Disruptive Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and 'Building the Password Free Society' | Founder and CEO @ Zally | Patrick Smith

 Hello and welcome to a new episode of The Start-Up Diaries Podcast brought to you by Burns Sheehan, a leading insights driven technology recruitment business located in Manchester and London. In this episode, we have Zally, a Manchester based deep tech company on a mission to confirm You are who you are, continuously.

They offer e-commerce stores a simple and secure way to authenticate visitors, resulting in happy customers, high conversions, and increased revenue. Overall, they're on a mission to abolish passwords. In this episode, CEO and founder of Zally, Patrick Smith, talks to us about the mission of building a password free society.

Finding the right place for you in the journey of a growing business. Disruptive marketing, personal balance, and finding the verticals to scale business using digital marketing. We think it's a great episode. We hope you enjoy it. Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Startup Diaries. In today's episode, we have Patrick Smith, founder and CEO of Zally.

Welcome, Patrick. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Do you want to dive in and give us a bit of introduction to yourself and Zally? Yeah, thank you. And first, first of all, thank me. Thank you for having us here. My background originally from Norway, Oslo where the polar bears are walking around in the, in the streets, as you know.

So I, I moved over to, to London and now eight years ago. And, and I saw a big gap in the market in London where there was nobody connecting brands with influences after a while. So I set up a A digital marketing agency was, the plan was to be a one man band. But long story short two and a half years later, we were 50 people and 250 retained clients.

So no longer a one man band. It was a full tour 24 seven tour which was super excited. Did an exit from that and then COVID hit. So I worked as a digital consultant for a few years. Then I, I Wanted to be closer to the talent and closer to great people. So I moved off to Manchester and I've been here now for a year.

Awesome. Well, I'd love to get a bit about Zali as well. Can you give us a bit of background to, without giving away the secret sauce, I guess. Yeah, yeah. A bit about the business and what you're doing. Absolutely. Yeah. So, so Zali is on a mission to, to create a better world without passwords. We believe that everyone hates passwords, both from a, a business point of view, but also, you know, It frustrates the users, and we can no longer remember 120 passwords.

It's not possible. And then, and then again, we can't remember 120 strong passwords, which is recommended. So we, we thought there must be a better way to do it. So I came about with the idea. When sadly my mom passed away from cancer and my father was left alone and he couldn't manage his affairs efficiently and remember his password.

So I started with creating one passwords across all his portals. And then I ended up writing this on a post note on his computer, but still he couldn't remember. And of course he called me day in and day out and trying to, to, to get me to. login for him. So I thought there must be a better way. What if we, instead of adding frictions, like your multi factor authenticator, your one time passwords your strong passwords, for that sake, What if we remove that entirely from the process, which we then did, and we started to look into behavioral biometric as a way to authenticate the users rather than using these additional factors.

And that's the way you interact with your device. So our technology is built on behavioral biometrics, which includes a walking gait analysis, which movement pattern, keystroke dynamics, accelerometer, pedometer, a lot of words that I can't almost pronounce right, but we have created a machine learning algorithm that are able to distinguish uses from each other.

And, and we've been doing that for a while. We are a team of eight people now. We're growing to 11. So later this year we will be 11 people, everything in house. And then we have, we have an amazing team and we do everything from Manchester. So we sit around the corner from, from where we are now at the digital security hub.

And, and was part of the accelerator program earlier this year from, for, for Dish and Buckley Eagle's Lab that has been very supportive in the process. So that's been very helpful and very including to getting to know the, the, the Manchester tech scene. Yeah. Awesome. I think one of the things I'd love to dive in with yourself is a bit about your kind of entrepreneurial drive from a young age.

So not only are you, you know, scaring polar bears off the street, but at the age of, you know, I think 10, you started your first business. That's correct. Am I even right in saying that you were asked to leave school by your teachers because you just obviously were off doing your own business? Can you give us a bit of background on that?

Yeah. So, so, so I was fortunate enough to, to, to be supported by my parents in terms of like going out and doing what you believed you wanted to do. So of course I did a lot of like sports activities, but I also enjoyed music a lot, so I started to be, become a DJ and that was at an age of 10 and I, I played at like local clubs and, and then it ended up being hired to a few birthday parties.

