Despite leaving the Dragons' Den feeling "broken" with no investment, Katherine Swift is on track to make £1million this year.
The Dragons' Den reject turned success explained her journey from project manager to starting her own matcha tea business, OMGTeas.
Starting with "very little finance," the self-taught entrepreneur was able to steadily build her business and turn over six figures.
Swift appeared in the Den in November 2018, asking for £50,000 in exchange for seven per cent of her OMGTeas business.
Even though she was bringing in honest profit at this point, the Dragons' couldn't see her vision, and consequently did not invest.
Peter Jones said he believed Swift had done really well for a start-up business in her local area but he couldn't see the product being adopted in the "mainstream" market.
Swift appeared on Dragons' Den in 2018
BBC
Swift told GB News: "I was in there for about an hour and 15 minutes and in front of the dragons for about 45 minutes, and it was so nerve-wracking.
"I thought they would get it but they didn't. I was really broken when I came out and I cried. Peter Jones said it was too niche.
"I'm so proud of myself though, it was a great experience."
Swift said that the idea for her matcha business came about during the time her mum needed a mastectomy. She needed to find a way to stay busy and found herself project managing a breast cancer awareness charity.
Through this she was given the opportunity to research and find natural compounds, exploring how therapeutic they could be.
She then found out about ECGC which is found in abundance in green teas.
She endlessly researched where she could get the best products as she wanted her mum to drink the best available to get the best benefits to aid her recovery - and that was matcha.
She wanted to find out how to potentially slow down the growth of cancer stem cells in those battling the disease and became fixated on studying matcha tea and decided to get some samples from Japan to test with her mum to see if it made them feel healthier.
Swift said: "Me and mum felt so great off it - it gives you a physical boost and helped with her recovery.
"I set up off the kitchen table with very little finance and I've laid the trackers down. I have grown the business carefully and organically.
“The biggest risk I took was leaving my job but I'm confident in the business as I have done it in a way where the foundation is strong.
“After 10 years we are still here and on track to hit £1million. I just can't believe it."
When starting out in 2014, Swift was making little profit.
She made a website to sell the tea, but with no traffic she had no orders.
Swift launched OMGTeas on Amazon as a way to reach a wider audience
Katherine Swift
The CEO said: "I was getting no traffic as I couldn't afford click advertising, so I just had to sell my products at farmers markets, food festivals and things like that to get the name out there and meet people.
"I eventually launched on Amazon as a way to reach a wider audience.
"It's all well and good having a website but with no traffic it's useless. Amazon helped me reach millions of people and I've been growing steadily there over the years.
"I wasn't making profit for a long time as I was taking a salary to live off but two years in, I was turning over around £92,000 with a profit of £48,000. This helped sustain me."
Even with no investment from the Dragons' Swift kept pushing on. Altogether she invested around £20,000 of her own cash that she had saved up over the course of her career to get her business off the ground.
She said: "It was a big risk, I didn't know it was going to pay off, but I did believe in the potential of matcha green tea to grow."
Year after year, her business was roughly doubling its profit margins year-on-year.
She explained that it doubled from around £250,000 to half a million pounds, and this year it's on track to double from £500,000 to £1million.
