Power to the people: the website that promises to keep you on the best energy tariff for life

Switch your energy supplier the easy way and save money — this Dragons’ Den start-up shows you how.
© BBC

In 13 years of Dragons’ Den, no one has walked away quite so pinch-yourself happy as Henry De Zoete and Will Hodson from Look After My Bills.

They received a “whopping” £120,000 offer for just three per cent of their energy autoswitching business.

That means the pair left BBC Two’s fire-breathing investors Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden, Tej Lalvani and Jenny Campbell with a company valued at a princely £4 million.

“Which feels nice, because we took a lot of advice beforehand from people who took immense pleasure in forwarding YouTube videos of businesses being absolutely barbecued in the Den,” says Hodson.

“Anyone going on the Den is going to have nightmares about where it could all go wrong. People go on the show for exposure, but if someone simply pulls your pants down, that’s exposure, too.”

HOW DOES AUTOSWITCHING WORK?

So who are these start-up upstarts, and what’s their big idea? The 10-person company’s algorithm finds its 83,000-strong customer base “the best gas and electricity deals”, switching people automatically when a better deal becomes available. That base was 10,000 before Dragons’ Den aired in August.

“In other words, it behaves like the rational consumer that no one actually is, because they don’t have the time or energy to actually do it,” says De Zoete.

His beef is not just with the “rip-off” tariffs set by the Big Six energy firms, which “wait until you’re not paying attention and then quietly whack your prices up”. It’s also with “problematic” rival comparison websites failing to tackle the status quo.

“That leaves the space clear for a disruptive company like ours who don’t mind upsetting the table to make things work for their users,” says De Zoete.

That pitch won the Dragons over, eventually. “We were in the studio three hours for 16 minutes of footage, so it was tense,” says Hodson.

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Look After My Bills, he says, is just the latest in a series of “people-powered, mass campaign” projects.

In 2014 he and Hodson set up The Big Deal, a collective bargaining platform that allowed consumers to grab one-off energy deals to save money.

The idea was to get a large number of people and, collectively, negotiate deals they couldn’t make on their own.

“We were very campaign focused, very anti Big Six. We broke some big stories attacking price comparison websites,” says De Zoete.

“We moved about £100 million of energy custom away from the Big Six, and in the end got 10,000 consumers to ‘go green.’” But they were stumped by what to do when the deals ran out. Hence autoswitching.

They hired former OVO Energy engineer, Dan Sherrard-Smith, to build their algorithm, and won a place in Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator start-up business accelerator late last year.

“It’s like a different planet out there,” says Hodson. “In Silicon Valley it’s almost as if Trump didn’t happen. People just look for the great solutions, and for new things, as salvation. They look to technology and business rather than government, which is really interesting.”

To join the “autoswitching” revolution, customers sign-up to Look After My Bills online and enter their energy details: gas and/or electricity supplier, whether they want renewable energy only, current tariff and estimated usage in kWh.

The service first calculates how much they might save initially (eg £202 a year with Green Network Energy), then moves them to a better deal as and when it becomes available.

Power to the people, indeed.

WHO ARE THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE AUTOSWITCHING REVOLUTION?

Will Hodson and Henry De Zoete
Matt Writtle

The two entrepreneurs behind Look After My Bills, both now in their thirties, became BFFs at Bristol University.

Will Hodson says: “Henry had done a gap year and exuded the worldliness, wisdom and the ethnic beads of someone who had done so.”

Old Etonian De Zoete studied Politics and Philosophy while ex-UCS Hampstead boy Hodson read Economics and Politics.

Hodson then spent a year shadowing Green Party MPs before joining accountancy firm Deloitte, then refocusing on consumer issues with research co-operative Ethical Consumer.

De Zoete, meanwhile, worked for Right-wing think tank Reform after university, then with Tony Blair’s old adviser Tim Allen for four years as a consultant at Portland PR, before becoming special adviser to Michael Gove.

He and another ex-Gove special adviser, Dominic Cummings, then rose rapidly to public prominence working for Vote Leave, the official campaign to leave the European Union.

De Zoete was Head of Digital. “I did some strategy. But mainly I did the focus groups,” he says.

“I’d urge anyone to sit in the back of a focus group anywhere outside London. You’ll see how completely out of touch the London bubble is with the rest of the country.”