How To Turn The Idea You Had At 1 AM Into A Multi-Million Turnover Business - Nicola Whiting

and cliff thank you very much thank you yeah the words are how to take the idea that you have at 1:00 a.m. and and turn it into a multi-million company and there's I'll present it today but I just want a quick question has anybody here got a mom who's like a multimillionaire no okay then that's kind of cool because there are some ideas in this presentation that potentially only a mom would buy and I probably wouldn't have invested in in any of these but what's really interesting is that pet rock one has anybody from the 70s like okay there's a couple of us that pet rock one I I really wanted one of those and they

were three dollars 95 maybe they started in San Francisco and then I Frank I came from a council estate so my mom did get me one but she said that she couldn't she lost the packaging so so basically the the pet rock sold one and a half million units and made that guy a millionaire so you know rock in a box I would never even vested in that the the Rubik's Cube but she'll be very familiar with has sold 350 million of those things and they're 2017 retail figures were two hundred and fifty million dollars which was a forty-five percent increase on the year before plastic toy the last one I've put in tribute to the fact that my hubby

gave me a cold this week and it's the hay fever hat from Japan I'm not really sure whether that's going to make millions the jewelry's out on that but hey the fact that they got somebody to invest in it is nothing to be sneezed at puns like this will happen I apologize in advance so to actually create this kind of business is often in this or firm build it and they will come model and that is one of the two models the businesses tend to run on has anybody seen that Field of Dreams fill with Kevin Costner a couple of you so the premise is Rea a farmer in Iowa is in a coal field and he hears a voice that says if

you build it he will come and he has a vision of building a baseball field and it all works out well in the end because Shoeless Joe Jackson and some of his baseball greats turn up to play ball because it's a movie when they're ghosts because it's a movie it's actually really good movie but kind of strange the other the other model is to go with the tried and trusted module and and that might be more talked about today because in 2016 Bloomberg did a study and it said that 8 out of 10 startups fail in the first 18 months sonna sake and the top three reasons were lack of cash no plan or lack of

clear value proposition and the rest were to do with sales marketing and management I'm not going to talk to you today about raising cash but I am going to touch on all of the other things and the great thing is the figures are better now so over just over half of businesses now pass that 18-month mark which is good that's just over half 50/50 towing costs and I want to really massively increase your chances of success so that if you do have that idea at 1:00 a.m. that you might stand a chance of validating it and seeing if it's actually a goer and whether it might make use some cash so we're going to cover today all of the things that we

wish we'd known 10 years ago when when Ian sat in his bedroom and I'd like to introduce you to Ian our genius creator this is Ian he's the founder of titania and the creator of nipper studio and I'll let him just say how he came up with that idea so excuse the picture and I really are I really am still fond of the Amiga but there's no place in the modern world unfortunately it really was as a penetration tester at the time and there were a lot of things about the job that really bored me and things that are repetitive doing the same thing over and over and over again and wherever possible I'm guessing just like

yourselves I tried to use automation and script see various other things to try to consider eight what I was doing I turned it for a job one day and they gave me 30 configurations and Cisco devices and at that state is like hell no am I going to go through 30 configurations manually and there really wasn't a lot of great tools out there that can actually help me as a penetration tester get the kind of information that I wanted out those conflicts so really titania started and nipper started because I thought no I'm actually going to spend the time instead of a third of a day for each device kind of going for it line by line trying to

work out where there may be security issues I thought no I'm going to automate this thing and and start letting the computers work for me rather than me work for computers so that's what I did and dipper started off very simply as a PHP script many many years ago really embarrassing but it was really quick for me to just cut something together obviously it's very different now and there's a whole team aligned well pass back so Ian founded the company literally in his bedroom when somebody came and offered him some cash and he went oh I need a vehicle to accept this cash now what was really interesting is before he'd done that he run it in terms of please give us

donations to help build this thing and make it better and in two years do you run it in that model how many donations did you have what so there was a really good reason that we had to go commercial to buy people to help us build this so it's just a thousand pounds well that's less later so so essentially we had to go commercial to actually make it into what it today so this is our Walt Disney and as you know Walt Disney was a massive creator now I'm married to this man and I'm just going to say that before I say that Ian's brain is like a pinball machine it's constant ideas I spoken to

