Bark: The British tech platform helping small businesses

Kai Feller learned to code as a student and, with his co-founder Andrew Michael, saw a gap in the market in 2015.

What if they could create a kind of “Amazon for services”?

He explains in detail to Sir Richard Harpin how he went about scaling this idea in our latest Business Leader podcast.

Bark connects small businesses and sole traders to potential customers. It handles a vast range of services, including accounting, website design, gardening and tutoring.

Customers can post about the services they need, then Bark can sell these leads to the small businesses providing those services.

The name is a nod to Twitter. If birds tweet to get attention, then dogs bark.

Feller made the decision to bootstrap the business from day one, he explains, because it was asset-light, only required a small team and had sound unit economics. He and his co-founder tweaked the business model to figure out what worked best, experimenting with ideas like subscription-rate prices, to find where the best margins lay.

After they found their successful model in the UK, they took it abroad. They were able to operate successfully in the US without having a physical presence there, Feller explains to Harpin, since their platform could in effect be automated.

Eventually, the business would expand to nine countries.

When the business appeared in a prominent list called Tech Track 100, suitors came to their door.

Feller used an advisory firm to identify the best ones. Based on their financial forecasts, they were able to sell Bark to EMK Capital, a global private equity firm that specialises in mid-sized businesses. The sale netted £240m in 2022.

It was a life-changing amount of money, and allowed Feller to eventually step down just as he was welcoming the birth of his daughter.

Like Harpin, he used some of his exit money to buy his local pub. It’s a village pub in Devon, where his parents had their wedding reception, Feller explains.

Feller still advises Bark, but is now working on a new start-up called Cyberstaff. Once more, he is focused on helping small companies that offer a service, but this time it is by helping them run more efficiently by using AI.

“Genuinely [it feels] there's been a new piece of technology invented for the first time in my lifetime,” says Feller, “and everything is going to be disrupted and it's so exciting.”

Looking back at the growth of Bark, he has two key pieces of advice, which he is trying to follow himself. Don’t be afraid to use some of your profits to reinvest in your product. This will help you to build a moat against competitors.

And set your ambition high at the outset, because this will model your behaviour when you are stuck in the detail of the day-to-day running of the business.