It sure if this group is super grassroots start up or a range of those on their start up growth journey, so apologies if it seems cheeky to ask about ARR at that level.
If this applies to anyone, could you opine on if those kinds of groups are helpful for your business at that level. If not, why not?
I’m a project manager, Ive been working in companies that are scaling for a few years and I’d like to do some early research into whether there's a need for this either part time, or for one off projects, in start ups?
My thinking is that a lot of companies can't really afford a full-time person, but still have projects that need managing. And founders are busy doing a million other things.
On the other hand I know how tight money is in small companies and perhaps founders would rather spend money elsewhere.
I’m also trying to work out what could relevant from experience I have - preparing for fundraising, setting up/replacing company processes or tools, general project management - planning, keeping people in different roles accountable and moving forward, and actually getting things done.
I post about education/purpose-led brands and am looking for a small group of people to support each other's content (e.g. liking, commenting, sharing). Not looking for anything dodgy, just genuine mutual support.
Been seeing the same ICO compliance gaps across UK businesses — cookie banners that look fine but aren't, Google Analytics firing before consent, privacy policies with no lawful basis stated.
Built gdprradar.co.uk to flag the obvious issues automatically. It scans against ICO enforcement criteria: PECR cookie consent, lawful basis per data type, data retention policy, ICO registration status, Subject Access Request handling.
Free tier runs in about 60 seconds. Paid plans produce a full PDF report — useful if you're an agency managing client sites or need something to show a DPO.
UK GDPR / ICO focused throughout — not a US or EU tool retrofitted for the UK.
Happy to take feedback on what checks matter most for UK startups specifically.
I've built a platform to connect SMEs and startups to Master's students and MBAs (thexpa.com), helping them with live cases for their studies and startups with more support.
And now I'm testing a tool (currently testing internally) to translate startups' challenges and objectives into university-level, consulting-style projects. (or at least parts of it)
It'd be a great help if anyone is interested in testing?
No payment is required, and ideally, I can connect you with students or academics if suitable!
There could be so much demand, especially now in dissertation season.
Hi everyone,
Our team is opening a limited number of $199 per project slots for UK-based startups that need fast, practical technical support without committing to a large agency budget.
We can help with:
We also offer custom AI modeling services, starting at $599 for models up to 10M parameters.
This is best suited for early-stage UK startups that need a small but useful project completed quickly, such as a prototype, data workflow, analytics dashboard, MVP feature, or AI/data task.
You can schedule a 15-minute meeting through the link below to discuss your project in detail and see whether it fits the offer.
Book a call / learn more: https://quintence.help
Because this is a limited offer, we’re only taking a few projects at this price.
Thanks!
Every startup has a success story - something small like acquiring your first client, to as big as acquiring as signing that massive contract.
Post your story here (a short description and link to your business too!), and celebrate with your peers, and we hope you stick around to answer any questions!
Must be UK based - and don't forget to upvote for visibility!
Been thinking a lot about marketing lately and honestly starting to feel a bit tired of the super polished “corporate LinkedIn” style content everywhere. Feels like people respond way better to stuff that’s more human and genuine now, especially on places like Reddit, Discord, smaller communities etc. For anyone building a startup right now, what’s actually worked for you when it comes to growing organically? Have you found any good ways to share what you’re building without sounding too salesy or spammy?
Hi, I have recently started running ads on Meta for my fashion brand( moslty selling leather products for now), I am currently in a sort of dilemma over how to grow with meta ads, should I increase my ads budget, or should I introduce new products, and grow organically. I mean my first month saw some sales, the CTR was good around 3.5 to 4, Conversion rate was 0.66%, and the sales couldn't even cover the cost of meta ads budget for the first month which was 1000£. What should I realistically expect from meta ads in terms of sales and stuff, given that all the metrics are aligned?
Not posting for advice, I just needed to get this off my chest.
I realised doing a startup is not for the faint of heart. I have sacrificed time with family, time with people around me, and honestly even time for myself. I kept telling myself "just one more thing to do" and somehow that became every day.
