Secret Leaders Hassle.com: How Alex Depledge Co-Founded a Company that Sold for €32 Million
Left work on a Friday and gave birth on a Saturday: already our guest this week is pretty much a rockstar. 2014 Tech City’s Entrepreneur of the Year Alex Depledge is a straight-talking British businesswoman best known for being the driving force behind hassle.com.
Alex launched her career in the US after completing her master’s degree at the Uni of Chicago, working on the campaign team of a major US politician. In 2006 she returned to the UK to become a consultant for Accenture, where she advised Footsie 100 clients on their customer and channel execution. In 2012 she bravely entered the world of entrepreneurship.
In 2011 Alex and her best friend, Jules Coleman, conceived the idea behind hassle.com when they discovered how hard it was to find a piano teacher online. They realized that service providers found it hard to market themselves, as they weren’t always as tech-savvy as other entrepreneurs, and they needed to rely on word-of-mouth.
Alongside co-founders Tom Nimmo and Jules Coleman, they started Teddle with the idea of connecting local service providers to customers. Two years later they rebranded to hassle.com and focused on connecting vetted cleaners to local customers. They recently sold for €32 million to German company Helpling.
Alex has now launched BuildPath, a company which assesses whether house extensions are viable and how much they would cost. She also continues to be a driving force for shared parental rights in business and female equality amongst the entrepreneur scene.
We chat about:
- Hassle’s journey from we-don’t-know-anything-about-startup-entrepreneurship to building an MVP to joining an accelerator to building the right product at the right time
- What was raising money like in a period when there wasn’t a startup ecosystem
- Their hiring challenges as first-time founders with no reputation
- Selling to Helpling and getting massively depressed
- Finding an executive coach and surviving Brexit
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