some of the people in this room today I know you're the same I also saved lot two reball generators because they just keep coming out sometimes I'm pushing them back in at the other end because they're not quite ready he once woke me up at 1:00 a.m. while asleep to tell me about a tissue app I'm not even going to go further into that conversation but essentially in his Walt Disney I'm his Roy Disney so when you are looking to build a company one of the things that you want to identify is are you the idea creator or are you the integrator and poker of balloons with pins I'm the CEO of the crew so Ian will

often come up to me with an idea and I'll go not sure that's really ready for the market yet which is my code for put it back in the box and hatchets some more so I've done quite a lot of stuff in the mentoring space may need for building businesses and I work with the D IT and cyber accelerators and I do quite a lot of speaking and writing on the future of things because that's where I am I'm not a technologist I'm a strategist so this I put in because it was one of our best days ever when we went to go meet the Queen so Ian built it I helped build the company and we

both therefore got to meet the Queen which was really cool and that was for the innovation that he created because he was the first in the world to create it which was really really fabulous and what we're really lucky to say is the in building some of that stuff and in the fact that Ian's mates rule pen testers and pen testers like to introduce cool things to people and they all go to really big companies because they're the people that will pay pen testers we were also really lucky to build a fantastic range of clients and these are just some of the ones that will let us tell you about them so how did we get clients like these

aliens already mentioned that he didn't want to spend like 15 days and then all of the report writing to do his first iteration but essentially why we grew was because we added value and we help our clients get to their goals quicker and this is the sort of start of what you'll need to look at to see whether the idea that you've had at 1 a.m. has got legs for other people you know whether they might be interested in getting value off you in exchange for cash from them so one example recently socially the products developed was we went to a military base and we spoke to some of their auditing teams there and I

think they said how long did it take what their uses so they were using spreadsheets to do their audits and it took them about a month I believe to do one base and now it takes them less than a week a few days so that's the kind of time scale and it isn't that we're losing people you know there's a people shortage it's with taking you know you go to the cyber generals but you shouldn't be filling sandbags or doing housekeeping so this is the way of releasing some of that stuff that's essential for pouring and automating it so when you want to test your value there's going to be a lot of book things

here I know you'll be able to get the slides afterwards but you may want to open your Amazon page now so the one that I would recommend to anybody is called the strategizes theories it comes in a really cool book like that if any of you want to Nick any of these later please come and just help yourself because these these books are a fortune you probably only need a few pages but essentially what it does is it lets you test your concept by putting yourself in a potential clients position so the page looks a bit like this so what you're looking at is what is this person trying to do well I need to

be able to harden my configurations on firewall switches on Reuters what are their fears it's a Cisco device and my money trained on juniper or I haven't got time whatever it that might be you know what are their needs to do it faster to do it consistently yadda yadda yadda and all of your time should be spent on that right hand side really unpacking it just to give you an idea we titania go off with the leadership team once a year from probably about four or five days to just a you know in hotel or a site and we just get out of our business so we can work on the business we spent one

and a half days doing this because we do it every now and again just to refresh what are people still looking for and have their needs changed and then from that you then create your product so we were really lucky because ian was the first customer of the product so he built what he wanted and give you an idea of what that might look like if you were say creating something for a startup accelerator you can see if you were starting a business bearing in mind cash is one of the problems what are you going to want so you're not going to want to know you're gonna want to know what's my rents going to be if I have to

get a little office and you want to have that as consistent right you're gonna want to know what are maybe an employee costs gonna be you're gonna worry about funding you're going to worry about how do i market stuff i've never done that before how do I sell this now Ian actually worked for a pen testing company while he built his business so he took his salary and he paid somebody else to develop another product to longside so his first hire was another developer and his third hire was somebody to answer the phones because these people kept phoning him up and interrupting his coding time to try and give him money which was really inconvenient it's really inconvenient so

