Where fearless founders find their feet

It started with a tweet.

Before Twitter became the unpleasant hunting ground it is today, Dominic McGregor was a hard-up sports science student at Edinburgh University, facing that decades-long dilemma…

He’d run out of toilet roll.

But he was never going to run out of ideas.

Most people might head to the corner shop.

Dominic decided to create the ‘Student Problems’ account – laying the first brick in the foundations to making his fortune.

He says: “The idea was to share some of the things I’d noticed about life at university.

“Like realising how expensive cheese is for the first time; how we prepare to drink with pre- drinks before we go out drinking – just student life and a little bit of fun.

“After 400 tweets, I had 400 followers, but then it went to about 10,000 followers in a week.

“I very quickly realised this was something, and then, like any desperate student does, I tried to think of a way to make money from it.

“I put an email address in my Twitter bio, and got a couple of emails in the first couple of weeks as the page grew quickly to 50,000 followers.

“One of them was a guy called Steven Bartlett…”

Now a well-known Dragon from the Den, and host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, back then the entrepreneur had just launched Ball Park, an online messaging board, also aimed at students, having dropped out of Manchester Metropolitan University after just one lecture.

The pair agreed to meet in Dominic’s home city of York, where he’d attended Bootham School, and also played as a young goalkeeper of some promise.

He says: “We went for a drink at Revs.

“He asked me what my plans were with ‘Student Problems’, and what I was trying to build, and I’d never really thought about it being a business.

“I’d just thought about it as a way of making a bit of money.

“We spent two hours together, and then a couple of days afterwards talking, and he saw what I was building as the marketing arm to what he was building, and he said to me, ‘logically, you should drop out of university, and we should do this full-time together’.

“The next day, I rang my parents and told them.”

It wasn’t an easy conversation, and his parents

Brian and Louise have subsequently admitted they knew they could back his entrepreneurial spirit, even if it was not the outcome they’d expected from his private school and university education.

Dominic says: “I’m blessed with two very supportive parents.

“We mitigated all circumstance and risk by it being a year out initially, with the ability to go back afterwards.

“I’m very grateful I had the opportunity to try something and test myself with a full security blanket underneath me in my parents; I’m very lucky I had that.”

Dominic and Steven set up Social Chain, with the latter also working from his parents’ home in Plymouth.

But they were forced to stop paying their own salaries within four months, and when the next academic year loomed, Dominic knew he had to decide on whether to return to his studies in Edinburgh.

He says: “I waited until the last minute.

“I rang the university the day before I was supposed to go back, and said, ‘I’m not coming’.

“It was touch and go, but it wasn’t a great leap; I didn’t want to go to university because I believed in what we could do.

“Steven did too, and he wanted to move out of his house in Plymouth.

“So, we put as much work in as we could to turn it into reality.

“And we had a very fortunate occurrence of events, which basically allowed it to be realistic, but a lot of it came from desperation.

“By the September, we had a client in London, who was paying us handsomely.

“But we were sleeping in their offices in central London, waking up at 7am, going downstairs to the shower block – I’d go in the left one, he’d go right – then go back upstairs to work.

“We slept there for three months, literally living in our client’s office.

“They knew all about it; they were a cool start- up and were OK with it.”

The pair started to build Social Chain, pioneering the use of social media commercially and driving online traffic as e-commerce businesses started to grow.

Dominic says: “We were in a very fortunate position at a very good time when the entire world started to look at social media and wanted answers.

“There aren’t many situations when you can walk into a room after doing something for two years, at the age of 20, and sit down in front of people who have much more experience than you, and say, ‘I’m an expert in this’.

“But social media was one of those situations, and we were very well positioned to support businesses wanting to grow on social media.”

Social Chain grew into a £300 million global marketing leader, with more than 700 employees and big name clients such as Apple, Amazon, McDonald’s and the BBC.

Dominic tells a compelling story – incorporating his life’s ups and downs – and is a confident, competent and regular speaker in business, as he will demonstrate when he appears before the Entrepreneurs’ Forum in Newcastle later this year.

He says: “We were lucky enough to work with Domino’s.

“And Spotify was one of our first clients too.

“It sounds fantastic now, but back then, they were a start-up, so they were trying everything and going really big on the student space.

