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From Hobby Shop to £10m ARR: 10 Lessons From Swytch’s Founder
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
How Oliver Montague turned a side hustle into a category leader, then chose to step aside.
When Oliver Montague hacked together a universal e‑bike conversion kit in 2017, it was to fix a problem in his tiny online shop. Eight years later, Swytch had hit roughly £15m in sales, raised multiple rounds, built a list of nearly 2 million subscribers and become a dominant player in its niche.
Then, in November 2025, he stepped down as CEO.
In this Founder Spotlight, Oliver unpacked what actually worked, what nearly broke the company and why he is no longer the one leading it from £10m to £100m.
Pair Product and Marketing From Day One
Oliver started out believing that “if I just make the product really good, everything else will work itself out.” And that belief died quickly.
What changed him was watching other founders do ten times his revenue with terrible products and excellent marketing. Instead of writing them off, he reverse‑engineered what they were doing, especially on Indiegogo.
The shift:
He stopped treating marketing as something you bolt on after the product.
Every major growth spike at Swytch came from combining a product innovation with a specific launch campaign.
The rule became: never build at scale until you know people want exactly what you are about to ship.
If you are still “finishing the product” while vaguely planning to “figure out marketing later”, you are already behind.
Treat product and marketing as one system. Every build should have a launch. Every launch should shape what you build next.
Fail Your Product Launches in Private, Not in Public
From the outside, Swytch looks like a string of hit launches.
Inside, it was something else entirely.
Swytch ran lots of product launches that flopped. You just never saw them. They tested everything behind closed doors:
Early access lists.
Different feature bundles.
Different price points.
Different propositions.
If something did not land, they went straight back to the drawing board and tried again two weeks later with a new prototype or offer.
Only when they saw real demand from real customers did they move to mass production.
Your public roadmap should be a highlight reel. Do your messy experiments where only a test cohort can see them.
Build a Waiting List That Actually Waits
None of that testing would have worked without one thing: an enormous, highly engaged email list.
Swytch grew a mailing list to almost 2 million people, largely off the back of their video and landing page funnel. The key was not just size, but trust.
They had one simple rule: never email unless you have something genuinely relevant to say.
Oliver constantly pushed back on the classic “weekly newsletter” instinct. In his view:
Week one people open. Week three they stop. Then you’ve burned your list.
Because Swytch emailed rarely and with real news, they could reliably:
Test a product with ten thousand people at a time.
See real conversion before committing manufacturing capital.
Launch to a base that was primed and waiting.
Email is an asset, not a vanity metric. Protect attention ruthlessly.
Use Pre‑Orders as a Funding Tool, But Know the Limit
Swytch was built on pre‑orders.
In a perfect world, Oliver says they would always have raised capital nine months before each major launch. In reality, their biggest fundraises landed at almost the exact time as their biggest launches.
The pattern:
2018: Raised ~£1m while doing ~£1m revenue.
2021: Raised ~£4m while doing ~£4m revenue.
Later: Raised ~£1m while doing ~£2m revenue.
Fundamentally, they were constantly under‑capitalised. At peak, with around £15m in annual sales, they needed roughly £8m just in working capital to offer fast delivery. They never had more than £2m.
So they leaned on pre‑orders and long delivery times far longer than they would have liked. It worked, but it hurt.
The fundraising upside was clear, though. When investors came back a month in and asked “So, how are sales?”, Oliver could say, “We just did £4m.” Rounds closed quickly.
Pre‑orders can prove demand and de‑risk your raise, especially in hardware. Just be honest about when the working capital strain stops being clever and starts destroying customer experience.
Understand That the Funding Game Has Changed
The hardware funding landscape Oliver raised into is not the one you are in now.
At one point, he notes, eye‑watering sums were being poured into hardware. By 2023, that had collapsed. Investors who once extrapolated gross profit and revenue now led with one question: “Are you already profitable?”
Swytch had strong revenue growth (from ~£2m to ~£8m, then to ~£15m) and solid gross margins.
What they did not have was consistent net profit, partly because they had invested ahead in team and leadership. That was perfectly rational in the earlier environment. It became a liability in the new one.
They found themselves stuck in the gap between seed and Series A: too big and complex for scrappy angel money, not profitable enough for cautious later‑stage capital.
Do not assume that hitting growth and gross margin targets will be enough. Build a path to real profitability, especially if you are hardware or working‑capital heavy.
