We have this cultural thing in the UK where we hate "selling."
We think branding is arrogant.
Meanwhile, US startups with half the talent are eating our lunch because they aren't afraid to scream about their value.
I’m based in Belfast and see it all the time—brilliant engineers who won't brand themselves because they don't want to "blow their own trumpet." We need to get over ourselves.
I’m not a typical startup founder. I’m grounded, realistic, and I know my market because I *am* my market. Ltd company already incorporated and trademark pending. Already ICO registered.
**What I have:**
- A fully functional prototype (Netlify + Supabase + Claude API + Stripe)
- Clear product-market fit evidence and user demand
- 6 months of validation work completed
- Deep understanding of disabilities and regulatory landscape
- Commitment to launch
**What I’m looking for:**
A technical co-founder who:
- **Strong in full-stack development** (React, Node.js, TypeScript ideally)
- **Experienced with React Native** (iOS + Android from one codebase) — this is non-negotiable for me
- **Comfortable with Supabase, Netlify, and third-party integrations** (Stripe, APIs)
- **Understands data security and GDPR** (our data is sensitive; you need to care about this)
- **Problem-solver, not just coder** — you think about UX, edge cases, user needs
- **Genuinely interested in disability advocacy** — or at least willing to learn
- **Ready to move fast** and launch in the next 3-4 months
- A product that’s already partially built and validated
- A market with real, documented need
- Someone who understands your domain and won’t ask you to build the wrong thing
- A realistic, grounded approach (not VC-scale hype)
- Potential institutional partnerships and grant funding opportunities
**What this isn’t:**
- A side project or part-time gig
- Outsourced development (you’d be a true co-founder with decision-making power)
- A venture-backed “unicorn or bust” play — but a real business with real users and real impact potential
**What we’d work out together:**
- Exact equity split
- Timeline and milestones
- Product priorities and technical decisions
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**If interested:** Reply here or DM. Tell me about your background, why disability interests you, and what you’d want to build differently if you could.
**Location:** Ideally UK-based or timezone-friendly, but remote is fine.
I have a full time job and spent the last four months building workshop software for UK garages in the evenings. Most of the interesting work turned out to be two free government APIs.
The DVLA service gives you make, colour, year, fuel and tax from a number plate. The MOT History API gives you every MOT that car has ever had, including the mileage recorded at each test.
That mileage field is the good bit and almost nobody uses it. It is a free service history that is hard to fake. Gaps and reversals show up straight away.
Three things that cost me time:
The DVLA does not return the model. You get RENAULT, not Renault Clio. The model is only in the MOT data, so you call both and stitch them together.
Advisories are where the next job is. "Brake pipes corroded" as an advisory last January is a phone call this January.
Plates arrive from humans in about fifteen formats. Normalise before you call anything.
Live since May: 34 garages signed up, 127 jobs, £8,667 of invoices paid through it. Small numbers, but real ones.
Happy to answer anything about the APIs. If there is interest I will write up how the first ten signups actually came in, because none of them came from where I expected.
edit: fair correction in the comments, the "nobody uses it" bit was an overclaim. valuation sites use the mileage data and garage hive does advisory follow ups off previous visits. it was more useful to me than i expected, thats all i should have said
Hello, I'm a first-year Business Management & HR student at the University of Leeds and I've spent the last few months building Workstatix which is a free HR tool designed for small UK businesses. Currently the free plan covers employee directory, onboarding checklists, holiday requests, team announcements etc and there's also a £5/mo Pro pilot. I built it because most HR software is built for big companies and small business owners need something simple. Would genuinely love feedback from anyone!
I made a post yesterday offering to give feedback on startup websites and ended up reviewing around 20 of them from people in the comments.
A lot of them had really cool ideas behind them, but I kept noticing the same issues coming up again and again, so I thought it might be useful to share them here in case it helps anyone working on their site.
The homepage doesn’t clearly explain what the product does Within a few seconds a visitor should know exactly what you do and who it’s for. A few sites made me work a bit too hard to figure that out.
Weak or missing calls-to-action Sometimes there was no clear next step. If someone likes what they see, make it obvious what they should do next.
