Ben O'Brien on Faces Consent's Innovative Solutions in Aesthetics

Hi guys, my name is Ben O ‘Brien, I’m from England and my background is in aesthetics so we do a lot of Botox and Dermal filler across the UK and we run an app called Faces Consent. It’s a booking system app for the beauty industry.

Okay, so what happened was a couple of years ago, we’ve been doing this for about three years now, Faces. So what happened was we were running physical brick and mortar clinics in the UK. So we had a team of doctors and nurses doing Botox and dermal filler injections. But then we found a need within our own business for digital consent forms, because at the time everyone was doing their consent forms for the treatments on paper.

So what we did then was we converted the paper consent forms into a digital consent form. So we created a small mini app for our own business. And then from there, we launched the app, started using it, and then other practitioners within our industry asked if they could use our app. So we said, yeah, no problem. You can use it for free. So we opened it up to everybody. And then more more practitioners started to download our app and start using it to run their business alongside too.
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Yes, we’ve got over 120 ,000 people, professionals that use our app. So our target audience is aesthetic practitioners. So any doctors, nurses, beauticians that want to use their app to store all their business information, store their client information, buy products, so you can buy your Botox and you can buy your fillers from our app and find insurance companies. And it’s like a mini ecosystem. So you can manage your whole business directly from our apps. So anyone that works in the beauty industry or the aesthetic industry is our target audience currently.

Yeah, we’re predominantly just UK based. We have a lot of American users on our platform at the moment, but we’re developing it a lot more for the US at the moment. So we’ve got people like Thresher, Booksy, Gloss Genie in the US, and Style Seats in the US. So there’s quite a few big players. But where we specialise, we specialise in the aesthetic industry. So that’s where our real niche is massive, it’s a brilliant powered industry anyway, the aesthetic, but where a lot of our competitors, kind of more general, so they’ll take on hairdressers, barbers, aesthetic practitioners, beauticians, nail techs, laser techs, so they’re more general where we’re looking to specialise in the one area currently.

Yeah, many challenges. So one of the biggest challenges at the moment in the UK is the regulations. So our industry is unregulated, unlike in America, where you have to be a doctor or an advanced nurse to do aesthetics , where in the UK, anyone can do aesthetics. So you, Stephen, you could get trained next week and start injecting people’s faces if you wanted to.

So one of our biggest, because hurdles at the moment, is becoming regulated within our industry. So we have to go through a lot of licensing. So we have to get our app certain licences so it can create prescriptions for pharmacy and it can do all the features that it needs to do. So licences is biggest one. Tech is another one. So we’re constantly looking for new developers, expanding the team, creating better team, better workforce, and finding people that understand what we do and how we do it. That’s always the biggest challenge in tech.

Yeah, so we’ve got, there’s people that work in an office or they just do manual labour one day and next thing you know they’ve to put themselves onto a weekend training course to do botox and next thing they know they’re doing botox on Monday. So we’re one of the only countries in the world without any regulation at the moment for this aesthetics.

You can find articles where problems have happened, on our app, we’ve done over 4 million consent forms over the last four years. And there’s only been a couple of cases that have ever gone to Tribunal or through the insurance company. They want the regulation in the UK, not just because of safety, but also because of finances before doctors.

We’re only able to do it in the UK, but then nurses were able to do it. And then what happened was beauticians were able to do it and then everybody was able to do it. And then it kind of diluted people’s earnings. So the medical industry wants to take control of it again. So the beauticians are a bit pushed out because what we’re finding in our industry is a lot of the beauticians are very creative and good at marketing where the doctors are more academics and their marketing skills aren’t as good as a beautician and they’re not as creative as them when it comes to how people look and how they want to look. So you’ll find that a beautician will get a lot of work from someone and the client used to go to the doctor in the local area but now they’re left because the price was half price and the work was probably just as good. So it can’t have a finance thing as well. People don’t like the industry being too saturated.

Yeah, so we’re looking at getting more licensing, so what we’re trying to do at the moment. So we’ve just recently launched our own pharmacy. So in the UK, you buy your product. So you buy your dermal filler and you buy your toxin through the pharmacy. So we’ve just launched our own pharmacy. So it’s been quite well so far. And then we’re looking at getting our wholesale licence. So the wholesale licence will allow us to sell toxin to other pharmacies as well. So we want what long term we want to be the biggest supplier of Botox in the UK. That’s where we’re looking at going.

A lot of it’s all been organic. So we haven’t done any paid marketing so far and we generate 3 million pounds a month in sales. We’ve got 120 ,000 practitioners that are outside registered and it’s all being organic. So what we did was our biggest marketing strategy was to contact people on Facebook direct. So what we did in the early days was joined all the groups, the Facebook groups that had beauticians in, had aesthetic practitioners in, had hairdressers in. These focus groups, we just messaged them directly.

Adam as a friend and then just said to them, look, we’ve launched this new app. Would you like to come and have a look at it and give us your feedback? And we did that to like a hundred people a day. And then people started downloading it and then they started finding a use for it. And then from there, they told other people, so that word of mouth. But also we partnered up with training schools. So where people get trained to do aesthetics , we would partner with the training school. And then when their students come in, the teacher would then say download faces for free consent form up. So because it was free and people were kind of like latch onto it quite quickly.

But yeah, some more collaborations really. So collaboration, that’s how we grew.

Yeah, so we do a bit now, a bit of Facebook ads and a few Google ad campaigns, but it’s just for certain parts of the app. But yeah, we get about 170 people download the app every day and it’s just mostly through organic, well, I don’t know.

Don’t do it. No, so, you know, I heard on a podcast the other day that don’t do something you’re passionate about. Do something you’re good at if you want to make money because, you know, people go into their things and they think they’re passionate about it then they don’t make any money. And the next thing you know, they’re not passionate about it. So always play to your strengths and play to your, you know, really understand what you want to do.

I always think, if you’ve got expertise in a subject, do that. If you’ve got, if you’ve worked at a place before, say if you worked in a corporate environment and you’ve seen a bit of a gap in that corporate environment market, then go and create that. Don’t, don’t, don’t start being a banker one day and then selling cakes the next, because the reality is you don’t know enough about creating cakes because you don’t know what you don’t know at the same time. And that’s what can hit you if you’re not ready for it. So I always say, if you’re going to start a business, start it off small and then do what you’re at.

No, I’ve pretty much quickly covered everything there really, but it’s good to explain about what we’re doing and how we’re growing and some of our techniques on how to grow a business organically. I think it’s just a case of sticking at it as well and not quitting too soon. Because it does take a few years for it to keep going.

Yeah, no problem.