In my last blog, I talked through how you start to articulate your own founder story.

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I’ve always found it useful to look around for inspiration from peers both in the chosen sector and others that you respect. Therefore, below are some of my favourite examples for your inspiration:

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Inspiration #1: Nuggets

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Problem

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Alastair Johnson, CEO and Founder of Nuggets: “The idea initially arose from my own payment details being used fraudulently online. The process that followed was both painful and problematic; my card was cancelled, I then had to wait a couple of weeks to receive a new one and in the meantime, the online services that I’d subscribed to were coming to a standstill.

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More importantly, like everyone else in that situation, I had no idea what had been compromised and what hadn’t.

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Having experienced that first hand, I thought there had to be a better way. Nuggets was a direct result of that pain and frustration and the frightening realisation that we all have extremely sensitive personal information all over the internet.”

Solution

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“Nuggets is a payment and ID platform. It stores your personal and payment data with blockchain, so you never have to share it with anyone — not even Nuggets.

That means you can stop worrying about data breaches. If companies don’t have to store your data, it’s not there to be breached. You can still buy what you want, and use the services you love. But without worrying about your privacy.”

Inspiration #2: PensionBee

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Problem

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Romi Savova worked in investment banking and found managing her work pensions difficult when she moved employer. She decided there must be a better way and if someone who is interested and works in banking couldn’t do it then it must be a widespread problem.

Solution

Romi developed a platform that combines and manages all your pensions in one place. It even finds the ones you’ve lost.

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Inspiration #3: Juno

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Problem

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Ally Fekaiki, Founder: “Having personally been affected by stress and anxiety at work as well as hearing the same from everyone I came into contact with I really started to think. Most of the stuff on offer at the time was really irrelevant and a bit tokenistic and so the question was how can we provide something that we ourselves would use?”

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Solution

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“To reimagine how employee wellbeing is defined by giving employees the final say on what makes them happy. We built a marketplace that allows businesses to offer amazing support for all types of people and employees a helping hand with all aspects of their lives.”

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Inspiration #4: Fronted

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Problem

Jamie Campbell, Co-founder: “Renting sucks — anyone who rents knows it. There are so many problems to solve and we intend to tackle them all bit by bit. The biggest one is having the cash available to pay the deposit upfront.”

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Solution

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“First, we are going to pay people’s rent deposits for them so they can pay us back in bite-size manageable amounts. Deposits are a large upfront expense and most people either use mum and dad to sort it out or stay where they are (in the worst cases they do to pay-day lenders).”

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Still pondering how to craft your story?

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Here are some more tips on how to find the problem, ask yourself these questions:

• What job were you doing before you started your business?
• Was there something that was making you feel frustrated with your current situation?
• What were your life goals? Were you at a point of change in your life?
• Did you create your own solution straight away or make do with something else?
• What was this ‘something else’ and what didn’t work?
• What was the moment you realised you needed to make a change

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Let me know what you think or ask me a question by dropping me a line, and check out my blog on Top three things to do is your funding has been paused.