Flubit saves Britons over £50,000 in opening month
Three years ago, Bertie Stephens spent his last day of three years as Neville Longbottom's double in the Harry Potter films.
Today, the company he founded is saving Britons over £10,000 a week.
In between there was a successful film production company, a chance shared orange juice that turned into a £50,000 seed investment for his new venture, and more than a few deep breaths and big decisions.
Today, though, it all looks like it has been worth it.
Stephens’ new company, Flubit.com, is created for a single purpose - saving people money when they shop online.
"We live in age where people know how to find what they want on the Internet, and to hunt for good deals.
“When you’ve done that and found what you want online and you’re ready to click ‘buy’, if someone said 'Stop - I can give you a better offer on that', you'd take it, right?”
Flubit.com is a marketplace with no product or price listings: customers provide the name of the product they want, the website with the best price they could find, and their email address. A short while later, Flubit creates a unique offer for them on that exact product.
It sounds like a simple concept (and for the user, it is), but it’s taken a lot of trial and error to make it work.
The first version of the website involved group-buying - and didn’t work.
“We reached a point where we knew we weren’t going to make it”, says Stephens. “We just weren’t interesting to consumers. And the users we did have weren’t buying in the numbers we needed them to. And sellers wouldn’t upload products to meet their demands. And we had no way to scale.”
After some deep soul-searching as a company, Stephens decided to take the lessons from Flubit Mk I and use them to create something new.
Along the way, he built the company from 9 to 26 employees, putting together a team of varied talents, including IT startup veterans, behavioural and data scientists, a head of marketing from Disney and a former press secretary to the Prime Minister of Australia to do PR.
Stephens’ persistence has paid off. The new Flubit platform has attracted serious attention from investors and the media - but, even more importantly, from customers.
“It’s just great to have built something people like, and that really works for them”, says Stephens.
“We had a day last week where our users came and demanded a better offer on individual products worth over £95,000 all together. To be able to create those offers, to save people that little bit extra on things they actually want - that’s an incredible feeling.
“Things have gone well, but this is just the beginning, of course. It’s a bit like walking from Kathmandu to Everest base camp: you feel great for having got that far, but you haven’t actually started the really hard part yet. We’ve still got a very big mountain to climb.”