Dominic Mills, founder and chief executive of Yuup tells Insider what drives him to start different businesses, and how he plans to use drones to scale his business over the next five years.
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00:00Hi, I'm Dominic Mills, founder and CEO of YAP, the Local Experience Marketplace.
00:19I think for me it's about the people, so when you create a business it's in every sense
00:23about the people, whether that's the people who become part of the team, in this case
00:27the YAP team, the customers or the wider community that you engage with as part of building a
00:32business and that creates amazing opportunities and seeing people come together and create
00:37something is for me what it's all about.
00:41So I was fortunate to exit a previous business and when I was thinking about what I wanted
00:45to do next, I really liked the idea of doing two things, firstly creating a product of
00:50our own because I'd spent the previous 10 years or so building digital products for
00:55clients and the idea of creating something that we could take forward and evolve over
01:00a longer period of time was really exciting and second I wanted to do something that had
01:04a positive social impact because I felt like as a second time entrepreneur I'd had lots
01:10of great opportunity to build my first business, so I wanted to do something that perhaps would
01:15benefit a wider community of people.
01:24About two years ago I saw the London New Year's Eve show where for the first time they used
01:29drones alongside the fireworks spectacular on New Year's Eve and it got me thinking that
01:35perhaps there was an opportunity to use drones to put on a spectacular theatrical production
01:41and I met Celestial who are one of the leaders in drone art and together we hatched a plan
01:47to create a drone light show production and where we're stood right now in Bristol at
01:53the City Unique Stadium was actually the location of our first show in December 2023
02:00and just since then we have toured two shows all over the UK and they've been enjoyed by
02:06nearly 100,000 people.
02:08So one of the things about the drone shows is that we've taken them now to eight regional
02:13cities all around the UK and met some fantastic audiences who've come along and enjoyed the
02:18shows in their thousands and crucially that gives us a platform to launch up into those
02:24local communities and our route to doing that is to meet local community hosts, so people
02:33who want to host experiences, something they're passionate about, it could be pottery or foraging
02:37or wine tasting and because we've built an audience in those local regional cities we
02:45then can introduce those brilliant local hosts to our audience so our exciting plan
02:51is to continue rolling out Yelp city by city across the UK.
02:56So the core Yelp proposition of helping local individuals and small businesses market their
03:03experiences is currently live in five cities across the UK and our plan for the next five
03:08years is to scale that across the entire country.
03:12So we're planning five further cities in 2025 and the next one up will be Brighton very
03:20early in the new year so we're extremely excited about taking Yelp to Brighton and then to
03:25other cities across the UK throughout the year.