We took like making like five pounds to begin with, but then. I got better and better and better and my father kind enough invested into two large sound speakers which I managed to fit into my mother's car and she drove me around to begin with. And at an age of 13, I started professionally.

So I, I have to say to, to all the customers that I was 18. So I was actually allowed to play and allowed to work for them. But I was hired by an agency and, and it was like 14, 15. I was awarded as, as one of the top DJs in Norway for weddings. So I'd done 250 weddings. I done a thousand DJ jobs between the age of 10 to 22.

25 ish. The only thing I haven't done yet, and I hope I will never do it either, is to play at a funeral, but I've done everything else. So I've done absolutely everything, which is fun. And then you see a lot of, a lot of the world you, you, you meet a lot of people which is fun. But you can also look at it from You are controlling a crowd and you need to read people.

And I think I learned a lot from that process. I also learned to, to, to be alone on the road because when, when you are a mobile DJ, I wasn't like a nightclub DJ. I was a mobile DJ that brought my equipment with me. So, so, so I learned that, that, that early on. And then I started when I was around 18 years old, I started a small agency where we.

The goal was to get more DJ jobs for other people, which we can then make a kickback from. And that ended up being 40 full time DJs that worked for a friend of mine and myself. And we did that for a few years. That was a fantastic journey. But then I think in one year, I did 170, 175 DJ jobs. And by the end of that journey, I'm working full time managing 40 DJs.

I honestly, I couldn't do it anymore. So I took a long break and just took a, and picked and choose whatever jobs that I wanted to do. It was fun, but I lost a bit of passion for it. And in the recent years, I have a full DJ set up at home now because I started to get back to just enjoying the part that I started with, which was.

music mixing and having fun. And my daughter started to get into it as well, which I, which I personally love, of course. So Will I ever become a DJ again? I don't think so, but, but I'm going to do it at home for fun. Yes. Maybe at an office party I will, I will, I will do it. Yeah. I feel that's for a different podcast.

Yeah, absolutely. So we obviously built. Your digital agency in London, and you've gone on and exited that business. Can you talk us through that experience for you? You've built this, I guess it's your baby really, isn't it? You've built that company and you've decided that enough is enough and you're passing on, what sort of brought you to that point and what was the experience like?

So, so I will never laugh about it, but, but of course this was pre COVID. And so it was the perfect timing to leave a business. It was set up in a way where we had retained clients, 250 big and small. But we were only focusing on one vertical and that was F& B Brands. And I was a big believer that, that to, to be sustainable over time, we needed to find other verticals that includes like fashion or even what I had during COVID, a waste management business.

So it's all about finding ways to improve their business, grow the business. And when you work with digital, there's so much opportunity. So there was not just about building social content for an F& B brand like Food Beverage brand, but it was also for me to be more challenged in how to help grow businesses.

So that's the reason why I left. And, and, and. from that, and then I moved on to, to taking on a few clients working directly with the founders and the owners and seeing how I could grow and scale scale businesses with, with the impact from digital marketing. And that has been very, very exciting.

And then that, that brought me into, to looking into, to e commerce, which then again, brought me into then the Cardiff Donovan piece that I see was a big drop off because a lot of the clients was in that space. And the reason why I started Sally October last year. Yeah. When it came to the point of exiting, was it, did you feel it was like a natural just point or was there some.

Was it a longer period of time that you knew it was coming to the point where you wanted to move on? I think like when you, when you grow a company like that, there are people, people end up thinking differently of how you should approach. There's a lot of people with a lot of opinions. And I think when you are a founder, you, you think you're the only one with opinions that should be heard.

And, and that's, you have the final say. And sadly, when you, when you grow a business to certain states, you don't have the final say. So you need to find where where do you want to want to be? Do you want to be the founder or do you want to be the CEO? And I was the CEO for two and a half years in that company.

I set out on the journey with Sally just to get a better reference here. I set out on the journeys, like I'm the founder, I'm now the CEO. If we can find a better CEO in the future that will take us to the next level, I'm happily to step back. I know my limitations, but I'm also happy to, to guide now and lead the company based on my experience to a certain point.

But I understand that sometimes you need to, to step back and let somebody else, sadly in the agency, we didn't have somebody else that could take over the ropes. So, so. The only best thing for me was to, to, to, to leave it then to the board, to manage the team and then, and then continue on my journey, which was a good decision and good decision for me.