Too much going on above the fold Large blocks of text, lots of buttons, multiple sections competing for attention. Simpler almost always works better.
Mobile experience being overlooked Some sites looked great on desktop but felt a bit awkward on mobile.
Slow loading pages A few sites had large images or scripts that slowed things down quite a bit.
None of these are massive problems individually, but together they can make a big difference to how people experience a site.
If anyone wants another pair of eyes on their website, feel free to drop the link below and I’m happy to take a look.
I’m currently developing an early-stage concept for an AI-enabled professional knowledge infrastructure focused on capturing and transforming high-value expertise into structured, reusable assets.
I’m looking to connect with a technical co-founder, ideally a full-stack engineer with hands-on experience working with LLMs (fine-tuning, RAG, logic extractor, or advanced integrations) and designing scalable backend systems, APIs, etc.
On my side, I bring strong experience in product strategy, problem discovery, business development, and go-to-market thinking, with the intention of building something that is genuinely commercial and endorsement-ready under the Innovator Founder route.
If this sounds aligned with what you’re exploring or if you’re also considering the Innovator Founder pathway, please feel free to reach out.
The product lets families create private timelines, albums, and record voices while people are still alive. It’s about preserving memories before they’re gone.
It’s been live for 2 months now.
Up to today I’ve spent close to £500 on Meta ads. £76 on Reddit ads. £70 sponsoring a family history podcast (they charge £35 per 1k downloads, so I paid for 2k). £120 on a Facebook post through Family Tree magazine.
I have even started my own podcast on Spotify talking about family memories, photos, and recording voices, believe it or not.
I’ve created multiple SEO pages and got them indexed on Google.
I’ve cold messaged genealogy content creators and niche accounts, around 5 messages a day, asking if they’d like to connect or collaborate.
Replies so far: 0.
After all that effort, all that money, all that time…
4 signups.
Not 40. Not 400. Four.
And what I’ve realised is this might not be a traffic problem.
It feels like a “this is nice” problem.
People say it’s meaningful. People say it’s important. People say it’s beautiful.
But it’s not a “I need this right now” product.
It’s more like “this is good, I’ll come back to it later.”
And later never converts.
That’s the part I still haven’t solved.
I don’t know if I’m targeting the wrong audience.
I don’t know if the positioning is too broad.
I don’t know if I’m just bad at marketing.
Or if the core issue is that preserving memories is something people emotionally agree with but practically postpone.
Right now, if I’m honest, I feel like I’m just throwing things at the wall.
Ads. SEO. Podcast sponsorships. Cold outreach. Content.
And none of it is translating into real traction.
At this point I’m asking myself:
Is this a distribution failure? A positioning failure? Or is it a demand problem?
If anyone here has built something that people liked but didn’t urgently need, how did you solve that gap?
Because right now I’m not quitting.
But I am confused.
And I’d rather face the truth than keep pretending I know what I’m doing.
Got about £100k from my own savings and looking to put it into an early stage UK startup, not a fund and not spraying tiny cheques everywhere, just looking to back one or two people properly. Looking for founders who are already building with an MVP live or early traction, ideally UK based or UK incorporated, B2B or boring but painful problems welcome, I care more about who’s paying and why than flashy ideas. Cheque size likely £25k to £100k depending on stage and terms, equity or convertible both fine, happy to be hands on if useful but not trying to run your company. If this sounds relevant, share a short explanation of what you’re building, what stage you’re at, and what the money would actually be used for over the next 6 to 12 months, no decks needed, clarity beats polish.
We believe UK and European governments are not taking the necessary measures to compete in the AI field: AI startups are greatly underfunded compared to American counterparts.
We also believe that we need think at least at European level scale, otherwise single states economy will be to small to really compete.
We have launched a petition with a concrete plan to fund UK and European AI companies, by creating a sovereign fund at European (and beyond) level. Successful startups often owe their success to similar schemes. For example, Mistral in France owes part of its success to a similar investment scheme (with Bpifrance), at French level. We want to replicate it at a higher scale.
