Alex Postlethwaite is the founder of Pebblio, a web app that helps friends and family put interest-free loans in writing, agree repayment terms and track payments, without ever lending or handling the money itself.
The business launched this summer alongside research among 2,000 UK adults, published in August 2026, which found that 54 per cent had lent or borrowed money from friends or family in the past 12 months and that 39 per cent of those had faced a misunderstanding or dispute over repayment.
A London-based chartered accountant whose career has been spent in private capital markets, he is building Pebblio alongside a day job.
He tells Business Matters why a written agreement matters more than the money, why he should have started his advertising narrow, and why founders should test before they spend.
What do you currently do at Pebblio?
Pebblio puts structure around informal loans between friends and family: an agreement, a repayment schedule and reminders, so nobody has to chase the money awkwardly. As the sole founder, I do everything that is not writing code.
My time splits roughly two ways. The first is getting the name out there without spending money we do not have: press, search, and content built off our own research. When you are bootstrapped you cannot buy attention, so you have to earn it, and that turns out to be a useful constraint. It forces you to have something genuinely worth saying rather than just a budget to hand over to Google.
The second is making the product better. Every week brings something from real users about where the flow is unclear or what is missing, and that feeds straight into what we build next. The version live today is deliberately simple. Everything beyond that has to earn its place by solving a problem somebody actually has, rather than one I imagine they might.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
It started with a sense of injustice. The people paying the most to borrow small amounts are almost always the people who can least afford it, and even with the FCA caps in place the cost of a short-term loan or an unarranged overdraft is significant. What struck me was the size of the sums involved. The typical short-term loan is only a couple of hundred pounds, and that is money most people could find from a family member or a friend without anyone paying a penny in interest.
The thing that was missing was not the money, it was the framework to bring confidence to the agreement. People do lend to each other constantly. Our research found 54 per cent of UK adults had lent or borrowed informally in the past year, but they do it on a text message and a handshake, and roughly four in ten end up with a misunderstanding about what was actually agreed.
That is why people go to a lender instead. Not because it is cheaper, but because it comes with paperwork and a schedule and something to point at afterwards.
Pebblio gives the friends and family version that same structure: a written agreement, a repayment schedule both people can see, and gentle automated reminders. We do not lend anything, we just make the informal version as clear as the formal one, for £3.99, or free for your first agreement.
Who do you admire?
I do not have a single answer to that. What has actually kept me going is having worked alongside and met a lot of founders over the years, and knowing what their stories really looked like from the inside rather than how they get written up afterwards. Almost none of it was a clean arc. The drive is the common thread, not the outcome.
That matters more than usual when you are bootstrapped and building alongside a job, because there is no funding round or board meeting to tell you whether you are doing well. You are the only person who is going to make you sit down on a Sunday evening and keep going. Seeing conviction from people who have already done it is the inspiration.
If you pushed me for one example, it would be what the Revolut team have built, and continue to build. It is truly staggering.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
I went too broad with our first advertising. I was casting a wide net and it produced numbers that looked encouraging on the dashboard, with plenty of impressions and a healthy click rate. But those are ego metrics, and they did not bring through the type of customer Pebblio can help.
Narrowing the targeting right down cut the traffic significantly but improved the conversion cost dramatically. I should have started narrow and widened out, rather than the other way round.
What defines your way of doing business?
Building for a category that does not really exist yet. Nothing in the UK currently does the whole job of putting structure around an informal loan. You can find a template that produces a loan agreement, and you can find an app that splits a restaurant bill, but nothing takes you from the conversation through to a signed agreement, a repayment schedule both people can see, and reminders that go out automatically so nobody has to raise it.
That gap is the entire reason Pebblio exists. It also means there is no playbook to copy. Every assumption has to be tested rather than borrowed, which is slower and considerably more painful, but you end up genuinely knowing why your product is shaped the way it is.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
You can build and prove a surprising amount on your own before you need to spend money on expensive lawyers or an over-engineered platform. Get to a minimum viable product, put it in front of real people, and find out whether the thing you believe is actually true. Then refine it, and pivot it if the answer is no.
Most of the money founders spend early is spent protecting and polishing an idea that has not been tested yet. Test it first. The spending decisions get much easier once you know what you are spending on.