I was the third employee sorry that the third sort of first second first salesperson employee and and essentially I then went oh okay what happens if we actively answer these things and properly speak to people and as it turns out it resulted in rapid growth as you can imagine so it was like 45 percent plus growth which was great and then we built some more people in as well so essentially that's the the process you can see if you were starting a business that quiet space you know Harvard of accelerators you can see how they're starting to do position in there so what this series helps you do is identify what problem you're solving how you're going to make

your clients lives better what value you're going to add and then on top of that it's who are they buying into so let's say you probably any of you like to do this let's say you're starting up a hairdresser or a coffee shop are you going to be unique on the high street no but do you have a preferred one yes because there will be something that that place has that the other people don't have even if it's the guy behind the counter is just like you and like your like his t-shirts I've never heard teachers so you need to be able to find your unique thing and your unique thing maybe nobody else in the planet is doing

this and I have a lot of people come into those accelerators going I've come up with this well I've been into University and I've worked in this thing and I've come up with this nobody else in the planet is doing this and myself and the other mentors will go yeah actually there's probably about three other people that are doing this in America or Australia because it's a global world now so it's very rare that you're going to come up with something that is really truly unique so what you need to do is be able to unpack that the strongest organizations trust me are the ones where they've really worked out what their vision is and they can

communicate that I have sat in a lot of rooms where people have spent 15 minutes trying to explain to me what value they're going to give those clients if that's their elevator pitch the person's left the room and shut the doors on them electronically so another thing in my top book list from Amazon would be start with why not because Simon sites I neck does that lovely bullseye thing and it has why in the middle and everything else but because what it helps you do is say what is going to keep me motivated to go home every night and keep coding rather than going out then to the pub and having pizza because you know that's the choice

or the latest game comes out it's like what's going to be more important than that to me and then potentially what's going to be more important to my team because if you want a load of people to join you and you're on a shoestring budget then this is going to be something that is kind of exciting that they're going to want to be part of that they're going to have want to work late into the night with you together on and that's really important and then obviously how does it benefit your potential clients now this is a kind of little bit of a paraphrase of something here the Wright brothers and being a woman in technology I kind of like this

story and I'll tell you why in a minute but I'm guessing everybody here knows who the Wright brothers are so anybody know their first names just shout it out Orville and Wilbur absolutely fantastic well done anybody know the guy on the left is good guess that guy is Samuel Pierpoint Longley and he was the guy that's supposed to develop the flight so he was at the head of the Smithsonian at the time which is a very prestigious organization he was a well-regarded engineer and and he had the backing of the War Department which is a bit like being backed by Bill Gates now and he had a chief engineer who was the equivalent of Tesla he had all the press

following him he was the guy that was supposed to do flight but what he was chasing was being first to success and his name be forever remembered in history and obviously none of you know who he is which is good the Wright brothers did it because they wanted to connect people and that means two blokes have a bike shop in Dayton Ohio where the people actually did that job and the difference between those two was the vision that they managed to talk to their fellow townspeople with because they were all in on it too and the bit that I really loved it's twofold one this is what Bill Gates said about them they created the single greatest

cultural force since the invention of writing and the aeroplane became the first worldwide web bringing people languages ideas and values together that always makes me just a little bit choked up because you know you just think it actually yes that was the first time people could actually travel easily and now every day people can get on a plane for you know a reasonable amount of money and travel across the world the other part that I love is a woman called Sarah Sarah Wright who was the daughter of a wheelwright and sat in her father's workshop learning and the engineering trade and Sarah was their mother and their father was a bishop and he went overseas and he brought back this little

model plane which inspired them but it was Sarah that taught them engineering and it was Sarah that they spent all that time at the feet of who worked with them on the plane and probably everybody's heard of Sarah about as much as they've heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley so this is the other thing that you will have to learn about because if you have a thing and you need to be able to define that thing then the strategizes series is really great but that will just tell you maybe how to talk about it technically and actually that's not how people by so one wasn't as well as a woman in technology I'm autistic and what that