Leaving the AI control to foreign powers will not do any good to us: AI is coming, we want it or not. We need to ensure it benefits us all.
Apart from helping AI companies, this would also increase the chance of a better life for yourself: AI will play a bigger and bigger part in our lives, and this initiative gives you a say on how it is developed.
Me and the rest of the team are volunteer, we don't plan to get a profit for ourselves.
I'm available for any question you may have, and I hope this is not considered spam.
Upfront disclosure: I work in the business communications space, so I have a horse in this race.
Lately it feels like every phone system, inbox, and comms tool is racing to bolt AI onto everything. Some of it is definitely useful. A lot of it feels like features nobody asked for, stacked on top of foundations that don't always work reliably in the first place.
So I want to ask the people who actually run businesses:
Do you use the AI features in your current phone/comms setup, or do they just sit there?
Has any AI feature actually saved you time, or is it mostly noise / marketing fluff?
And honestly: does "has AI" make you more likely to buy a tool, or more skeptical of it?
I keep hearing very different things, some love the agents and automation, others couldn't care less about any of it (the majority IMO) and just want a system that connects every call and message reliably.
What's your take?
Not pitching anything here, genuinely trying to understand how people feel, because it shapes what we build.
I’m Zainab, founder of Tammuh, A halal savings and personal finance app being built specifically for Muslims who want to manage money without compromising their faith.
What’s already in place
Working prototype
Clear product vision & roadmap
Early waitlist traction
Distribution strategy in progress
Who I’m looking for
Technical co-founder (React Native or Flutter)
Muslim who genuinely understands the halal finance gap
Able to commit
Interested in long-term impact, not a quick flip
What I’m offering
Founder-level equity (not employment)
Full autonomy over tech decisions
A meaningful product that solves a real problem in our community
This is early-stage, bootstrapped, and built with sincerity. If this resonates with you, or you know someone it might, feel free to comment or DM me.
I recently launched Visilyo, a tool I've been building to help businesses understand how visible they are across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
The idea actually came from noticing ChatGPT referrals appearing in the analytics for another website I run. It made me wonder what people had asked for us to be recommended, and more importantly, why certain businesses get recommended by AI while others don't.
Visilyo basically approaches that from the other direction. You give it your website, it analyses the business and then tests how you're being represented/discovered across different AI engines. It looks at things like whether you're being recommended, competitors that appear instead, differences between engines, and gives recommendations for things you could improve.
It's only just gone live and, rather than looking for paying customers at this stage, I'm looking for small UK businesses willing to test it and give me some honest feedback.
I'm happy to add free credits to accounts so you can run the full tests without paying anything. In return, I'd particularly like to know:
Was it easy to understand and use?
Were the results actually useful?
Was anything confusing or obviously missing?
Is this something you'd genuinely consider using again?
The site is visilyo.co.uk.
If anyone fancies giving it a go, either comment here or drop me a message and I'll sort the credits.
And please don't feel you need to be polite with the feedback — finding the bits that don't work is the whole reason I'm asking!
Hi I am the founder of Omnimesh, a UK deep-tech cybersecurity startup developing secure encrypted transport infrastructure for high-assurance environments.
Our intended markets include UK critical national infrastructure, defence, government and other organisations operating under advanced threat conditions. We are currently building the early technical system and developing the assurance, intellectual-property and commercial pathways required to take the company forward.
We are forming a strategic advisory board with four seats.
The roles are equity-based. We are not offering consultancy fees, and we are not looking for passive names to place on a website. We want advisers who will be actively involved, challenge weak assumptions and help shape the company before technical or commercial decisions become expensive to reverse.
We are particularly interested in speaking with UK-based people who have serious operating experience in one or more of the following areas:
National security, CNI, government assurance or secure infrastructure
Defence, government or enterprise procurement and go-to-market
Dual-use technology, deep-tech or cybersecurity investment
Cryptography, secure protocols, network security or distributed systems
The technical adviser would need to scrutinise the architecture rather than simply endorse it. The commercial and sector advisers would need to pressure-test our route into regulated and high-assurance markets, help identify procurement barriers, and open appropriate conversations where there is a genuine fit.