So you obviously left, you left the agency and then you actually put a little bit of money into a research program. Yeah. What drove this? And also, was this the start of Zally? Was it the research help? Yes. So the research, we started to look in like ways to distinguish users. So I got a lot of learning together with a set of friends.

We looked into how can we distinguish users? Is there any model we can create? And what data can we use to actually authenticate these users? We started to look into doing like KYC, you know, your customers checks anti money, money laundering checks, AML and a lot of other things to see how could we use certain type of technologies to actually distinguish users from each other.

And we ended up to, to, to be able to create a an algorithm later on that, that I'm able to distinguish uses for high level of accuracy. And from that experience, I then started to build out that, that Sally. So that took me then to the next, next step where I actually believed in it. I was able to invest both time and money into it full time.

And then bring on better and smarter people than myself. Which is not difficult to find, but then again I've been able to find some, some, some. Superstars that are brilliant at what they do to join the team, join my vision. So I'm a full stack developer as a background as well. But as I'm not just a DJ I'm more than that.

So, so I think I could never achieve this without bringing in really, really good people at what they do. So I'm the enabler, the one with the big vision. I love sales and marketing. That's the reason why we hand out condoms where it says fuck passwords on it. So I love to come up with new ideas to, to, to, to, to get the attention of people.

Um, and, and, and, and just getting the team together on the journey to together. Yeah. You might have many talents then you might find people who. Sort of deeper in those verticals, but DJ, marketing, dev, a bit of everything there. But I think, I think, It's important to, to understand different things.

But I think also I have been a very quick learner in a lot of things that I, that I've done in the past. So I tend to deep dive, but I think I have, I don't have more hours in the day than other people, but I use the hours we have. So I wake up pretty early. So I'm a three 55 starter. And I finish a couple of hours after the, the cleaner has been in the office.

So, so when you have that amount of hour in the day, you need to fill it with something. So if that's skills growing a business or whatever it is, I always use that wisely. That's clearly one of those people can survive on less sleep than the rest of us. Then if you're getting up at I, I, so, so, so this is the thing.

I'm, I'm, I'm telling that this is me. I don't advise anyone to do it. Yeah, it is stupid . But you need to know your limitation, but then you also need to switch off when possible. But, and then also of course, with startups comes a lot of stress a lot of challenges. So it's all about finding that.

Should I call it balance? I'm not sure if that's the right word, but finding your place in the journey. What driver, driver seat you're going to sit in are you going to be the lead driver in projects, stuff like that. And then, and make sure that you have downtime. I heard that Gary Neville said that he had, he was going away for, for a mini holiday here from from a Friday to a Sunday.

And I, I felt that was normal. That would be a massive retreat for me, but I think it's important. And I think after I stopped drinking 16, 17 months ago having downtime, we actually are really, really present and not focusing on anything else or having, you Things that waste your time, like drinking has worked really, really good for me.

Made me focus more on my family, my daughter and, and, and that has been a smart decision. Yeah. Hmm. Going into a bit about Zali, when we put this together, you said you were building a B2B and a B2C business in one. Can you talk us through what that means? Yes. So first we are, we are a solution that is built for growing e commerce businesses.

So that's our first vertical. But then again, passwords are everywhere. Yeah. Good for us. It's a large market. It's a massive market. Um, There's limitless applications for the, for the use cases of, of, of our solution, but we focus on one vertical first, but then again, the consumers are frustrated.

So in the future, we hope to develop something that will also help the users to authenticate easily and, and check into, to, to websites or their apps or any platform seamlessly and frictionless. So that's the reason why we are both B2B and B2C. But we are focusing, so our revenue comes from B2B. But then again, let's see what the future holds.

We have a plan in place and a great team to achieve it. But, but focus first is B2B. Obviously with the history of building the digital agency, one of the things you said to me was that you were trying to bring that digital agency feel into a tech business. Can you describe How you're doing this and I guess give a few differentials of what, what you, what a digital agency sort experiences.

Yeah, yeah. I, I, and I tried to describe that we're trying to, to have like an agency culture within the tech space and like people, like are you, are you starting an agency inside the, the, the technology company? How, how would, how would that work? Yeah. No, we're not. I'm just saying like we need to have. A culture where it is a fun culture.

