The founder who decided to stop raising and just build something good.
Steve Darrah bootstrapped Really Honest from nothing, couldn’t get investors to move fast enough on an industry ripe for disruption, and built one of the most human companies in a sector not known for its warmth.
Here’s what founders can learn from that.
Interview by Ash Phillips, Rebellious Co | Feature for TechSPARK
There’s a version of the founder story that gets told a lot in the Bristol tech ecosystem. Raise a round, hire fast, scale hard. Steve Darrah, founder of Really Honest, has a different version. He tried to raise money – repeatedly, across multiple years – watched the process consume time he didn’t have, and eventually made a decision that more founders probably should: stop chasing the round and just build the business.
Eight years later, Really Honest is a bootstrapped, B Corp-certified insurance broker with twenty employees, around a thousand clients, and a rebrand that is generating more genuine conversation than most funded companies manage with a full marketing budget. Not bad for an industry that most founders engage with only when they absolutely have to.
“I spent probably a year and a half, maybe two years speaking to investors who either moved too slowly or didn’t see the opportunity. What that forced us to do was bootstrap – and honestly, that turned out to be the making of the business.”
The honesty is disarming, and deliberate. It’s also kind of the point.
Starting with a problem you’re actually angry about
Really Honest exists because Steve got fed up working inside an industry he couldn’t respect. His first job out of school was insurance – not an obvious launchpad for a disruptive business, but the frustration turned out to be useful.
“I got to a stage where I hated it so much that I wanted to fix it,” he says. “There was just this moment where I thought: I’m going to do it myself.”
He left a well-paid role, took out loans, leaned on a supportive partner, and submitted an FCA application that came back approved in eight weeks – one of the fastest on record. He wasn’t entirely ready. The website didn’t exist yet. He built it himself, alongside all the contracts and clauses, while the first clients started to trickle in from his existing network.
It’s the kind of scrappy, slightly chaotic start that most founders recognise. What’s less common is what came next: instead of letting the chaos define the business, Steve built something deliberately different from the industry he’d come from.
What founders actually forget about insurance
Most early-stage founders treat insurance the way they treat their boiler – they know it’s important, they set up a direct debit, and they quietly hope nothing goes catastrophically wrong. The problem, as Steve is at pains to point out, is that “off-the-shelf” rarely means “actually what you need.”
Really Honest’s model starts with a conversation, not a form. They ask founders what their business actually does before recommending anything. It sounds obvious. It apparently isn’t standard practice.
“We try to be the first policy you’ll ever buy and the last policy you’ll ever need – not because your company died, but because hopefully you’ve gone on to exit or IPO.”
They’ve also tackled some of the structural absurdities of the industry head-on. Claims under £25,000 don’t trigger premium increases on most of their policies. They’ve introduced a no-claims bonus to the commercial market -something Steve notes, with some exasperation, that nobody had apparently bothered to do before. The logic is simple: insurance that punishes you for using it isn’t really insurance.
There’s also a specific call-out for founders raising money: D&O (directors and officers) insurance is, in Steve’s view, non-negotiable the moment a VC gets involved. He’s seen too many founders get into trouble without it. “Even if you think they’re nice, they will try and find a way to protect their investment at your expense. Please buy D&O.” It’s not cheap advice. At around £500 a year for early-stage companies, it’s one of the least expensive forms of protection available.
Bootstrapping in a funded world
The fundraising narrative that dominated the tech ecosystem for the better part of a decade made bootstrapping feel like a consolation prize. Steve’s story is a useful corrective to that.
“I’m probably testament to there being another way,” he says. “If you’re trying to raise money and don’t, there’s always a route to revenue first.”
In practice, that meant being strategic about clients from the start. Really Honest built its early base around high-growth companies – startups and scale-ups with investors, hiring plans, and contracts to sign. Every time a client grew, so did the policy. It created a compounding effect that funded growth without external capital.
It also meant hiring differently. Steve prefers taking on young, hungry people with no insurance background over experienced hires who’ve absorbed the industry’s bad habits. His first employee was his sister, now the company’s top salesperson. His cousin served as CTO. His wife joined as head of people. It’s a business built around trust, which is either a liability or a strength depending on how you manage it – and twenty employees in, it looks like the latter.
Brand as the only weapon left
Really Honest recently rebranded from their previous identity, Fuelled. The trigger was partly competitive – two similar businesses had entered the space and started eating into the same positioning. But it was also something more intentional: a chance to say clearly what the business actually believes.
The name is both a value statement and a product promise. Staff are encouraged to be genuinely honest with clients – including, apparently, about how their day is going, which Steve acknowledges is unusual in financial services but very much on brand.
The brand is also their primary marketing channel, by necessity. “We can’t compete with the likes of Hiscox, who are spending upwards of £150 per click on Google,” Steve says. “So we’re competing socially.” That means content, conversation, community – showing up in the places where founders are already talking to each other, rather than trying to outspend incumbents on search.
It’s a strategy that requires patience and genuine presence. It also requires the product to be good enough to generate word of mouth. Really Honest’s bet is that those two things are the same investment.
“We try to be the most anti insurance company you’ll ever see. We’re not going to funnel you into tick boxes. You’ll speak to a person every time.”
Human first, AI second
There’s a specific thing Really Honest does that keeps coming up when founders talk about them. Every quarter, someone from the team gets in touch to check whether anything has changed – a new contract, a new hire, a new
product line that might affect coverage. It’s a simple thing. It’s also apparently rare enough that customers regularly assume it’s automated.
Steve’s response to that assumption is instructive: the whole point is that it isn’t. “When something does change, you don’t want a robot to give you the answer back.” The company uses AI internally to support its operations, but the client-facing relationship stays human. In an industry where the default is to reduce friction by reducing contact, it’s a deliberate choice to go the other way.
It’s a small illustration of something bigger. As AI capability increases and automation becomes the default solution to almost every operational problem, the businesses that choose to stay human – and can articulate why – are starting to look less like outliers and more like a distinct competitive position.
Really Honest has been building that position for eight years. It took a rebrand to make it explicit, but the culture was always there. That’s probably the most useful thing about Steve’s story for founders in the Bristol and Bath ecosystem: the brand isn’t the business. The business is the brand. And you can’t retrofit that once you’ve already built something else.
The practical takeaway
If you’re a founder and you haven’t had a proper conversation about your insurance coverage recently – or ever – it’s worth doing, especially if your business has grown or changed since you first bought a policy. The gap
between what most off-the-shelf policies cover and what a growing, complex business actually needs is often larger than people expect.
Really Honest work specifically with startups and scale-ups across the tech ecosystem. You can reach them at reallyhonest.co
— Ash Phillips is the founder of Rebellious Co, a community and events organisation connecting entrepreneurs across 30 cities and 10 countries. He hosts Rebel Meetups Bristol monthly.