has meant for me is from the age of 16 I've studied psychology because I'm a Vulcan in a roomful of humans I didn't get how you guys worked so unless you're narrow diverse in which case you'd probably completely understand how I feel sometimes but essentially I did a lot of study from the age of 16 and there weren't that many books then you know it was maybe how to impress and influence people by Dale Carnegie but what I discovered was really cool so we have the Windows XP of brains in fact it's not even that good it's it's Vista we have Vista as an operating system and what's interesting is that Vista operating system is more predictable

than you think and that you can learn its operating language now I'm gonna talk to you just for a little bit about that stuff but I want to ask you to kind of make a deal with me because if you do learn this it's properly ninja level marketing but you can influence people a lot with these kind of things I know social engineering is very popular but this is the same thing but in marketing terms and to me this is really important because the difference between influence and manipulation is who you're doing it for if you are trying to help your client by influencing them to buy something that you know will help them its influences

it's a good thing it's a win-win if you've got some kind of back of the car thing that you know doesn't work and you've created they pretend they're moe that is manipulation so please do not listen if you're the second set of people is that okay I'm just gonna obviously you'll carry on listening cuz if you're the second set of people pay no attention at all and you learn all this really cool stuff so logic versus emotions you've been sitting out for a little why would you like or just stand stand up so I'm here talk to you very quickly who knows who Spock is awesome he's a Vulcan for those people who don't know

what he is so he's based on logic okay Vulcans how Vulcan but essentially this is how I feel a lot of the time logical on the outside loads of emotion inside but essentially he will try and make things make decisions based on logic and he will get loads of facts and he will weigh the options and he will make things like that and then you've got chimp guy on the right that's they've got feeling it would be McCoy to his Spock the one that is basically always going to take shortcuts and will believe fake news now if you think that you mainly mainly make decisions that are quite logical and that you'll be reasoned in your

decisions please sit down now if you think you mainly make your decisions based on gut feeling instinct please sit down okay now I use the word mainly here so the rest of you think you're somehow perfectly balanced human beings which is really interesting but I'll let you sit down as well it's really it's an interesting thing because in every talk I've done except for for ones where they're in psychology places most people do the same thing and I'm going to tell you a little bit about neuroscience which i think is really interesting that little pshape thing on the left you're a Magdala is kind of where your chimp lives and the frontal lobe that's what let's let's

say that's where your Spock lives and the really interesting thing for me is that all of your senses your sights your sound hit what you touch everything goes to the Magdala first that it's faster and it makes the decisions for you before your logical mind can even engage so technically it's really quite hard for you to make a logical decision that you haven't already made at some level emotionally now some people go really I'm not logical I'm pretty sure I'm logical know who's everybody's gone into a phone shop right and bought a phone yeah did you pick it up and if it was heavier you thought that's probably good quality I think yes you did didn't you

yeah you did okay so that's what your chimp that's that's a decision on an operating system and a holic customer experience based on weight no I love stuff like that it's like okay I think this is obviously already better quality because it's got a really flat battery on the back of it now so probably improved its whole user experience but essentially the reason that 150,000 year old brain works like that is let's say a mugger run into the ring with a knife it doesn't want you strategically working out the risks that they're going to be successful it once you add the door and running and we operate a bit like that still so that's why some people find

public speaking really hard because you are on your own in front of a bunch of people that potentially could be adversarial and it doesn't matter what your logical mind says that's what your chimp is doing yeah so we make quite a lot of modern-day decisions based on primitive brain types now what does that mean in terms of marketing well it means there are certain things like scent a preference like anchoring and all those kind of things term got time to go into fully here that you can learn and that methods of persuasion book talks about all of them so there is a reason why you often get three options you know when you go to a

checkout three options and one just seems too good to be true marketing or that lovely one where they say oh you know it's going to be a really reasonable price it's not like it's going be a million quid it's only gonna be 150 thousand pounds anchoring so there is a whole heap of stuff that is very easy to learn and when you learn it not only you're better equipped to help promote your own product but you're also better equipped to understand what people are trying to do when they either influence or manipulate you now what does that mean in terms of running a company where you don't want to manipulate people or you want to build trust with people now