I'm not focusing on the, on the drinking culture. I just, as I mentioned, I don't drink. I allow anyone to enjoy alcohol, whatever they want to. I'm not saying that I'm. I'm against it, but there's more to this to fund the team aspect. I think you could find that in a lot of tech businesses, a lot of young startups now but it's bringing that cool.

Why being edgy? Think differently. Don't be afraid or think differently. So we want to be the challenger. That's the reason why our brand colors are purple and pink and not like your standard blue, which is should be like safe and only cater to, to financial services. We think hopefully different.

That's fair. I mean, ironically, some of the colors in Bermshede is blue. Yeah, yeah. Because of the, the, the, the, the, the safe, the safe element here. And, and, and, and of course looking at your logo with that, with that light blue touch is, is, is slightly Manchester city, but we don't need to discuss that.

It's more Glasgow Rangers, I think. But yeah, diversity, I guess this has brought. Some of that meant that the thinking has probably brought diversity to your team. I know it's something that's higher, higher your agenda. So how are you approaching driving that sort of diverse hiring? So, so number one, we, we.

We we try to find people that are brilliant at what they do, no matter if they have autism neurodiverse come from different backgrounds. I think I have all of the above. So, so for me, it's, it's, it's important also to include others than myself. I, I position myself as the clown in the business a guy in the, in, in this morning meeting consider himself as, as the stupid one.

So they, all of them are trying to find different different ways to fit in and we call it the Sally Sue. And, and for that reason that, that there's room for everyone and we think to achieve what we want. setting out to do to kill passwords and competing with some of the biggest players in the world.

You need to be a bit crazy, a bit stupid, and you need to be a clown and part of bringing the attention to it. So I think it's all about bringing to people with different backgrounds, different mindsets, like our, our CTO has spent the last 10 years in, in, in, in India. We have a marketing executive from, from originally from Pakistan.

We have a a data scientist with a family background from Somalia. So it's all about bringing people together with different backgrounds, cultures, mindsets to find this solution. So remember, this is a global problem. So we need to represent this problem internally as well. And then looking at Manchester, which has like, it's, I thought London was a melting pot.

Manchester is a brilliant city with a lot of brilliant people from different cultures. And we can bring that all together within one team. Sadly, we can't be more than like 10, 20 people within our team, but I wish I could have hired like 500 people and we can represent the world in our office. One of the things, again, when we're putting this together, use the phrase, you want to make Manchester proud.

Great phrase first and foremost, love that. Do you want to talk through what you mean by it and why I guess Manchester has become your home now? Yeah, I, I, I think like I think I would never use that phrase in London. I always say that is that when I compare and explain the difference between working seven years in London versus being now one year in Manchester is that if I asked anyone for help in London, they always said to me what's in it for me?

When you do this in Manchester, you ask anyone like anyone, if I ask you now for, can you help me with an introduction to X? You said, of course, I'm going to do that. But I think also there's a few other people that I will introduce you to. So you run the city that is much smaller. I think long term that will win.

So the reason why I said I want to make Manchester proud, I want to do two things with Manchester. I want to make it proud and I want to make them proud. Better together, but if we take the, the make them proud is that I want to make sure that we put Sally on the map globally, become the next unicorn from Manchester, make them proud.

And they can talk about Manchester and Sally in the same sentence, and that will make them proud the same as, as some footballers recently also made them really, really proud. So, so it's, it's putting us on the map and doing the right thing for Manchester. And there's so much impressive tech talent in this city.

I think a lot of, a lot of the times London wins because it's the biggest city there's, there's more VCs there. But then again, we have fantastic universities. It's a fantastic ecosystem. Look at the digital security sorry the digital security hub dish with Barclays Eagle Labs. You have Plexol that is supporting it.

You have all the universities, the consortium which matches the city council behind it and all of that. Like it's just an ecosystem that works. So that brings me over to the, to the second part, which is better together. So we are starting to host events quarterly now that is called Sally Sessions where we want to bring people together.

And it's like, you can ask any questions, if you have challenges you can ask them there. You will get some faces behind the names. So we bring you people that you might not meet at all the events. A lot of public from public sector that you normally just see behind the name, but we, we, we, we put in some faces to that name, which is, which is brilliant.

