Hello and welcome to this session with one of our Executive MBA alumni this is a great time
to interview Lucy Mullins who is the co-founder of Stepladder a start-up which is just about to
be listed on Seedrs another successful start-up which was the brainchild of one of our MBA alumni and
it's great to be interviewing Lucy now because of course this is international women's week
Lucy so tell me a little bit about how the idea for Stepladder got going and tell me what it is?
Thank you nice to be here Kathy so Stepladder is a collaborative finance company and we help
people raise their property deposits very simply we say we're helping people buy their first homes
faster and the idea's actually been around for hundreds of years it's a system that's used
around the world and I'm sure some people watching this will have heard of it so I'll just give some
names it's called a partner in the Caribbean it's called an agile in Nigeria it's called a chip fund
in India and it's a way of a community of people coming together to borrow and lend money from each
other so that they can reach their financial goals faster. So where are you now with this?
So we have just launched on Seedrs so in pre-registration phase at the moment and we
have got over 600 members who are all in various stages of saving for their property deposits
we've awarded over £750,000 to our members to use towards their savings goals
and property deposits and we're almost about to hit the million pounds mark of
money saved on our platform so we're really beginning to see some scale now. One of the
most difficult things is getting from friends and family money to the point where the vcs are
interested in you the venture capitalists actually believe that your success can make it for them.
You are choosing the Seedrs platform as a way of raising money. Tell me a little bit about this
journey from the initial investment, where I assume the co-founders are sacrificing most to
the point where you are now and and some of the conversations that you've had to have along that
route. Yes, so the fundraising journey is always a bit of a bumpy road. So we raised money from
friends and family in the early stages and then we got siege funding from siege camp
and then in October 2019 we did a 1.5 million raise with Anthemis who are a big
fintech vc so we were delighted to have them on board and they're in partnership with bbva
and it was excellent for us to get bbva on board because obviously they have huge presence
in South America where roskers as stepladder circles are known generally they're called roskas they're
they're known and so bbva were very interested because of this potential to kind of put them into
the countries in which they have a presence so we've we've raised nearly three million pounds
and the reason we're doing a Seedrs raise now is because we're a community-based platform we have
a lot of members you know in a way a Stepladder circle if you think about how I described it it's
almost like a little mini crowd raise and so the kind of members people we have interested
in Stepladder really believe in that power of the crowd and community and say we wanted to be able
to open up Stepladder to our community so that they could feel part of this raise and of course
you know raising money is hard work and doing doing something like this on Seedrs is also a good
opportunity for us to talk about Stepladder as we are now whereas if you're raising with a vc
fund it's something you do a bit more behind the scenes so it was it was a bit of a double header
for us I mean the absolute main driver was that we're a community based business and we wanted
to invite more people in it feels absolutely the right thing to do at this stage of the business
but there's always the bonus of you know raising on Seedrs makes it up a much more public activity?
What makes you stick with this? I've had moments
I actually took six weeks off over December and January and just had to have a complete
step back and that really re-energized me and the thing that makes me stick with it
is the the mission to help people buy their first home I remember buying my first home and
I see the look on our members faces when they get in the front door and of course with Covid
it's been a shame because they've had to just send us little videos of them putting the keys
in the front door, whereas normally we would go out and meet with them and see their new homes.
It's a life-changing thing to do to buy your own home and to have
that independence that freedom that sense of I've done this and I think there aren't
many other things that I can imagine doing that really make that much impact on somebody's life
Lucy thank you very much indeed good luck