Okay, fantastic. It's January and here we are with another People's Choice Award winner. How do you feel, my friend? Who are you? Let's start with that bit. For anybody who doesn't know who you are and wasn't there in London last week, who are you and what do you do and how do you feel about being a People's Choice Award winner? That's right. Yeah, no, look, I'm Taha, founder and CEO at SearchSmartly, former Formula One engineer, now building AI-powered personalization technology for property search to help people find the right place to call home. Really excited to be here and really enjoyed the People's Choice Award recognition and the demo day. It was great to get feedback from a lot of different people in the unique format that we had. And yeah, just really excited to have that recognition from the audience and the great feedback that we got along the way. I mean, the London audience is quite discerning. And of course, they had a moment, well, quite a lot of the evening to really get to know you, right? So we did the speed date demo night format. It's only the second time we've run that in the last twelve months. And it was fun to watch how the London audience responded to it. But everybody got to ask you lots of questions, right? And becoming a People's Choice Award winner is amazing. In that room, there was some really high caliber stuff going on. and there you are being voted the favorite. And it's a very tight thing, you just kind of nudged it over, but what's your main experience like? How would you reflect on the speed date format compared to some of the other things you've done before? Yeah, very unique. It's not very often that you get the chance to be a bit more intimate with the audience, especially when there's a lot of people there. You don't get the chance to iterate on how you're presenting and what you're saying and how you say it. So what I thought was really interesting about the format was, because we split the room up into three groups, you got to do the same pitch three times. But then you could kind of subtly iterate through. And there are certain things I did in the first one that I was like, oh, that didn't work really well. I didn't get enough time to get to some of the key things that I wanted to get to. So by the time the second and the third one happened, we're able to very quickly iterate on that. So it gives you this really fast feedback loop to just try again quickly. You had to work hard, didn't you? You had to work hard that evening. That wasn't a breeze, just step up there, do five minutes, and step down. This was a whole evening, right? Exactly, exactly. Because you're so physically close to the people that are listening, it just feels more intimate. People, I think, are more open to asking questions and engaging. And you can get the screen up close to them as well, obviously, because it's a laptop screen in your hand, at least in my case. Maybe they didn't get to see the nuances of what I was showing in terms of small annotations, but of course you can adapt to that. And one quick piece of advice might be like if you are going into a speed date format, maybe blow up the text a little bit and just make it really simple. No small wording, no small print. Yeah, quick advice for you guys out there. OK, fantastic. I mean, have you got any key takeaways for you from that from those iterations? You know what was maybe the one key thing that people were telling you all the time? Yeah, I think it helped because we are at a point where we have revenue, we've got a product in market, we've got some pretty large clients. So being able to lead with that is really important. I think one thing that I've learned along the way is when you're building that slide deck format, there is no ideal format. So lead with what you think is the strongest part of your company, your team, et cetera. So if you're really early stage and you've got a really fantastic team, but no product or no customers, lead with the team. If you've got a brilliant product, maybe lead with a demo. If you've got great clients, lead with revenue. So we kind of led with that. We showed a global map of where our customers are distributed, what our revenue run rate is. So we kind of led with that. And I think that helped set up from the first minute an element of credibility, and then everything else kind of flowed from there. So people aren't kind of lingering in their minds as, you know, sure, it's great, but having your treatment behind this, we could kind of address that right up front. It sounds like the Jerry Maguire strategy, you know, have them at hello kind of thing. You know, it's a, it's very good, very good. So what's next for you after this demo? Like, what are you trying to do over the next sort of three to five months? Yeah. So we're at the stage now with our company that we have product market fit, or we think we have product market fit across a few different offerings that we have with global customer base. Now it's about scaling up and scaling up means obviously winning more customers. We need to basically start building up a sales team. Here it's all been primarily sort of C-suite led sales up until now, whereas now we think it's the right time to start scaling that up, bringing a bit more capital to start deploying essentially the sales function, continue investing in our product as is critical in this environment, because the world of product is moving so fast, you cannot rest on your laurels. So investing in sales, investing in product, and really kind of aggressively ramping up our international expansion, currently raising a seed round to help make that happen. So we're pretty far along in that process. So hopefully closing it out in the next couple of months. And are you a UK registered entity, a US one? Yeah, UK company, EIS eligible, as many people often care about at this sort of stage, yeah. So what does the seed round look like for you? What's the sort of size? Yeah, so we're targeting minimum of one million, which is, as I mentioned earlier, yes, eligible. We've got a lead in place, existing investors following on as well. So kind of in the final sort of closing stages, getting the last couple of hundred K across the line now. All right. Good luck with that. Good luck. So as is always the case with the People's Choice Award winners, we want your wisdom for those that follow you. So based on your experience of becoming the favourite of that evening, what's your best piece of advice for anybody looking to do demo night, even in Bristol this week where we're going to be doing the same speed date format? So what's the best wisdom from you? Yeah, if you're doing the speed date format, then make sure that you are able to cover the key things that you want to cover in the amount of time that you've been given. So practice, first and foremost. Build up that confidence if you haven't been doing a lot of pitching. especially in person, because it is different from presenting in front of your laptop screen. So practice, first and foremost. B, get that slide formatting or demo formatting adjusted for your laptop screen, which you're going to have in front of maybe four or five rows of people, rather than on a big, big screen where small print can be legible. lead with what you think is the most impressive thing about the company so team traction product demo etc etc make sure that's really up front so you lead with that when you start the conversation with the audience so you're leading from the front foot essentially so everything after that you're establishing credibility from the get-go with the audience You're addressing maybe some questions that are going to build up. And when those questions build up, I sometimes notice that people kind of get distracted because they've got this question, it's lingering, it's lingering, it's lingering. If you haven't answered it in the first minute, they start losing a little bit of a track as to what you say next, because you haven't answered that question that gives you the ability to move forward. amazing thank you so much the gift of that wisdom is uh is fantastic and as i mentioned to you when we were talking before one of my favorite moments was hearing from a people's choice winner who said i watched the vid of the last guy i read the article and i planned out my demo based on what what the wisdom was that was shared and here we are as people's choice for winners a month later i just thought that was fantastic so i hope others will follow suit and listen to your advice as well Thank you so much for being here and congratulations for being the People's Choice Award winner. I think one of the takeaways I had from the evening was everybody was of a really high calibre on the evening. But the thing that stood apart for me with you was you were not just professional, not just polished, and you had lots of you made it look like you had lots of time in the way that you were relaxed about it. And I thought that was really special, the way you had that kind of quality. But no matter what people were throwing at you and what questions, you just kind of looked like a good golfer does or a good tennis player looks like. They've got extra time for that shot. And it was really interesting to me that you were like that. So it's a great skill to have. So thank you so much and good luck with the raise. I hope it goes very well for you. Thank you, Stuart. And thanks for hosting the event. I had a great time.
