The Small Business Podcast by Verb Ventures Tom Wesseldine

I speak with George Linekar and Sebastian Lewis about their business, Your Business Number. Your Business number is a B2B and B2C SaaS business that enables customers to operate two different phone numbers on their device. This is most useful for applications such as Whatsapp Business. For just £4.99 per month any customer can have a new number and use Whatsapp Business from it - negating the need for a separate business phone. This is a fantastic solution not just for individuals but for employers too who can then level up their staff by giving them the ability to use Whatsapp Business and Whatsapp Web - an ever growing stronger sales tool. 

Remote coach provides a full technology suite to personal trainers so that they can digitise their business. It also boasts a front-end market place which also supplies clients. Ben Camara, the founder is an experienced entrepreneur and we talk through his journey from footballer, to PT, to gym owner to tech founder. It’s a fantastic story and Ben is one of the most business savvy founders I’ve met. We talk about all usuals on marketing, revenue model and building as well as his time in an accelerator – something he believes to be worth its weight in gold.



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In this episode, I talk to Natasha Zone, founder of onezone – the app making it easy for people to find cool places to eat and drink in London. Their mission is to curate the world - to ensure everyone can land in a city and know where to go.

Curation is at the core of onezone, with the app dedicated to quality and pioneering a better way of trusted discovery. Every place on the app is visited and photographed before being added to make sure it meets the “onezone approved” standard - great food, cool vibes and top service. With onezone, scrolling TripAdvisor and Googling ‘best places to eat’ are things of the past. The app is free to download on iOS and I recommend doing so!

Natasha has designed, marketed and launched the app single-handedly, reaching +20,000 users without spending a penny on marketing. We discuss this, her journey and much, much more.



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https://verb.ventures

Bloody Drinks make premium, pre-mixed Bloody Marys. Crafted using nothing but proper, quality ingredients and canned for maximum freshness and instant satisfaction, they’re Bloody perfect. Every time. 

Started by Will Best and Harry Farnham, bloody Drinks is a Bloody Mary in a can business looking to shake up the Ready to Drink or RTD market.  Armed with Harry’s recipe that the two of them enjoyed throughout university together, they set out to take it to scale. In just over 2 years they’ve launched in Selfridges, Sainsbury’s nationally and independent locations around the UK. They’ve featured In GQ, Timeout and on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch. The two of them are a fantastic team with Harry having a background in digital publishing, achieving great success with his Mozart project (winning plaudits from no other than Stephen Fry) and possessing a very obvious eye for design and branding.  Will boasts a career in advertising in a previous life, is an established TV presenter and had former  startup experience through founding and successfully exiting a music tech business audio splitter dot fm.

Today I’m talking to Will and we go through the nuts and bolts of production - they started by making literally bath loads of Bloody Mary’s to test, the importance of being agile as a small business and what led them to making the jump into this growing market. They harbour grand ambitions, which we discuss, of entering the aviation and travel industry and more… All of which I’m positive they will succeed in achieving.

As with many spare room podcasts, we unfortunately experienced some technical difficulties with the quality of my internet, however you can hear Will loud and clear throughout so it’s well worth a listen… Any slurping you can hear in the background is myself enjoying a few cans of their Bloody Classic. I hope you bloody enjoy!



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https://verb.ventures

In today’s episode I talk to Zoë Desmond, founder of Frolo, the first single parent community app. Frolo transforms and empowers the single parent experience by providing easily accessible connection and support. It makes it easy to discover and connect with like minded single parents living in the same area as well as giving access to a wider global community. Along with the support of fellow frolos, the app provides valuable content and advice from specialists such as family lawyers, child psychologists and relationship experts.

Frolo has already achieved great success and has featured in publications such as the Guardian, Grazia, Sky News, The Evening Standard and many more.

Zoë is an amazing founder and built the app after her own experience as a single parent. 1 in 4 families are single parent families in the UK and we talk through some of the difficulties that single parents face and why there is such a need for a community and platform like this.

Like many entrepreneurs, Zoe does not come from a technology background and so we discuss how you go about building an app without this base knowledge. We cover the highs and lows of using agencies, the importance of marketing and PR as well as taking a community from social media and converting it to users on another platform.

It’s a fantastic story and well worth a listen!

In this episode I meet with Ollie and Justin from DÀPPA, a plant based ice cream company based in London. They started as a pop up in Shoreditch and you can now find their ice cream and shakes in restaurants and venues in London and around the UK. We talk about their journey from a direct to consumer only business to now having multiple B2B revenue streams as well as the production of their ice cream, marketing, PR and how they pivoted during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a fantastic company and a great couple of guys. You can find out where to get their ice cream at https://www.getdappa.com/ and find them on instagram at @getdappa.