. So we said, what if we had one app on your phone which could take a feed from all of these providers and essentially consolidate all of your online bills and statements into one easy to use app.

Now ultimately, it was an absolutely terrible idea and it totally, it, it, it. It has a lot. I mean, intuitively, you know, I'm like, yes, I have that problem.

I have all these sites I need to log in to all, you know, some of them, you know, sort of not sort of utility businesses running these horrible websites. So, you know, would love to have a centralized feed of this stuff. Yeah, people still say that to me to this day and say, is now not a better time to give that a crack?

But it, but genuinely it's a terrible idea because it solves your problem as a consumer. And that's the angle that we approached it from.

We were trying to solve a problem that we had, but believe it or not, we never really considered who owned the problem actually and who was going to pay us for this service. Because whilst you might say it'd be really convenient to have one app where I'll get all of my household bills, you probably wouldn't pay for that. Right. At least very much. You wouldn't pay very much for it.

And so we were trying to build a model whereby the utilities and the banks would pay us. And our hypothesis was that because it was so difficult to manage all of these different online accounts that you have, if you had one place to register, these companies would experience higher adoption for digital billing because this was made easier. And that was our whole hypothesis.

And they want. So that was their incentive.

They, in theory, they would really like this path to converting more of their customers to digital billing. Yes. Because it's cheaper than sending bills through the mail. Yep, yep. Boy, will that come back to play a role.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But we thought this was such a good idea, so revolutionary that we shouldn't tell anybody about it. Right. Because somebody will steal it.

So we went and built this product in stealth mode effectively. And then once we had a minimum viable product, we basically started talking to the utilities and the banks. And they were like, well, we'd never use this because we don't want anybody going to your app.