In Conversation with Sanjay Lobo: The Vision and Drive Behind OnHand

Sanjay Lobo is the founder and CEO of OnHand, and has led OnHand on its immense upwards trajectory over the past five years. 

From ranking at #13 on the Startups 100 2024 list and becoming B Corp certified, to featuring on BBC’s Dragons’ Den and securing investment from four dragons, as well as facilitating over 1 million OnHand actions in 2023 and nearing the planting of 1 million trees, Sanjay and OnHand have faced huge success recently.

Sanjay formerly served on the exec team at two unicorns, Lastminute.com (one of the UK's first dotcom unicorns) and Vistaprint (Nasdaq listed, with 17 million customers), leading growth teams across the EU and US. In 2019, he founded OnHand to help solve some of society's biggest issues using technology. Since then he has been named Great British Entrepreneur for Good twice in 2020 and 2022 and an MBE appointment in 2022 for OnHand’s services to older adults during COVID-19.

OnHand is an impact platform that facilitates doing good and feeling great. The volunteer app showcases hundreds of local and remote opportunities for our OnHand Heroes in order to create collective community action. The OnHand app is a serious contender in the tech for good sphere, and we’re only getting bigger.

We sat down and had a chat with Sanjay about OnHand’s recent success, challenges, motivations, and his vision for the future!

OnHand’s success in the startup rankings

What do you think sets OnHand up for success within the startup ecosystem, and what sets us apart from other startups?

What sets us apart from other startups? I think we're very much ‘of the moment’.

The rise of responsible business is a huge trend. Whilst we probably see it, because that's the type of business we are and the businesses that work with us, we’re still right at the start of that trend becoming a super trend, and not just being early adopters.

[The rise of responsible business] is gonna become the norm, and you see it through B Corps, you see it through the rise of more companies talking about being responsible. You see it through impact reports, you see it through customers saying ‘if I'm going to buy from you, you need to be a responsible business and do the right thing for the planet’. Employees say that kind of stuff, and even shareholders say that kind of stuff.

So it certainly makes us different from the majority of other startups and I think that's why we get noticed. 

Securing Funding and Recognition

How would you say company fundraising has impacted OnHand’s growth and the direction we've gone in?

The funding, for us, has been phenomenal. 

If I go back in time, the first funding we did was when we were 2 months old. We started in February 2019, and in April 2019 we went and did that first friends and family round. Really, it was mostly people I've met through my career who were investors, especially in some of the last companies that I was in. They initially put some money in as investors, not, you know, friends and family - really as investors. Then they brought other people they knew in to fund us.

That money let us experiment in 2019 and 2020 on what the service was. You’ve probably heard of product market fit and finding product market fit as a startup.That's what we did, find our product market fit.

We started off with the wrong business model. We were charging someone like me to get help with my dad, or charging my dad directly. And that was wrong because, well, first off, you're charging somebody vulnerable, and, second off, you're charging out the volunteers’ time. That was just jarring – we kind of knew it was the wrong model.

The other models we tried – we tried some B2C subscription-type things that may have worked. To be honest, we didn't push it enough, and it coincided with when COVID hit. So that likely was a big opportunity for us to try B2C subscriptions at that point.

But where we really found our product market fit was with businesses wanting to engage their employees. The investment size wouldn't have helped us if we didn't have that kind of investment coming in in the first year.

There's no way we'd have survived that 2019 and then 2020 transition with COVID, because the B2B side really didn't kick off until 2021 in terms of any kind of revenue traction, which then attracted the larger investors to come in.

Founder Recognition and Leadership

Can you talk about the motivations for OnHand in the beginning? How has the motivation shifted through the years up until now?

I left my last big role in 2017. That was working for VistaPrint – big corporation, Nasdaq, global role, really fun job, really enjoyed it. Left that in 2017, joined a startup as their MD, and it didn't work out. I massively clashed with the founder almost from day one and I quit 6 months in.

And then I wasn't really sure what to do next. I could have fairly easily gone back to something like the jobs I've done before. Certainly, that group of people were starting up other things and it felt like I could join one of them doing that, but it didn't feel exciting.

So I was in my forties at that point, in the working world for two decades. I just didn't want to do the same thing again - essentially, you know, another great tech company making money for someone. It just didn't feel that that was the right thing to do at that moment of my life.

Then the idea for OnHand, it wasn't mine, came about from a bunch of charities. They realised volunteering had become really difficult and they wanted to make it more tech enabled and mobile first. 

When I came across the idea, I happened to be grappling with the same issues with my dad. My dad was living in London, I was living in Brighton, my dad had a bit of Parkinson's and he couldn't quite carry shopping anymore. I was struggling with how to solve for him getting shopping. 

So this idea came about. And, as soon as I saw it, I thought it solved my issue, but it could probably solve lots of people's issues.

Pretty much straight away I couldn't stop thinking about it. So, 7 days a week, I was already thinking about it before I'd had conversations with them. It was a consultancy working with the charities that were trying to get it off the ground. I eventually met them, did some interviewing with them, did some presenting to them about how I could take it on and develop it and, thankfully, they decided to bring me on board as the founder.

It was a wonderful idea. I wasn't sure it was the right model again, but I thought we could feel that out as we went.

So how's that shifted to now? It's massively different, right?

The core reason to do it was still there. If I could go back, would I have changed my mind and joined any other high-growth tech company? No, that's not the thing anymore. It's fun to do, but it's just not the right thing for the world.

So the world needs something different going forward, right? OnHand fills that, and the  motivation is definitely still there. But I've got more responsibilities at this point. I didn't have a team when we started, so I  feel massively responsible for the team. Got a bunch of investors, there's lots of them, lots of angels, a couple of VCs, I feel massively responsible for them.

