Nifty co-founder Piers Ridyard was taught by his dad that “if you need something done, give it to a busy person”. It was in this spirit that Piers started developing a storage solution for his MacBook whilst in the middle of his university exams in January 2012.

After developing the first working prototype in Manchester’s Fab Lab facilities, Piers and Steve Levy started a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund their first production in late 2012 – and with $384,000, exceeded their initial target of $11,000 by far. Since then, they have secured production partners and further refined their design. Their main aim for the year ahead is to start building and designing other products to grow the business.

Q&A with Piers Ridyard, co-founder of Nifty

We asked him about his experience and reflections on starting up.

There are various funding opportunities for startups – why did you go for venture capital?

We went to the banks. We went to Barclays and said, “Can we have a credit line? We crowdfunded $400,000 in 28 days, we have 20,000 people on our mailing list who want mini-drives. Can you lend against that? And we’d like to use the government’s equity loan guarantee scheme because then your risk is basically 25 per cent of that and with 20,000 people on our books times $40, that’s a lot of money”. Ultimately it was rejected as a loan, which meant that we had to raise venture capital.

Looking back, what has been challenging in the process of starting your company?

I think the big issue for entrepreneurs is the gap between zero and two years. After your two years’ trading you tend to have a lot more access to a huge number of different things because you do have two years of accounts, you have trading history and people can really look at you in a way that they couldn’t before that, but how that gap is bridged is a difficult one.

What is your experience of Manchester’s startup ecosystem?

In London you can raise money. Most people can raise money - at least the first round, which often means that you get a lot of companies that shouldn’t really be there. Whereas in Manchester, people really have to fight to survive and, as a result, the people that we’re working near have a lot more drive, a lot more ambition and are of a higher quality in general.