Meet the entrepreneurs behind Pouch, the startup which just won all five offers on Dragons’ Den

We spoke to Pouch’s co-founders, Ben and Jonny, on their time inside the Den and just how their company kicked off.

Having spent several years of breathing fire on the dreams of budding businesses, Dragons’ Den has returned to BBC Two - and it’s guaranteed one too many startups will face the heat.

However, tonight’s episode (August 20) of Season 15 told a different story. Two entrepreneurs received offers from all five Dragons for their clever idea - this has only ever happened once before in the show’s 13-year history.

If you haven’t tuned in then - sorry, spoiler alert - we’ll introduce Pouch, a browser extension that downloads to your desktop. It enables you to apply voucher codes to your online shopping cart without leaving the site.

A huge 75 per cent of people abandon their virtual baskets because they haven’t been able to find a good voucher to save some pennies. That’s when Pouch shakes it up and instantly notifies you when a code is redeemable.

The idea was so good that all five Dragons wanted a piece of it, so with Ben Corrigan and Jonny Plein wanting £75k for the company’s marketing and development, the duo settled on a joint deal with Touker Suleyman, Tej Lalvani and Jenny Campbell for their original price and 18 per cent of the business, split equally at six per cent for each Dragon.

Ben and Jonny, both just 26, started building the business early last year although didn’t launch Pouch to the public until November 2016.

It was Ben’s initial idea, and the duo are supported by the company’s third co-founder Vickram Simha, 33, who brings 12 years of experience in marketing, selling and coding to the team.

The concept of Pouch began whilst Ben was working at startup company Yieldify, before moving to Newcastle-based SaleCycle as its senior vice president for the Nordic market.

At the time, Jonny was working at Ernst & Young (EY) doing a corporate finance graduate scheme when Ben approached him with the idea.

Jonny explained: “I had to be at EY for just over three years to be able to qualify, and as soon as I was qualified, I left to do Pouch full-time.

“[Pouch] was going on in the background casually for quite a while before we thought, actually, there’s an opportunity here - it’s now or never - so we all just quit our jobs and went for it!”

Setting up Pouch was a “massive” challenge for the team with a lot of big errors made in the first few months, however living in London and receiving funding from a German software company helped the process along.

Ben agrees that if it wasn’t for both him and Jonny living in the capital, Pouch might never have made such progression: “We’re very fortunate that, at 26, we both still live at home with our parents so there’s no strain in terms of cash.

“We were earning the equivalent of only £10k each for the first eight months of the business, literally living off savings.

“If we didn’t have that family support [as well as] access to a lot of strong mentors and professionals [from which] we’ve had a lot of advisory, we would be nowhere near - not a chance.”

Now, here’s the ironic bit… Several challenging months passed for the company as they grew, and Jonny kept chiming in with the idea of applying for Dragons’ Den but both Ben and Vickram hated the thought of it, so he pushed it to the back of his mind.

However, a BBC researcher found Pouch earlier this year on the off-chance from an article they’d read and named them as two young founders to watch in 2017 - then the invitation to apply for Dragons’ Den shortly followed.

So off they set writing their application form - “there was, like, 150 questions!” - and after receiving a phone call two days later going through the details of Pouch and their background, they were told they might not hear back from the BBC until May so they didn’t take it too seriously.

Yet Ben recalls just 20 minutes later, the BBC replied: “They said, we want to do an interview, come in for an audition! We went to the BBC’s White City offices, it was a two-hour audition where you do a mock pitch to see how you come across on camera…”

After successfully getting through the interview process, they were invited onto the show - for real. Cameras, Dragons and everything. So with the interview over in February, they had a filming date of May 4, 2017 in Manchester.

“We had six weeks to prepare this three-minute pitch - we had to hire speech and presentation coaches! I personally have a terrible issue with public speaking,” Ben admits: “I was just feeling sick about it the whole time… But we were very, very over-prepared for the pitch and we know our business inside out so we handled the questions well.”

Jonny echoed his co-worker: “After they understood what our business is about and what we do, it was actually very enjoyable. It was like having a conversation with anyone; the Dragons were perfectly amicable.

“We were honest the whole time, we didn’t give them the opportunity to pick us apart for lying to them… We’ve spoken to dozens of investors, thousands of retailers and journalists so they just felt like people - but famous!”

Still not grasping it? Just ask yourself, wouldn’t that dress or laptop be great with a little extra knocked off the price? We all love a good bargain when we see one, don’t lie.

Ben describes Pouch perfectly, too: “Imagine you’re in John Lewis and you see some perfume, then a Debenhams sales assistant comes [over], says that perfume is 10 per cent cheaper at Debenhams and escorts you to the store… John Lewis can’t remove that assistant.”

Pouch is essentially a community of users looking for deals, from students to OAPs. It’s been said the average consumer could save around £500 every year just by installing the browser extension for free.

So it’s a win-win for consumers, but what about retailers? We had to ask: wouldn’t they hate the idea of losing money with vouchers and having to pay Pouch commission?

But think back to what was mentioned earlier… A massive percentage of people abandon shopping carts because of this ‘voucher epidemic’, so with it already in place, this makes the consumer save time and money and, ultimately, it changes their behaviour towards online shopping.

So with five offers from the Dragons and major retailers on board from the likes of Microsoft, Boohoo and Waitrose, the future looks bright with international expansion and a mobile platform on next year’s horizon.

The main thing Pouch hopes to become is the money-saving site for millennials, and Ben and Jonny hope to achieve this by basically staying ahead of the technology game: “We just want to be a multi-faceted company straddling lots of different technologies.

“Mobile applications, augmented reality, artificial intelligence… We don’t have any plans though!” Never say never, right?

This autumn, Pouch is moving from Moorgate to Huckletree in Shoreditch, London, next to the popular Finsbury Square. Visit Pouch for your free access to voucher codes on your favourite websites with completely unlimited access.

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