Growth Podcast with Emmie Faust

In the beginning it was just you and your idea, and maybe a co-founder. This isolation doesn’t just expose you to loneliness, it also makes you vulnerable to your own personal blind spots. It’s crucial to add the right people to your team at the right stage (in return for the right incentive) - it can make or break your start-up.

In this week’s podcast I interviewed Andrew Waters, co-founder of Zanda, a recruitment firm that supports start-up founders or VCs with senior hires as they look to scale.

When Selin Yigitbasi-Ducker began looking for investment back in January 2020, she had no idea that a global pandemic was about to tip the odds heavily against her. And yet despite challenging economic conditions, Selin was able to raise 150% of the investment she needed to develop her social environmental impact collaboration platform.

In this week’s podcast episode I’m interviewing Selin to talk about the decisions, and her tenacity, that led to her securing £225,000 in funding in March 2020.

Hannah Forbes is a crowdfunding expert and founder of The Funding Crowd, helping businesses raise investment through alternative methods.

Hannah fell in love with the start-up environment during the final year of her engineering degree, and now works at the University of Cambridge in the Center of Alternative Finance, and is doing a PhD in crowdfunding and crowdsourcing at the University of Liverpool.

In this week’s podcast, Hannah and I discuss the two most popular alternative fundraising routes for startups, equity and rewards-based, when to use them, and how to maximize your chances of a successful campaign.

Zaffrin O'Sullivan is the founder of Five Dot Botanics, a minimal ingredients skincare brand, launched in July 2019.

After initially being turned down for an investment opportunity, she successfully secured funding on the second attempt - pitching while heavily pregnant with her third child.

I invited her on the podcast to talk about her business journey so far, including how the delay in securing funding actually resulted in perfect timing for her brand to make a disruptive impact in the tightly-packed beauty industry.

Julia Elliott Brown is CEO and founder of Enter the Arena and a serial entrepreneur, with more than 20 years experience in the start-up industry. She raised £2 million for her last business, Upper Street, a fashion tech brand. And now she helps female founders secure the investment they need to scale.

I see so many start-ups and scale-ups wasting time and money on marketing activities, advertising and social media that’s not working.

It’s because they don’t have a plan, and they haven’t got the basics right.

So I invited Janine Coombes, a strategic marketing coach and consultant onto the podcast. She helps small businesses with their marketing strategy, ensuring their offer is positioned as a must-have, not a nice-to-have.

Is your start-up about to start looking for investment?

David Turney is a lawyer who specialises in working with start-ups and scale-ups.

In this episode we talk about how to best navigate your first fundraise.

Reach out and connect with people. Pick up the phone. Now is a great time to start fostering relationships, support, collaborate and connect

Six out of 10 businesses in the UK don’t make it to the five year mark - evidence of a huge gap in leadership skills in this country.

Rebecca Morley is a leadership coach working with entrepreneurs and businesses that are scaling up. In this episode we talk about how to get the right kind of support at the right phase.

In this mini-episode, I talk about 4 key questions to ask yourself that are super relevant at the moment.