Matt Ford is the CEO and co-founder of Sidekick, a digital wealth management platform for professionals looking to invest their savings.
Founded in 2022, Sidekick is a platform aimed at founders, tech workers, lawyers and similar professionals who want to invest beyond picking stocks but don’t know what the next steps are.
The London-based startup raised £8.5m in June this year, in a combined debt and equity round.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, Ford explains how lots of startups aren’t solving a scalable VC-backable problem, reveals what he would do differently when launching a company, and shares mindfulness tips for avoiding burnout.
1. What one thing do you wish you’d done differently when launching your company?
Matt Ford: Sidekick isn’t the first startup I’ve built, so I’ve taken a lot of the lessons learned in my first venture to avoid certain pitfalls the next time around. Back in 2014, I founded a money management business, Pariti. From the outside looking in, an exit to Tandem Bank looked like a resounding success, but the truth is that we struggled to raise enough money to be competitive.
Another operator in the market had raised significantly more than us, and the capital that we did have meant that we couldn’t make senior enough hires to de-risk the process. I was in my 20s, hadn’t done this before, and had never raised money. We secured half a million pounds, which meant we had limited runway.
While this was a limitation, it did also foster creativity amongst the team because we had to solve problems in order to survive.
I’m now able to look back with more experience and say I’ve avoided the same mistake. Sidekick secured a £3.3m pre-seed investment in 2022 with great investors including Octopus Ventures, Seedcamp and Semantic. Thanks to the efforts of a well-versed team, we’ve gone on to close a £4.5m seed round this year and launch our flagship equities product and high-yield savings account.
2. What advice would you give to a first-time founder?
MF: There’s no singular piece of advice that can lead to success in the startup world, but there are characteristics that a founder must have – or needs to learn – that will be of huge benefit to the individual. Setbacks are inevitable, and you learn very soon that there is only so much within your control.
Your attitude and how you show up, is one of these. Startups aren’t just hard, they are VERY hard. You must be persistent, you need to be resilient, and critically, you need an absolute focus on the problem you are trying to solve – and more specifically your customer’s problem.
There’s a big difference between how you view the problem, and the problem your customer has. Your sole working purpose must be to fix that problem for that individual.
3. What’s a common mistake that you see founders make?
MF: Between my time at Tandem, and before launching Sidekick, I stepped into the venture capital world, joining Mouro Capital as a partner. Mouro backed entrepreneurs in the financial services space, and I’m a big believer that there should be more operators in VC, particularly at the earlier stages.
In VC I naturally saw thousands of pitches, and it was very clear what the most common mistake was: not solving a problem that is big enough.
Aside from needing to solve a real problem, most companies aren’t solving a highly scalable VC-backable one. There are a lot of very nice businesses out there that can be successful, but to be a successful VC-backed business, you need to have a huge market potential – which means your problem is one that millions of people, or thousands of businesses experience.
If you go too narrow, you may have a smaller market and a nice revenue-generating business, or you will fail.
If you need help here, a book I believe should be compulsory for all current and future founders and their teams is ‘Crossing the Chasm’ by Geoffrey Moore. I highly recommend it for guidance on finding product market fit and how to scale.
4. What’s a fact about yourself that people might find surprising?
MF: For those that know me, I’d say the most surprising thing I’ve done lately, is to get my first tattoo! Inspired by Sidekick, I recently had a geometric style tattoo inked on my upper arm, to, amongst other things, remind me to be resilient and to keep moving forward.
5. How do you prevent burnout?
MF: You can learn the hard way or take the easy way, to understand just how much your body and mind are entwined – and connected to your success. While in startups, we might like to move fast and break things, but this doesn’t work for humans. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Rest, mental health, and looking after myself physically have become more and more important, and are non-negotiables.
Today, I use various mindfulness apps, especially on more stressful days – and I do fitness bootcamps and running multiple times across the week. It is so easy to not do this stuff, and just focus on the problems you need to fix at work – but these problems get much bigger and harder to fix when you’re not in good form. Sometimes the best thing you can do is step away, go for a walk and clear your mind, and come back to it.
The greatest minds, like Einstein, Darwin, Dickens, and yes, I’ll even throw Jobs on this list, believed in the power of movement to solve problems, and it was a daily ritual.
Founder in Five – a UKTN Q&A series with the entrepreneurs behind the UK’s innovative tech startups, scaleups and unicorns – is published every Friday.
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