For the past 1 year in the making, I just kept showing up day by day, little by little. Some days I feel progress, other days I feel like I am just shouting into the void.
Today I checked and realised I now have 192 users on the platform.
Maybe that sounds small to some people, but I know every single one came from effort, consistency, trial and error, and not giving up.
I still have a long way to go, but I just wanted to get that out.
Some of you might remember my earlier posts here. The one where I spent £210 on ads and got zero paying customers. The one where I was asking about funding and had nothing but a half built product and a lot of stubbornness.
A lot has changed since then.
The platform has 125 signups now. Still zero paying customers, I am not going to sugar coat it, it is what it is. But the platform is unrecognisable from what it was.
It started when I tried to sign up to my competitors. StoryWorth, Remento, Heirlooms, StoryKeeper, Meminto, Keepsake, My Life in a Book. I could not sign up unless I paid first. I also realised their entire goal was to get you to buy a book. That was it. Buy the book and their business ends there. So I went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. I wanted to build something unique that stood out from the masses. I became focused on overtaking my competitors and changing the whole Memory Preservation business.
Ancestorii was basically a single user tool. One person uploading photos and building timelines alone. That is not how families work. Nobody preserves memories by themselves. So I ripped the backend apart and rebuilt it around families. A family that can invite other members to contribute, thus becoming a shared library with multiple people contributing to the same timelines, albums, voice notes, and capsules. Signups shot up to an average of around 4 a day on just £4 daily meta spend. No other advertising cost.
Then I went physical. But differently to the competitors. They are essentially book printers with a prompt system bolted on. Ancestorii is a living library. The digital side is the foundation. Timelines, albums with voice notes, time capsules. And when you are ready you can turn any of it into something physical. Hardcover memory books. Canvas prints. Acrylics. The physical products come from the library, not the other way around.
I think there is a real gap here. People are tired of social media where everything is performative. Tired of memories scattered across six cloud accounts and three old phones in a drawer. They just want a quiet place where it all lives together and their family can contribute without it being public.
Google's AI Overview started referencing me as the founder which was a strange moment, and i did get a small sense of pride.
I still work full time shifts. I build on my days off. No investors. No co founder. No formal software background. Just stubbornness and an unhealthy number of late nights.
The next bridge is revenue. 125 people signed up and none of them have paid me anything. That is the honest truth. But the product finally feels like something families would actually use together rather than something one person tries alone and forgets about.
If anyone here has crossed that gap from free signups to first paying customer I would genuinely love to hear how. I am all ears..
Solo operation. No agency, no juniors. One designer. One week. Entirely focused on your product.
Every screen, every flow, every interaction designed in Figma and ready for your developer to build from without a single back and forth. Delivered in a week.
Here's the thing most founders learn too late. Getting the UX right before development costs $500. Getting it wrong costs three months of rework and whatever your developer charges per day.
The math isn't complicated.
3 projects a month. First come first served.
Pre-development and want to see work samples before deciding? DM me what you're building.
Wanted to share something I learned the hard way recently in case it helps anyone else thinking about competition style models in the UK.
I'm a solo founder building a community platform for people with early stage business ideas. Basic idea is people submit an idea, the community evaluates it anonymously across four criteria, and the winning idea each cycle gets a permanent page on the site, distribution help, and a share of a community prize fund (55% of submission fees pooled, winner takes it). Felt right to me. The fee also worked as a seriousness filter so the platform didn't fill up with random low effort posts.
So I'm pivoting. Each cycle will have a sponsor who provides the reward instead. Winning idea still gets a permanent page on the site and help with distribution, just with the reward coming from a sponsor rather than the user pool. Cleaner legally. But honestly it does feel different. Less 'community putting money behind community ideas', more 'here's a brand backing the winner'.
Three questions I'd love thoughts on.
Has anyone else run into this with pooled prize or contest setups in the UK? What did you do?
For people who've thought about it more than me, does sponsor backed still feel community driven, or does it quietly change the platform's character?