So I think Manchester. And the people that I met now for the last year has opened so many doors for us. So we also need to find a way to, to, to say thank you. And the way to do that is just helping out as much as we can. And now that I recently have become an ambassador through investing Manchester and meet us, I want to shout and rave about Manchester in the best possible way because it actually has helped our business.

I don't think we would have been as far as we are now. without being in Manchester. And that says something. So you can think about it like I was in London for seven years. I have all my contacts and relationships there. Yeah. But now I'm setting up here and we have better traction than we could have been in London.

Yeah. And that says everything I hopefully. Yeah. Look, I completely agree with that sentiment. And going back to the original bit about that community and referrals and introductions, I mean, I was of the date of recording this. So is it the tech climbers launch to be kind of panel this morning, but the people in that room of all.

I've introduced people, they've introduced me, like, it's, it is an ecosystem, it's truly a network, and I think actually, ironically, a lot of the time, my London colleagues are all quite jealous of the fact that we're only literally a degree or two away from someone who can help open a door for you, and people are willing to do that, whereas I think London's too dispersed, there's not I don't, there might be a network, but I don't think we've certainly found it like this in London, but it's just such a big space that, yeah, I mean, the team come up and always laugh that I say, Oh, that, that office is 10 minutes that way, or it's five minutes this way.

Like it's general, it's a big city, but it's, it's a very like, it's very small, actually. Yeah, I, I've seen that we have, so we are just around the corner from where we are now. And, and it's. Literally three to four minutes to anyone that we have relationship with and partner with which is crazy So there's a small small city with a lot of talent.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Things that we dive into towards the end of the podcast I'd love to understand what the biggest challenge you'd see in your career as so far. Well that's a good question. I would say like the biggest challenge is ahead of me to actually grow this on a global scale.

Luckily we have a plan to do so. But I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm honest about it. We need. All the help we can get and everyone that I meet as like, join me on this journey because we're on a journey and, and it's going to be a challenge when you, when you, when you have an ambition of building the next unicorn from Manchester, I know that's bold and it's not very humble, but it, it needs to have big vision to be able to achieve it.

So, so which we have, and we have. Massive potential to achieve it but I need help of doing so. So, so I'm just reaching out to everyone and says like, help us on this journey as much as possible. And like, and I know there's going to be tons of challenges, there's challenges every single day. But I always say is that if there is a big challenge, I was like, is this what you can bring?

It's like, bring it on. Like, and then I said to the guys this morning and because it's sunshine today and it was raining yesterday. And when I got into the office early this morning, I thought, Oh, I forgot my umbrella. And when I was heading over here, I thought I needed an umbrella. But luckily it's sunny today.

And after, after rain, it always comes sunshine. You just need to make sure that you're, you're, you're bringing it through, stay positive and remember this to any founder that is out there. This is a journey. This is a journey. So it is goods, bads, everything in a day. You just need to live through it and find that That, I'm using that word again, but balance to survive and actually work harder the next morning.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the next question I normally ask is, what bit of advice would you give to someone who's starting their own business? Would that, would that be it? Or would you Yeah, it's, it is, it is one of it. I could have said don't do it, but, but no. I, I think if you, if you're starting a business, make sure that, you try to find an accelerator program to become a part of not just because what you learn from it But you mean like you meet like minded people that are in the same position as yourself Yeah. Not necessarily the same stage on the journey. But I think having somebody that, that are doing exactly the same as you are doing, it's, it's will help you a lot on the journey.

So, so that, so that, that is one. And then make sure you get mentors, talk to friends and family. Don't listen to, to all what your family say, because a lot of say it's like, don't take the risk. Don't do it. Believe in yourself and speak with people. That's normally our last question, however I know you're starting your own podcast.

I believe you are anyway. So just want to say if you want to give some information about it so people can look out for it when it gets released. So we are, we are launching in a few months supported by, by Barclays and the podcast studio here in Manchester. As we're going to bring on guests, talk about how can we create a better Manchester together.

So find people that people want to listen to. I'm not sure they want to listen that much to me. So I need to find interesting people to join me on the, on that journey. This is going to be part of the event series salary sessions. And then the podcast series is named the same thing where we just talk.

Want to do one thing and that's create a better balance. So together, give back, educate, share knowledge and have fun. Thanks a lot, Patrick. Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for having me.