you've all bought stuff yeah have you ever bought anything unless you really had to because you had no other choice know whether I'm net that was from an untrustworthy person where they make your skin crawl would you buy something from that person no thank you thank you for the big shake because I don't recognise microexpression so that's really helpful so you don't you don't buy stuff from people you don't trust so why do we do things like referrals and test sites and trials and testimonials well it's actually because it helps her show credibility so Trust involves credibility is this personal I'm going to buy something from credible how interest is a really interesting one if you can't see what's in it for the

other person does it make you feel slightly uncomfortable yeah the amount of companies I've been to where they kind of go ah this is just with just so generous it's just all for you there's nothing in it for us at all and you go yeah what's your top it's a no that isn't how it works is it you know that that isn't true so there is nothing wrong at all in saying what's in it for me is this big pot of money that you're going to give me or what's in it for me is that you're going to give me a big pot of money and we'll do this if you're a referral site it's absolutely fine and that's how it

should work it should be a win-win scenario and then the really cool thing which that marketing stuff will help you with is the communication part now our industry really loves to make up new words and then if your customer can't keep up with the new words they're dumb right no that's not the case if your customer can't understand what's in it for them who is the person that's going to miss out it's not the customer so the communication part is really important because if they don't get that you're credible because you can't communicate it to them and if they don't get what's in it for them and what's in it for you then the trust won't happen either so

that it's a triangle for a reason you actually need all three things so if you want a credible reputation do not be this guy I think I saw I took that picture in post I know I didn't so this is the guy of the shiny disco balls and the smoke and mirrors and you don't want to be sold to like that I don't want to be sold to like that there is a reason that people walk around with bingo cards at the big shows you've all had them so really really simple for sales you treat others like you want to be treated and you build relationships now if you haven't had experience of sales that's

fine like Ian hired somebody in if you build a business you will probably end up hiring somebody in but you'll probably in the early stages also have to go to those meetings now you learn coding right or you learn how to do whatever your current role is this is the same it is a learnable skill let me know you may not end up being you know PT Barnum hopefully not but you can learn these skills and a really good shortcut to learning what a trusted adviser looks like is having a look at some of the stuff by Charles H green so essentially the reason that we have grown so fast is we spend a lot of time

sitting in listening to our clients to give you one night one example of that which I can share the military one comma so when the military first became our clients they used to spend you know about eight hundred dollars per site roughly there was a row of about three sites that started applying myself we couldn't really quite work out and then we found out that it was this one guy that was going to different sites and saying hey you should try this thing and he introduced it was really really cool and then he we spoke to him Annie and we said we've got some new stuff coming up he said we'll come talk to us about it

Who am I he's spending one and a half thousand dollars so we spent probably about five thousand dollars flying out and we learned what it was they were doing and we improved the tall the last order from the US military single order was 1.7 million dollars so this works listening to what people want and then making sure that you can build that Plus what they might need next is how we've grown our company and it's also the easiest way to grow referrals is to do what you say and deliver on your promises so to smash things I haven't really talked about the running a business part the how do you measure things and the metrics and everything

else the sales are marketing if you don't get that right all of the other things can be almost a moot point but it's amazing how many people trip up because they don't know how to manage those things they don't know how to measure their people or how to get the best out of their people so a business framework that is really really awesome is one called traction and it covers everything not in detail it's like a buffet of what you might need to run a business but it will help you through ten three and one year planning which if you want to get an investor and if you do want to get any investor I'd

recommend the best slide deck ever it's like ten slides to how to how to build an investment slide deck it helps you with streamlining your peoplemetrics so understanding what people are good at and then getting the best and it helps you manage by numbers so that's so that you're not running on do I like this guy because I went out with pizza last and Joseph fabulous guy and then you find it and actually it hasn't delivered the project so traction is a really great business framework but it doesn't create great managers it helps those managers thrive know the kind of out of time but we I will try and answer some questions but we will be around and