Use the 15 Percent Rule Without Lying to Yourself
Very early on, Oliver worked out a simple rule of thumb for Swytch:
They could sustainably spend about 15 percent of next year’s revenue on the team.
On paper, that sounds responsible. In practice, it meant they were usually ahead of themselves and routinely overspending by £500k to £1m on people.
For years, he hired against conservative future revenue targets, rather than today’s bank balance. When growth hit headwinds, he had to do repeated, painful rounds of cuts, including some of the people he valued most.
Two counter‑intuitive things he found:
The people most loyal to the mission took redundancy news the best, because they cared about the company surviving.
The only way to make those calls is to be clinical about the bottom line, however much you like your org chart.
Whatever your “people budget rule” is, run it against today’s cash and a worst‑case forecast, not just the figures you want to be true.
One Hero Video Can Be Your Whole Growth Engine
Ask Oliver what really sat behind Swytch’s growth and he doesn’t talk about funnels, channels or attribution. He talks about video.
Specifically, a single “hero video” that told the whole story:
What Swytch is.
Why it exists.
How it works.
Who is behind it.
The bigger vision.
Back in 2019, when they were almost out of cash, they were forced to make that video on a shoestring. About £2k went on a videographer. Oliver and his co‑founder wrote it, fronted it and edited it themselves.
That video:
Drove the bulk of their paid acquisition for years.
Got them on BBC, Sky and The Gadget Show because producers saw it and reached out.
Directly attracted investors, including a family office that ended up putting in ~£500k.
Became slide one in every pitch with a simple CTA: "Watch this.”
Across a couple of years, Swytch generated an estimated £15m to £20m of revenue from around £1m of ad spend behind that creative.
No viral hit. Just a clear story, told well, shown to a lot of people.
Before you pour money into complex stacks, make one piece of content so strong it can sit at the centre of your marketing and fundraising.
Do Your Own Press Before You Hire an Agency
Swytch did work with PR agencies. They were competent. They got some results. They were also never the highest ROI line in the budget.
The best press, Oliver says, came from founder‑led outreach:
Identify the exact kind of coverage you want.
Find the journalists who already write those pieces.
Email them personally with a tight angle that clearly fits their beat.
Agencies struggle to replicate the authenticity and urgency of “I built this, here is why your audience will care”. For Swytch, founder‑to‑journalist was consistently more effective than retainer‑to‑journalist.
Squeezed everything from direct founder outreach before looking at PR retainers are a luxury.
Do Not Let a High Valuation Become a Trap
In 2021, Swytch raised at a pre‑money valuation of around £42m. Revenue was climbing fast and the market was hot. It felt deserved.
What Oliver did not fully appreciate at the time was how a high valuation can backfire when things do not go perfectly to plan.
If you come back for capital without having hit the next obvious milestone, a flat or down round becomes likely. A down round hurts morale, damages option value and scares fresh investors. You can quickly end up in a position where everyone agrees the company needs more money, but no one will bridge the gap at a price that works.
He now thinks that if they had raised at, say, £10m to £15m instead of £42m, they would probably have been able to raise again later on better terms and keep the company’s momentum smoother.
There is a genuine upside to a slightly “under‑priced” round: it keeps the door open for future capital if the world turns against you.
Do not treat valuation purely as a scoreboard. Optimise for the probability you can raise again in a worse market, not just how big the number looks.
Know When You Are Not the CEO for the Next Chapter
The ending matters.
Oliver did not exit with a yacht and a LinkedIn victory lap. He stepped aside because the plan Swytch needed to follow was no longer the one he was best at executing.
He is an innovation‑and‑launch founder. His playbook is:
New products. Clever launches. Growth hacking. Demand creation.
The investors’ plan, and the company’s reality, had shifted to:
Tight profitability. Operational discipline. Maintaining and gradually growing existing revenue lines. Lower risk, more conservative decisions.
The new CEO, Paul Reeves, with experience taking businesses from around £10m to £100m, was a better fit. Oliver’s last big act as CEO was to radically cut overheads, simplify the business and hand over something lean, breakeven and genuinely set up to scale.
He still advises on marketing. He is still a shareholder. He just is not the one in the seat any more, and he is fine with that.
Part of being a good founder is knowing when to pass the baton. There is likely someone else that can run the company you started and take it to its full potential.
Oliver's candid account took us through the beginning, the end and the messy middle. The stuff that founders seldom talk about but are fundamental in ensuring others avoid the same pitfalls.
This was just as much a story of success as it was one of reflection.
Watch the full event here.