“Our logic was we had the student accounts, and if we could mirror what we had in the student space, in football, gaming, food and fashion, we’d effectively be able to five times our revenue, because we’d work with clients who wanted to reach that media.

“We became one of the most successful social media agencies in the UK, with offices in the US and Germany – we took on investment from a family office in Germany to continue our expansion and continued running that business until 2020 when COVID-19 hit.”

After taking the company public in 2019, they quit a year later.

Steven became a Dragon, Dominic turned his attention to a new venture: Fearless Adventures.

But they remain close friends.

Dominic says: “Steven has the same hat, the same look, but he wasn’t the Dragon you see today.”

Not every aspect of Dominic’s journey has been positive – even if he has turned his excessive drinking into one.

He’s written a book – I’m Never Drinking Again – based on his experiences at the height of Social Chain’s success, when alcohol became a dependency, in good times and bad.

He says: “I massively advocate young people testing themselves, growing, building resilience and putting themselves out of their comfort zones.

“But I also massively advocate sense checking, whether you’re still sane and having healthier coping mechanisms.

“My coping strategy was drinking alcohol and trying to numb and forget about things but, unfortunately, that’s not a healthy long-term habit.

“I really pushed myself to the limits in terms of my body, mental health and wellbeing, without actually ever tackling the cause – and there were trigger points – but I think my downhill spirals properly lasted for nine months, where everything started to fall apart.

“I was at breaking point where people around me, including Steven, had to say, ‘it’s time for you to seek some help’.

“And when I went to see a therapist, she said to me, ‘you should stop drinking’.

“I’m very aware of the impact poor mental health can have on someone, because I’ve experienced it first-hand.

“I don’t want people to go there.

“But, on the other side of it, I’ve also seen what pushing yourself to the extreme can do for the positive.”

And with that in mind, Dominic knew he wanted to help founders on their business journeys by sharing his knowledge and experiences from Social Chain.

He set up Fearless Adventures with fellow entrepreneurs David Newns, one of the youngest-ever FTSE 100 executives in the UK; and Charlie Yates, originally a solicitor at George Davies, who set up corporate finance business Contrado and has advised on £1 billion deals.

So far, Fearless Adventures has invested in eight businesses, providing funding, marketing expertise, operational support and guidance to help them scale.

Dominic says: “I have two missions that I wake up every single day and try to deliver on.

“At Social Chain, we supported entrepreneurs to grow their business through marketing, and had great times helping them scale their companies in meaningful ways.

“But one thing that always frustrated me was that we would take a percentage of that growth as a fee, rather than having a shared interest with the brand.

“So we launched an investment firm to provide marketing but also provide support for that founder on an equity relationship, rather than a fee-based perspective.

“That’s where Fearless Adventures came from.

“It is about the word fearless; it’s about founders being bold and supportive, and about young people being fearless when it comes to their careers and life choices.”

An additional arm of Fearless Adventures is its award- winning training and education academy, which offers government-funded Skills Bootcamps, and has already helped more than 800 people into highly-skilled digital marketing careers.

Dominic says: “When we started Social Chain, our first 20 hires were just a bunch of misfits.

“Nobody would ever give us a job.

“There was nobody with any experience of TV whatsoever, because they were all people who just started social media accounts, but we put them all in one room, and we made something happen.

“As I grew and started to understand how recruitment processes, hiring managers and companies worked, I understood everyone wants to hire good people.

“A lot of people play safe when it comes to hiring people, which makes no sense for a lot of reasons.

“I was very passionate about launching an academy scheme – and I’m very blessed to work on things that mean a lot to me.”

Dominic and his team are now looking to expand the academy into other areas, including the North East.

He says: “Our ethos is much better than a lot of training providers, because we are industry-led.

“The people delivering the teaching are still on the tools.

“If we train 100 people in the North East over the next year, each of them will be guaranteed a job interview upon graduation.

“That’s not just a win for our learners, it’s a way for us to actively support businesses in the region to build stronger, more diverse teams.

“By connecting with companies looking for talent, we’re helping them tap into new perspectives and develop a deeper understanding of the ecosystem.”

Dominic adds: “We have a very limited time to get close to the best businesses from an investment perspective – if they’re really good, they’ll raise money.

“The closer you get to the early-stage founders here on the ground, the better chance you have.

“The idea is that these people will be the marketing directors of the future, the founders of the future, the managing directors of the future.

“That’s why we’re doing this.”