The story of a seven-figure investment offer, an IP stand-off, a crushing collapse – and what happened when I dropped my old app brief into Claude Cowork.
I wasn’t looking for investors.
That’s the first thing to understand. I wasn’t on the circuit, pitching to rooms, doing the rounds. I was living in rural France, in a house that was giving me mould poisoning, with internet that died for a week at a time and four hundred neighbours who didn’t speak English.
We were in the middle of a country-moving marathon that would entail 7 house moves in two years. I was getting the kids into new schools every new term, figuring out the hell that is the French administrative system, packing and unpacking our entire lives into rental accommodation while trying to keep a business running in the background.
My business was, if I’m honest, on the floor.
And then my brother introduced me to someone. A networking connection. Just a chat. And I mentioned my vision – a mental wellness app, like Calm or Headspace, but built around Head Trash Clearance. A DIY version of the method I’d spent fifteen years developing. Something that could scale.
He said: are you looking for investment?
I said: not actively, but I’m not going to say no.
He said: I know people. Have you got a pitch deck?
I did not have a pitch deck. But I’ve written pitch decks. I know marketing. I’ve done a management buyout, I’ve pitched for budget in boardrooms, I know what a strong deck looks like.
He came back later that day saying he’d organised a meeting with an investor. In five days.
We worked on it solidly for two days. The following Monday, I was on a Zoom call with an investor.
Halfway through the call, he stopped me.
“I’m not going to give you £350,000,” he said. “I’m going to give you a million. You need a million to build this.”
What a million pounds feels like when it’s your idea
I’ve pitched for money before. In corporate life, you pitch for budget, for campaigns, for headcount. You sit in boardrooms and you make the case and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t. It’s just the job.
This was not that.
This was my idea. My vision. Fifteen years of building something I believed in, in the gaps between everything else life was throwing at me. And someone had just looked at it – at me, at what I’d built – and said: I see it. I see what this is worth.
They valued the business at ten million pounds.
I remember sitting there thinking: my revenue does not support that valuation. Because it didn’t. My business was on the floor, remember? But what they saw wasn’t the revenue. They saw the foundations. The structure. The IP – the books, the training programmes, the method mapped out as a DIY system. The fact that I’d been thinking like a builder and a scaler from day one, not like a coach trying to fill a practice.
“You’ve got a treasure chest,” they said. “It just needs unlocking.”
I held it together on the call. I’m used to holding it together in meetings. But afterwards – I won’t pretend I didn’t cry. Because that’s what validation feels like when it’s been a long time coming. And it had been a long time coming.
The stand-off
Then the negotiations started. And I didn’t budge.
They wanted all of Head Trash – the app, yes, but also the books, the training, the future IP, everything. Which, from an investor’s perspective, makes complete sense. I’d have wanted the same. But the equity on the table didn’t match the ask. They were coming in for the app and reaching for the whole treasure chest.
I had a session with Rachel Elnaugh – ex-Dragon’s Den. We’d worked together and I’d been to her BBQs. She was unequivocal: don’t move on the IP. If you start on the back foot, you’ll have nowhere to go. They’ll put in another million, then another, and before you know it you’re at 20% equity and they can move you out of your own company.
For me, Head Trash is legacy work. It’s not a product – it’s a life’s work. There was more still to build, and I knew it. So I held the line.
They lost interest. And then life moved on.
What the collapse actually felt like
Here’s the part that I’ve not really shared before.
For three months, I’d been thinking like a CEO with a team and a budget. I’d been mentally spending that million – Facebook ads, a head of this, a head of that, a proper board. I’d been operating in a completely different headspace. Bigger. Bolder. Like I was finally moving at the speed I was built for.
And then it was gone. And I was back to just me and my rural French internet connection and doing crappy Facebook posts.
It was crushing. I’m not going to lie.
Because here’s the truth about me: I was never trying to build a busy coaching practice. That was never the vision. Give me a team, give me a system to lead, give me the infrastructure to build something that scales – that’s where I operate naturally. That’s what I’m wired for. Doing it alone, as a solo founder, has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Not because I’m not capable. But because it’s not how I’m built.
So losing that million felt like losing the permission to finally be what I actually am.
February 2026
Fast forward 5 years. Claude Cowork launches. Everyone’s going mad for it.
Out of curiosity I dug out my old app brief. The one I’d built during those two months of intense meetings with investors and designers and tech people, the one that had all the user journeys and the features and the experience mapped out. I’d done a lot of thinking back then. Good thinking.
I dropped it into Cowork. Just to see.
Within an hour, I had a working prototype.
I cried again. But differently this time.
Because what I understood in that moment was: I never needed the million. I needed the tool that would let me build it myself. And now I had it.
No equity negotiation. No investor oversight. No percentage of my life’s work handed over in exchange for someone else’s capital. Just me, my brief, and AI that could actually receive what I knew and help me build what I’d always been able to see.
The Clearance Club app – the DIY Head Trash Clearance experience I’d been carrying around in my head since 2019 – is now built. It’s ready to ship.
It took me months, not years. It cost me my time, not my IP. And everything that’s in it came from me – from fifteen years of watching humans change and knowing exactly what they need to do it.
What I actually learned
Two things.
First: the investor was right about the treasure chest. I had built something with real structural value – I just hadn’t had the tools to unlock it myself. AI became the key. Not by replacing the expertise I’d spent fifteen years building, but by giving me the processing power, the building capability, and the speed to finally move at the pace I was always capable of.
Second: I was always a systems builder who happened to be doing it alone. The constraint was never my vision or my capability. It was the technical barrier between what I could see and what I could build. AI removed that barrier. Completely.
The million pounds would have helped. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But it would have come with strings. With percentages. With someone else’s hand on the wheel of something I built from scratch, alone, in the gaps between seven house moves and mould poisoning and rural French internet.
This way, it’s mine.
And it turns out that’s worth more than a million quid.
The Clearance Club is a DIY Head Trash Clearance app – the fastest, most accessible way to do the inner work. Visit club.head-trash.com
Alexia works with founders and organisations as a fractional AI systems builder. Work with Alexia