essentially there's the book list that what the only one that I haven't covered is because that's all about selling stuff and building a business and how to run it the bit that's about the people is first break all the rules and that is quite honestly one of the best books I've ever read on managing people it's done by Gallup so it's a pollster and they assess out of all of the most successful businesses and the most successful teams and the most successful managers within those teams what were they doing and they came up with twelve things that people need in order and the first two are really simple do I know what's expected of me and have I got the

tools to do my job and you'd be amazed how many businesses don't get that bit right oh you might be working for some of them in which case no not amazed at all but anyway thank you very much have we got time for a little question or two awesome so if you've got any questions of us please feel free to chuck them this way this way she's program many Kaplan people in my life he could sell I know yes one of them was really charming you're obnoxious that he was the other one was charming in time yes but I had lots of trying people give you answers Jim Jimmy to see what it is that they're

doing differently yes it's normally in the delivery area so I know a lot of very slick people that then don't deliver and they may get through the door a couple of times but then when you don't get what they promised you then it tends to wear off quite quite fast and there are people that I will go out again and again with for lunch but I will never buy from them so you know just but there's a whole heap of stuff and I'm happy to to cover that one to one because that's a big thing to unpack any I think there was a question at that so yeah so if you haven't got any customers at all the

easiest way to show credibility which may or may not be possible for you is to show that it does what it says on the can so if you can do a trial if you can do a demo type thing if you haven't got any customers there's something in it for you might be the first reference site so it may be that you go do you know what I'm so confident this is going to work for you that I can see that you're going to have to invest some time to test it with me I will invest my time and product for you for free while we test it and then if you're happy with it

in the second year you carry on and pay for it but would you be a reference site because you know honesty is the best policy because at some stage they're going to realize that you're new and shiny you know but that would be a very typical way of doing that providing that you can you can fund it it's that cool bingo great sorry okay so for me I have a notebook so when ideas pop into my head I write them down and I then don't do anything I'm just kind of brain dumping into this book and what I do is they can go back and review it later after a period of time has gone quite often I'll

go yeah that's a stupid idea I live scribbling a whole day but then there'll be some which actually I'll go and this is worth investing more time into and going on I think it's worth having that gap just so that you have time to come back down to earth cos sometimes when you have these these things they then I actually based in the real world and actually that's a really good point because remember the emotional versus logical that you're gonna have an emotional response to your own idea and think it's brilliant and as you haven't got a team to stop the groupthink happening you're your own group that that gap very much helps you engage that

logical thought processes yeah and it also helps me out as well because I know Nicola spoke a little bit about being bullied is need with me being what it's kind of I come up with these things that I think a great ideas if I immediately told her she didn't need big oh well how we're going to do that has I can the way stuff and then in my head that's a negative thing that then goes may feel a bit sad that I suddenly do so the process of me having a notebook and writing it all down in there before actually helps me out as well with you were kind of right and that's what happened with titania because there was

nobody else in the marketplace that somebody could go to so people were really forgiving you know if they were like oh this this is weird I wasn't quite expecting that and they didn't have anybody to phone so they just worked it out didn't they the kind of did that but the thing is a really good product does kind of sell itself in if it does what it says on the can and it meets your needs and it's a adds value and you've got cash there of course you'll buy it but will you buy it the next row in the next row and the next row after that because there's it's not a customer it's a

paying prospect so your customer is everybody else's prospect for the thing that is like your thing and if you're not there supporting them and making sure they get best value out of it somebody will come along and it may be somebody with a shiny disco ball but they're busy talking to them so you're paying prospect maybe lost so yes I'd say you know when when I started up titania I created a website itself but what I thought was useful information on the website in solids overall and the first few customers that we had with people that had used Google and just playing the website and then work back themselves off my techy speak what it

was the product actually did and and then find it useful who came and bought the software I think if we had carried on doing that what would have happened was someone else but I said well that's a really neat idea they're doing it badly will create swim it's similar and market it better and then titanium will just disappeared off because we have been able taking muscle one else it's almost like that's happened before B - max VHS so it so having a great product is great for getting a good start but actually and the marketing needs to come and capture that has been extremely informative fantastic [Applause]