Steven Mendel: Tips on how to build a sustainable growth business

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Steven Mendel, CEO and Co-Founder of Bought By Many, an InsurTech startup well known across the UK market, with a new brand launched in the US under the name "ManyPets." Bought By Many is making the world a better place for pet parents through its tech-enabled insurance products and services. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The first startup I was involved with was in the investment consulting space in the mid-90s. I became a management consultant and went on to set up three more startups, all in the finance space, but none of them directly related to insurance. Bought By Many started in the broader insurance space, but over several years, we narrowed our focus to the pet space.
• For many years I’d been troubled by the poor way large corporates treat individuals – in particular in financial services – in contrast, they treat other corporates very, very well. I felt I had to do something to redress the balance between corporates and individuals in financial services.
• We asked our pet community members to fill out a questionnaire to understand what they thought of the insurance industry, how they would have improved it, and what their ideal pet insurance policy would look like. We got 40,000 responses and created seven brand-new go-to-market products in September 2016. Instead of going live, we took the opportunity to reimagine every step of the customer's insurance journey so that, when we launched in February 2017, there was nothing about the experience that bore any relation to anything else they would have seen in the pet space before.
• We became a double unicorn in eight and three-quarters years. But, in truth, I can’t get excited about the valuation at all. It doesn’t change in any way the business, the people we want to recruit, our existing staff, our focus on our customer base, our focus on the pets, or our focus on the pet parents. It’s an important milestone, of course, but it has not changed us as a business one single piece of the way.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Our first TV advert was at the very beginning on direct to household advertising, and we were able to work with Ridley Scott’s production studio to create something genuinely different and quirky.’

‘The idea behind Bought By Many was creating communities of individuals who had similar but niche insurance needs and to help them get access to better insurance – price, product, and customer experience.’

‘Our Net Promoter Score has never been below 70.’

‘Pet owners do talk, they want to know what pet food you use, what vet you go to, and who insures your pet. Having members of ours who advocate in the marketplace is really important for us and has massive knock-on economic benefits, of course.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Steven Mendel has over 25 years of experience as an actuary in financial services, which has included leading Close Brothers Wealth Management during the launch of their non-advised offering, creating the world’s first art-focused wealth advice offering for Christie’s, working as part of the team that formed Barclays Wealth, and heading the McKinsey UK Savings and Investment Group.

Steven founded Bought By Many, now called ManyPets, which is disrupting the pet insurance market through innovative tech and is building a business to become an irresistible employer obsessed with customer service.

In April 2019, Steven was included in the London Business School Review of 30 People Who Are Changing The World.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

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