For anyone running platforms for founders, how did you do early validation when you had no real data yet? What's the smallest signal that actually meant something?
Platform's live but no real users yet. Genuinely just trying to learn from people further along.
I have spent years in the dry world of global logistics but I have recently been humbled by the reality of the London hospitality scene. I live in the SW15 area and I am obsessed with finding a specific peach infused cider. Since finding it on tap is a total lottery I decided to build a community project called Pubify to map out niche drinks.
I built the MVP in a week using Claude. To handle the onboarding I used Vapi and Claude Haiku to call 1,100 London pubs and offer them a free listing to manage their own taps. I thought my experience building platforms in the past would make this a straightforward task.
It was a total disaster.
My call logs are now a poetic wall of pure Anglo Saxon fury. 99 percent of landlords hung up within five seconds. Even with the speed of Haiku the tiny silence after they say hello is enough for them to smell a bot and tell me to jog on in very colourful language.
I have two big questions for the UK startup community:
Is the concept of a free app dead for business owners? I am offering a free tool with zero strings but I cannot even get them to listen. Have we reached a point of absolute fatigue where free is no longer a selling point?
Has anyone actually cracked Voice AI for cold B2B onboarding? I am curious if anyone has made voice bots feel trustworthy enough to survive the first ten seconds. Is this a technical latency issue or is it just culture simply too hostile toward automated voices in a professional setting?
Time to either enforce bans, or close it, I’m leaving. This has turned into AI written comments having arguments about AI written posts. Every single one of them, have a look at the last 5 yourself.
At least before it was interesting to read now both posts and comments have 0 substance.
Mods, wake up!!!
​
Hey folks,
Recently moved to London and spending some time exploring the UK startup scene.
I’m currently a Senior AI Engineer at an MNC, and I’ve realised a lot of startups are in the same place with AI right now:
tons of ideas,
lots of AI noise online, but uncertainty around what’s actually practical/useful.
I’ve been working mostly on:
LLM apps & AI agents
RAG/search systems
Python backend + APIs
workflow automation
internal AI tools
turning “cool demos” into things people actually use
Not here to aggressively pitch services or anything more looking to meet founders/builders who are experimenting with AI and could use an extra technical brain for:
MVPs
architecture decisions
feature planning
debugging weird AI behaviour
cost optimisation
or just sanity-checking ideas before building
I genuinely enjoy early-stage problem solving, especially when a team is trying to move fast without hiring a full AI team immediately.
Curious: What AI use case are you actually finding useful right now in your startup/company beyond “AI chatbot” demos?
Would love to hear what people are building.
Hi all,
I’m a finance professional and I’m interested in building something on the side, with the aim of eventually going all in if the right opportunity develops.
At the moment, I see a potential opening for a traditional, local business in the West Midlands/Warwickshire area, possibly in the healthy takeaway / food space. That said, I’m open-minded and wouldn’t want to limit the conversation to one specific idea too early.
I’d like to connect with someone commercially minded who is also serious about building something. Ideally, someone who wants to properly test ideas, challenge assumptions, and potentially partner up if there’s a strong fit.
What I can bring:
I’d be particularly interested in speaking with people who have experience in:
But I’m also open to hearing from people outside those areas if there’s a promising idea or complementary skill set.
Would be keen to hear from anyone who has made a similar move from a professional/corporate background into business ownership, or anyone in the West Midlands exploring something similar.
Open to comments.
I see a lot of people talk about side projects turning into businesses, but I’m curious how realistic it is in the UK context, with time, tax and workload constraints.
I've just opened my law firm in the UK and the question came to me, what's considered a 'start up' and what just 'opening a business'.
I feel like modern technology based companies are what's considered 'start ups' and your run of the mill Profesional services companies just 'opened a business'
Sorry, I'm in need of clients and these thoughts have come to me after months and months of stress.
Could be communication, website quality, customer support or even how founders talk online. Want to understand what gives people confidence early on.
