How I got given £20k off the back of a blog post
Here’s the story of how I got given £20,000 to work on the first year of Sanctus – it’s a story worth sharing.
In February 2016 I wrote a blog post called mental health in startups, it got 10,000 views in 2 days and I got over 500 personal messages about mental health.
Post-blog post was a bit of a blur; I wrote in The Guardian shortly afterwards and started getting asked to speak on panels and give talks about mental health in the startup world. It all happened very fast.
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Clearly mental health was a pretty huge problem and something people passionately cared about.
I was still right in the midst of my own journey with mental health, still feeling pretty raw and anxious a lot of the time.
I was working for Doug Scott, running his Angel Investment Syndicate and making early stage investment deals happen.
I told Doug I was going to focus on mental health in my spare time, so I kept writing about mental health through a blog and newsletter. I was getting other people to share their stories on my new fangled website https://mentalhealthinstartups.com. I even got Brad Feld to share his story with me.
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Project Karma, as I called it, was my passion project, I wasn’t getting ahead of myself and I didn’t want to rush into anything too soon — I was still pretty burnt from my last company.
Chatbots were the latest buzzword in tech…
I went about faking a mental health health chatbot called Sanctus. I got 50 people’s phone numbers who wanted to be part of the experiment, bought a new sim card and set up a Sanctus whatsapp.
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I was basically pretending to be a chatbot and broadcasting messages like; “How’s your day going? Rate how you feel with an emoji.” I didn’t really know what I was doing but a few people were responding.
One of the few people who was receiving my Sanctus chatbot messages was mills, founder of ustwo.
I’d known mills for a while and he’d been letting me use space at ustwo for work.
One night I was staying late in the office after work playing around with Sanctus the chatbot and mills messaged me back.
We chatted over whatsapp about how passionate I was about mental health and he asked me a question…
“What would it take for you to go full baller on this?”
To go “full baller” I needed cash, I was living in London with expensive rent and was enjoying my job for Doug, but to go all out and try and make something happen with a spare phone and the name Sanctus just wasn’t feasible. I had no idea what Sanctus even was.
Before I knew it I was meeting Mills at 7.30am at Shoreditch House and talking about what I wanted to do in mental health. I was just a ball full of energy at this point, I wanted to “make mental health cool”, “change the perception of mental health”, “treat mental health like physical health”, “remove the stigma” and “build a brand that defined mental health & fitness.”
Yet at this point, the product was still a fake chatbot on a broken iPhone 4.
Another meeting with Mills in The Ace Hotel a couple of weeks later and I was talking about my new found vision for mental health gyms on the high street. I wanted to start off by running mental fitness classes for startup founders then build up a real physical business.
I think I was a tiny bit more coherent than our first meeting and the idea for a mental health gym felt a bit more legitimate.
After breakfast, mills got out his phone and wired me £10,000 on his mobile banking app, from him and Sinx (his business partner).
I had no business plan, no Ltd company and no product. I had nothing.
But, I now had £10k to play with.
I did also still have a job.
So that all happened on a Friday.
By Monday I was in Lichfield walking around a park telling Doug what had happened with mills & sinx— I was handing in my notice.
I’d worked for Doug for about 9 months and he’d been amazing to me, I’d learned a lot from him and had a lot to thank him for.
In what seemed like a no-brainer for him, Doug offered to do the same as mills.
Suddenly, I had £20k in the bank and time to figure things out.
Suddenly, I was founding a company again and this time, working on something I was truly passionate about.
I’d been backed to the hilt by two people I massively respected. Two people that had not just built great businesses, but were also genuinely good people too.
I couldn’t believe it and still can’t in many ways. If I’m honest, I didn’t understand what they saw in me, why they’d backed me so much.
Shutting down my last company was a huge blow to my confidence and this was a huge boost.
After matchchat I didn’t feel like I was good enough to build anything again, but Doug & mills thought I was and that made me believe in myself too.
Neither of them cared about valuation, return or terms — they just believed in me and that I was doing something good for the world.
I suppose it’s time to say thank you to both of them now. Thank you for backing me when I had nothing, because now Sanctus is something, to a lot of people.
So from me, the Sanctus team and the Sanctus community.
Thank you x
p.s to all the people in startups reading this — this isn’t supposed to be one of those fundraising blog posts that tells you how it should be done, it’s just how things happened for me. Carve your own path.