Credit where it's due - understanding your audience - Sho Sugihara, Co-founder & CEO of Pave

This week our guest is Sho Sugihara, co-founder and CEO of Pave - an app made to help fix your credit score through personalised credit fixes, bill monitoring and active credit building. Sugihara shares his journey that sparked his passion to start Pave and the entrepreneurs who inspired him when starting out. He emphasises the importance of understanding and listening to your customers and how having a great product alone isn’t enough. Sugihara delves on the explosive growth they experienced using Tiktok - growing the business to over half a million monthly customers - and how a passionate team underpins the success and growth of Pave so far.

Show Notes

Sho Sugihara recounts his experiences that inspired and led him to start Pave. He talks on the importance of passion in addition to having a great product and audience. Sugihara emphasises the necessity of listening to your customers and how he went one step further by living their experiences. This commitment to understanding his audience allowed Sugihara to grow his business to over half a million monthly customers. He opens up on what it means to have a team as passionate as yourself and how their combined ideas helped in the use of Tiktok that led to explosive growth for their brand.

Sugihara is Pave’s co-founder and CEO. Born in Kyoto he studied politics, psychology and sociology at the University of Cambridge. He received a BA from King’s College, where he focussed on informal economies and economic exclusion. Sugihara began his career working with NGOs across Latin America, implementing socially responsible economic solutions to reduce poverty. He then joined McKinsey & Company where he consulted global clients across the financial and healthcare service sectors on strategy and business. His experience in consulting and reading on economic exclusion led him to leave McKinsey in 2017 and co-found fintech firm Pave.

What is UKTN | The Podcast?

Each week, Jane Wakefield sits down with some of the key movers and shakers from the UK tech ecosystem for the UKTN Podcast. Learn growth strategies from both seasoned and up-and-coming founders, hear market sentiments from investors, and understand the tech policy affecting businesses across the country.

The UKTN Podcast provides insight into the most influential people in the UK’s innovation economy, exploring their personal and professional journeys and hearing their views on the hottest tech topics of the day.