Christian Owens discusses his experience raising $100 million for his company, Branchr Advertising, which aims to transform how businesses deliver revenue.
Christian Owens discusses his experience raising $100 million for his company, Branchr Advertising, which aims to transform how businesses deliver revenue. The episode covers the strategies and challenges involved in securing a large Series B+ round of funding.
yeah so we're about 150 people uh right now we'll hire about another 100 people this year um we main office is in in london we have other offices in china um australia ireland and kind of the us in new york so sort of you really have to differentiate on providing the best possible product to people and the best possible service and experience to people at the same time alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today we have a founder that is pretty impressive i mean the story that he has i mean everything starting at 14 years old i mean it's pretty mind-blowing but we're going to be learning quite a bit you know the ups the downs the really the exploring the whole thing of building scaling financing you name it and especially at a very very early stage so i guess without further ado i'd like to welcome our guest today christian owens welcome to the show thank you for
having me excited to be here so originally from there from the uk so how was life growing up it was good it was good i grew up in a pretty small town um kind of pretty sleepy uh and that probably is why i now spend most of my time online because i discovered it really early but no it was a good a good good life growing up and obviously growing up very early into computers so how did you get your hands on computers and code for the very first time christian because i know that you developed that that love right away oh absolutely so my i forget exactly how i kind of came to have my first computer but i remember um kind of sort of 12 13 sort of somewhere around there um we i think got a computer inherited one uh from somewhere and i kind of just became fixated on it uh from the moment uh that we got in the house and obviously it was kind of dial-up internet and stuff like that back then
and i think i used it for the first like six months before us getting internet and kind of just exploring every possible part of it um and then sort of i think the revelation for me was i i think i bought a book or kind of took a book from the library or something which was about like html uh or something like that and i found it just fascinating that you could kind of like type characters into this thing um and you could end up with something kind of out of it that you could see and you'd use and you could play with um and that kind of really sparked my fascination with with computers and technology pretty early on and i think from about kind of 11 12 13 somewhere around there um i started building websites for people um so i kind of go door-to-door almost uh in the town that i grew up in to kind of local businesses or restaurants or whatever it was and i'd be like i can make you a
website um and i didn't really charge them anything for doing it it was like a kind of hundred dollars or 100 pounds or something like that um and kind of that's really really how i started and then how do you really get serious into this because obviously at age 14 you were already making a killing so uh at what point do you realize that hey i can actually make good money out of this so i mean i was really building websites for people kind of for the fun of it more than anything else like i was just like tinkering really enjoyed making stuff um and then i remember like i can't exactly remember exactly the moment that happened but one of these businesses i think it was like an italian restaurant or something that i was making a website for we got to the end when they were supposed to pay me this sort of like pretty small amount of money and they were like can i have an invoice and like
me kind of 12 13 whatever it was was like what on earth is an invoice like i've never even heard of this before so i googled it and i know like a bunch of like a ton of different invoicing software and stuff came up um and i think one of them was quickbooks and i like clicked on it and it was like 10 pounds a month or something for this this piece of software and i was like i'm not paying 10 pounds a month i can build this um so i kind of at that point started teaching myself how to like code and build software um and the first thing that i built was kind of really to scratch my own itch kind of around this invoicing thing was um it was like invoicing software for people who did kind of freelancing or time billing or kind of project-based billing or whatever it was it wasn't super it wasn't super fancy um didn't have a ton of functionality but it kind of worked for the very like narrow
purpose um of what it was so i started um kind of building that initially using it myself and then i realized i became obsessed with building software as opposed to building these websites for people and kind of as i started building software i realized well kind of i'm not actually making websites for people anymore so i'm not making any money maybe i could just sell this invoicing software to people who needed it and started doing that in in kind of like 2013-ish um sorry when i was about 13ish and then kind of from from that point started making a couple of sales and things like that and kind of gradually made the product a little bit better and then made a few more sales and made the product a bit better and made a few more sales and kind of before i knew it kind of six months later we we'd done sort of three or four hundred thousand in revenue and i was sort of 14 year old with
actually a real business um and fast forward kind of 18 months from then um we were a kind of four or five million run rate kind of software company um with kind of a bunch of remote people who are helping with things like support and and sort of all this stuff i mean that's a lot of money for for a 14 or 15 year old i mean were your family concerned that maybe you were you were dealing drugs on the street or something like that like maybe the hell is that money coming from so there was this really interesting there was a very kind of poignant like funny moment um i think in my like childhood uh that i remember which was my parents had zero idea or is doing any of this stuff like they knew i was building websites for people and occasionally like i'd get a check or something and like i didn't i had like a kids bank account at the time that didn't accept checks um and they would always
write the checks out in my dad's name so whenever i made money doing this um this website stuff like they would have to take me to the bank and they would put the check in the account and then they would take the cash out and then i'd put it in my own account um and these were like not big checks they're like 50 100 pounds something like that um but i remember one day like we went and we did that and sort of this was back when when you went to the the bank certainly in the uk i don't know if it was the same in other countries as well but um for the account that i had you had like a little book um and it was like a little book that like had instead of getting bank statements you would have a book and every time you go into the bank you'd hand over this book and it was like look at that little passport um and they would like dot matrix print in the next line of the statement with like your
balance in it and i remember one day going in with with my mother and sort of to deposit like a hundred pounds or something i handed over the book and they they gave it back to me and like the balance read sort of it went from like 70 pounds 120 pounds sort of 96 pounds and then the most recent line was just like 74 000 pounds and that led to the conversation with my parents which was just like what on earth have you been doing on the internet um kind of that has led to you having 74 000 pounds in a kids savings account um and then that led us going to like a little coffee shop around the corner and like me being like well i've been building this invoicing software and we've been selling it on paypal and like kind of doing all this stuff um and then sort of from there kind of they were initially like incredibly skeptical of like what is he doing on the internet is he selling drugs like
what is it what is this and then two like once they understood it obviously like super supportive of what it is i was trying to do and what i was trying to build i mean looking back because i guess at 14 you're we're still kind of like i guess developing you know maturing growing shaping up the personality the experiences i mean were you at that point able to realize that that that was a lot of money um i would like to say yes um but like i didn't come from a i didn't come from a family where we had tons of money like my my my dad like worked in a in a factory my mum she was a kind of company secretary for like a local like engineering company um and like we never like wanted for anything we're never hungry or anything like that but we know no means sort of like had a ton of money like we went on kind of one holiday every other year or something like that and and things like that so sort
of it's not…