After seven years as a management consultant, Jules took a leap of faith, left her job, taught herself coding, and with her friends Alex Depledge and Tom Nimmo, started Hassle.com. Based on Jules’ idea of a way to find a local piano teacher, the site evolved from a tool to find almost any domestic service to focusing just on cleaners. It grew and the trio sold the company for over €30million. Jules and Alex then took on the architecture and planning sectors with their next company, Resi.Jules looks at how startups work, the importance of focusing on what customers want, the need to protect the culture, as well as addressing more technical aspects of tech and digital.
Jules Coleman is the founder and former CPO (Chief Product Officer) of Hassle.com, a service that secured a loyal customer base as the easiest way to find, book and pay for a domestic house cleaner online. She has since gone on to co-found and serve as CTO of the disruptive architecture business Resi.co.uk.
After studying economics, Jules spent seven years as a management consultant, working for PWC, Accenture and IBM. Frustrated, she came to the realisation that consultancy wasn’t what she wanted to do, and decided to take a leap of faith. She left her job, taught herself to code, and over four years built and nurtured Hassle.com along with Tom Nimmo and Alex Depledge. The team were guided by Jules’ idea to create a tool that would help her to find piano teachers in her local area. This idea grew to include other types of services (such as cleaning and dog-sitting) and quickly became too large to manage. It was only when Jules, Tom and Alex looked at what their customers were actually using Hassle.com for that they discovered the demand for reliable cleaners, and adjusted focus. The trio eventually sold the company for €32m. Jules and Alex have gone on to establish a new business, Resi, aimed at disrupting the architecture sector with Jules as CTO and Alex as CEO.
In speeches, Jules shares her journey from writing code in her bedroom to selling the thriving company she helped to build, and offers advice on what it takes to develop a product that consumers will actually pay for. She discusses the methods by which small outfits can disrupt much larger companies, examines what we can expect from changing workplaces, and takes a look at the tech trends of the future. Having learned the hard way, she advises start-ups to focus on doing one thing excellently, to accept the importance of careful market research, and to remember that a successful start-up requires a lot more than a stylish office – it’s the product that truly matters. Along with business and consumer lessons, Jules can also take a more technical approach to speeches.
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