Starting up and standing out: founders reveal all at SME XPO 2025

Starting a business can feel lonely - whether you’re testing out a first product in your kitchen, conjuring up a social media operation that makes it look like you’re a team of ten, or trying to charm strangers into becoming your first customers.

But as founders speaking at SME XPO made clear, sharing your advice, experience and even mistakes can be the fastest route to growth. And that’s what they did at this year’s event, which buzzed with energy as over 4000 founders, investors, executives and creators came together to exchange ideas, share stories, and give practical advice on the entrepreneurial pathway.

Founders who are long on passion but short on cash found plenty of advice from the panel, How to Market Your Business on a Budget: Advice from Founders Who’ve Done It, with Hot Topics editor Peter Stojanovic adding:

Lucie Macleod, founder of Hair Syrup, said her business was living proof of that. She started the now-viral brand from her student kitchen at Warwick University, and scaled it to a £4 million turnover - becoming the most trending hair care brand on TikTok this summer - entirely without paid advertising.

It was, she said, all about the power of the founder-led story:

“My brand was all about what my hair used to look like. Instead of seeing a big brand, they were speaking to this 22-year-old girl who said, ‘I used to have damaged hair just like you'"

Kristal Baker, founder of botanical-infused water range Luxwells, was on the same panel as Macleod and confirmed the trend: “People want to know who they're buying from. It’s more about the storytelling, less about the facts.”

User-generated content is a marketing goldmine, Macleod added. Hair Syrup has never paid an influencer, but relies instead on customers posting organically about their products - “but it only works if the video is genuine,” she added.

Katherine Burn, founder of matching family pyjama brand Pyjamily, created her brand’s first photoshoot using Amazon-bought lighting equipment, and friends and family as models. She suggested founders can use IKEA showrooms for free backdrops. “It doesn’t have to be polished,” she said. “You just need to get scrappy.”

The panelists were unanimous that creativity matters more than cash. Macleod’s cheapest marketing, she said, was appearing on BBC show Dragon’s Den. “It cost me nothing except my dignity - and we got a 64% sales increase.”

Stojanovic added that one smart hack for entrepreneurs is to “artificially deflate your marketing budget” to force yourself into more inventive, high-impact ideas.

Still, the founder-led path isn’t easy, especially for camera-shy founders. “It can be really scary,” Macleod admitted. “I’m a confident person, but when I started founder-led content, I did feel uncomfortable. I made myself cringe. But the more you do it, the easier it gets.”

Baker said that she too “battled with putting my face out there. I’ve usually been quite private, but people kept telling me: ‘You should tell the founder story.’ And it’s worked. In the time that we live in now, people want to know who they're buying from. They want to know who you are, and why you've started the brand - when they know that person, they’re more likely to buy your products.”

For more private founders, the founders advised trying to anthropomorphize a logo. It’s a way to tell an entrepreneur’s story - give the brand its ‘why’ - without facing the pitfalls of social media’s barbed tongues.

Elsewhere, Apprentice star and media entrepreneur Mike Soutar told founders that it’s crucial to stay creative and nimble. “In a perfect world, you would have the space in which you can create ideas - but sometimes, having no spare time and resources set aside for it, is the mother of invention,” he said.

Creativity needs to align with a risk-taking culture, and the willingness to try new things. The worst thing you can do is hang on to ideas. Try them. Do them. They either work or they don't. If they work, brilliant. If they don't pivot, move on.”

A panel considering where entrepreneurs should focus most in their first 12 months of business included Natalie Sanders, founder of paintable biscuit business Pickles & Bakes, Popcorn Shed’s co-founder Laura Jackson, Mike Adams, founder of referral business introstars and Matt Hunt, founder of The Protein Ball Co.

Sanders started her business in lockdown, as a way to keep her children entertained. “The first couple of months were me making thousands of biscuits every night,” she explained. “When I realised this was scaleable, it was about focusing on the packaging to turn the home-brand into something that looked and felt like a real brand, that we would be proud to put on the shelves. It was a lot of door knocking to find a manufacturer who would help us grow something that nobody frankly had ever heard of before.”

For Adams, there was one place to promote his progressive web app - LinkedIn:

Export was an early focus for Hunt’s food businesses, which include Oloves olives. “We started in the UK but after attending a German trade show, half of our £500,000 first-year turnover came from Germany and Denmark.  If you've got a good product that you can sell in the UK, look at other countries as well. Act global from the start.”

But don’t cede the start-up’s secret weapon: being nimble. Sanders, at Pickles & Bakes, said she’s grown by being “super agile. When Donald Trump won the election, we had Donald Trump biscuits the next day. At the start of summer, we were freaking out as our marketing calendar looked bare: then we thought, ‘Wimbledon!’ and printed some tennis biscuits.”

In a start-up landscape where connection beats perfection, SME XPO’s key message to new founders was that the ones who thrive are the ones who are willing to get out there - whether it’s awkward filming in Ikea, begging a parent to put on your pyjamas or overcoming shyness to self-promote your story on Instagram, lack of budget is no impediment to growth.

Budget Friendly Takeaways? We've got you

1. Be the face of your brand - Share your personal founder story - even if it’s uncomfortable at first. As Kristal Baker said: “People want to know who they're buying from.”
2. Let customers be your influencers - User-generated content is free and powerful — and it works best when it’s authentic. Encourage real customers to post, share, and tag your product. As Katherine Burn of Pyjamily said, “It’s free advertising.”
3. Scrappy content has an impact - You don’t need a studio, just initiative. Shoot in IKEA set-ups, use friends as models, buy backdrops on Amazon. Raw and ‘real’ beats polished and pricey.
4. Use constraints to fuel creativity - Challenge yourself to do more with less. As Mike Soutar said, “Sometimes having no spare time or resources is the mother of invention.”