And we've got hundreds of customers, tens of thousands of downloads and employees using the service. So the responsibility to them now is a massive motivation. I think someone asked me a few years ago, well ‘who's your boss?’, and I remember thinking about it, who is my boss?

And it's all of those stakeholders, it's the team, it's the companies that work with us, it's their employees, and it's the investors. All of that is the motivation now.

With that growth, you’ve obviously experienced challenges as well. Could you touch on a few challenges that you've faced over the years, either with the company or with yourself?

Very early on, especially in the first couple of years, there was a massive shift in the business and it gave us a great opportunity to become a scalable breakeven business. Up until that point, and then during the first couple of years of that experience, the stress levels are ginormous. 

As soon as you take on any employees, you’ve got to pay people. Whilst that's obvious, the stress that that involves for a founder isn’t that well known to non-founders. You're not profitable when you first start out, and you’ve got a certain pile of cash which is going to run.

So you've got runway, and you don't know if you'll get to the data points or the traction you need to raise the next lot of money. You take on some hires and you know you can pay them this month and next month and maybe the month after, but there’s that looming deadline of ‘I won't be able to pay them.’

In the first couple of years that's massively stressful because you're not that well funded at that point. All the investors tell you to grow fast, which probably means hiring and trying some different things, lots of which won't work, so you're spending the money at a certain pace.

And the stress that gave me was giant. I've never had hives before, but I started to break out in hives a couple of years ago and it spreads over your body and all that kind of stuff, but it's never really left. I feel much less stressed than I was in the first couple of years, but it never really leaves, so the stress is certainly one of the challenges.

The other challenge is maybe the same as lots of startups have, so the question of ‘can we get to profitability?’ is a massive one for us.

That's the real drive for us over this year and next year. We've got some growing customers, a wonderful growing recurring revenue stream, which is fab, and our costs just aren't going up anywhere near that pace.

We really should be able to get to breakeven and then profitability over the next year to two years. So that's that's a challenge, and we're five years in now so that's been huge for us. I think the story up until now has been ‘grow, grow, grow’, and that massively changed in 2023. With lots of tech companies, the ‘grow, grow, grow’ message shifted to ‘actually, let's be sustainable.’ I think rightly so.

People are also a challenge. We've got a wonderful team. We're 32 people now. We haven't always got it right on hires and not every person will be right for OnHand and OnHand might not be right for every person.

 I try to be conscious of that often, and I'm not talking just about myself here, but for anyone that hires folks, it has a massive impact on the internal culture. If you get it wrong and then you don't do anything about it, that's huge. You have got to be really comfortable with that kind of stuff too.

Maybe the last challenge, and it's probably people-related too, is we're a hundred percent remote team. That brings some challenges. 

It's not like when we're in the office and you can just have a quick chat with someone or overhear a conversation and say, ‘oh, by the way, you should probably bear this in mind’. I always think about the sales team, especially because they do a lot of calls with customers. They can't hear each other.

Part of being in an office is that you just hear people. You're not even listening to them, but you'll hear someone have a conversation with, I don't know, a new customer or maybe an end user or maybe an employee, a company that works with us, and you'll hear a conversation which you know will inform how you have that conversation when you next take a call. 

So being a remote company is another challenge and, you know, I'm not saying we get it right or anything like that. I think it’s massively still learning how to be a remote company and make that work.

Key Takeaways and Future Outlook

For you, for OnHand, what is the vision for the future at this moment in time?

In one sentence: it's to be the most impactful service we can be. 

We don't know everything, we're introducing new things all the time. We introduced sustainability actions a couple of years ago and we use publicly available sources for how we measure that stuff, but is that the best possible measurement that can be? Maybe not. Is that okay? Well, maybe it's okay for now, but to be the best service we could possibly be means we've got to know that stuff very well.

We've also got to know what's remote on our app. So I will see the most impactful things, but we've also got to be able to take people on a journey where they start on the app and come back and do more things, and then we later lead them on a journey that takes them to the most impactful stuff.

If we believe the user experience doesn't lend itself to the most impactful stuff first, there’s a lot of challenges in that whole journey.

Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on?

There's something about getting hires right. That's something I touched on earlier.

You’ve got to hire people, obviously, but you’ve got to make sure they fit with what you do and what you want and all that kind of stuff. If they don't, and some won't, that's normal and maybe it's not the right thing for the company.

You've got to make those choices as quickly as possible, right? It’s best for both sides but has the least impact on the company culture. There's something about how some people are right for different stages of business.

It's a weird one. Some folks just grow and grow with your business, but actually there's others who are happy to be amazing for a certain period. It's really interesting seeing people who are right for certain parts of your journey but maybe not right for some of the late stages.

Getting to our size and then growing as fast as we do and becoming the most impactful app – you can't do it alone. 

Highlights 

It’s not always been easy for Sanjay and OnHand. Despite earning himself titles like MBE, Dragons’ Den winner, and Exceptional Founder, Sanjay highlights that being a founder doesn’t come without its fair share of stresses and challenges.

OnHand wasn’t a one-person effort. Sanjay mentions the involvement of everybody who’s brought OnHand to where it is today, and how many people it takes to facilitate doing good.

Despite it all, OnHand’s motivations have remained largely the same: to do good. Although the methods have changed over the years, with funding and teams giving us the chance to experiment in ways we wouldn’t normally be able to, we’ve kept our eyes on the same endpoint.

In summary, OnHand is the company that makes it as easy as possible for people to do good. We’re continuing on our mission to make a global impact, and our commitment hasn’t wavered at all over the past 5 years; in fact, it’s only grown stronger.