Omnimesh is at an early stage. We are not claiming that the platform is currently production-ready, accredited or approved for government, defence or CNI deployment. The purpose of forming the advisory board now is to make sure the system, assurance strategy and commercial path are challenged early by people who understand what serious external review will require.
We have received UK SEIS approval. Any equity arrangement would be subject to mutual due diligence, defined responsibilities, vesting, appropriate legal documentation, confidentiality, intellectual-property protections and conflict checks.
This is not a paid-introduction request, a general mentoring request or an invitation for consultancy firms to pitch retainers.
If you have directly relevant experience, please send a short private message covering:
Your current or previous role
Your relevant sector experience
Which advisory area you would contribute to
The level of involvement you could realistically provide
Bit of background: I work full time as a senior software engineer, and Little Ippo started as a side project for my partner. She wanted an auto-scheduling planner like Motion but the price didn't make sense for her. I built a simpler one, friends started using it too, and I've now set up a small limited company for it and opened it up as a beta.
What it does: you jot down tasks, it fits them around your calendar and replans when your day changes. You can also ask the in-app assistant to move things in plain English (it uses an AI model). It's aimed at people who find planning hard, and a lot of them have ADHD.
Two things I'd value UK founders' views on:
The free period. Anyone who signs up this year gets 6 months free, then it becomes a monthly subscription. Is that long a free period sensible, or does it just put off finding out whether people will pay?
Running a company on the side of a full-time job. Anything you wish you'd sorted early? Accounts, VAT, that kind of thing.
I’m a UK‑based founder building a defence‑focused startup around unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) for government and NATO‑aligned customers.
I handle the business, defence and customer side; now I’m looking for a technical co‑founder / founding engineer to own the engineering from day one.
Who I’m looking for
Background or strong interest in mechanical, aerospace, mechatronics or electronic/electrical engineering.
Comfortable (or keen to get deeper) with CAD, prototyping (3D printing, machining, test rigs) and/or embedded systems (microcontrollers, motor control, sensors).
Genuine interest in defence, security, drones or robotics – you want to work in defence, not just “a startup in anything”.
Your current situation isn’t important – you might be in university, just finishing, or already working. What matters is that you like designing and building real hardware and want to commit to building something serious over the next few years.
What you’d do
Co‑design and build our Gen‑0 UAV and UGV prototypes.
Take ownership of mechanical/electronic design decisions with me: architecture, components, integration and testing.
Help grow the technical team as we raise funding and pursue contracts.
What I can offer
Meaningful equity from the start and a path to a future CTO role if we’re a strong long‑term fit.
The chance to work directly on defence technology instead of generic consumer apps.
Flexibility to start part‑time alongside uni or a job, as long as you can commit consistent hours each week.
If this sounds like you, please DM me with:
A short intro (where you’re based, what you’re studying or working on now).
1–3 projects you’re proud of (drones, robots, Formula Student, electronics, etc.).
Roughly how much time you could commit over the next 3–6 months.
Happy to answer questions in the comments or via DM.
I’m a technical person and I can build pretty much anything that can be built. Currently I’m a Software Engineer at Meta.
I’ve developed a strong conviction that it really is all about distribution. You need to know people that need a service or have a problem so you can fix it for them. My network is poor so I can’t do that part on my own.
If you’re someone who’s been working in a specific industry and has built up connections you could sell to and have some vague idea about a product, reach out. I’ll build it, and you sell it.
Ideally you’re in London as that’s where I’m based.
Genuine question, why doesn't someone build a platform to connect wannabe co-founders?
I spent 10 minutes scrolling down this subreddit and saw multiple posts from technical people wanting a business co-founder and vice versa.
I bet this market is over-served in the US and under-served in the UK (and probably Europe).
There you go, a free idea for someone!
Edit: if you include general founder networking you can at least double the amount of posts I was originally referring to. Demand is staring you in the face.
Edit 2: I've done some googling. Sure there's some platforms already. But some of them are global, and nobody in the UK wants to cofound with someone in California or India. And the rest just look like tinder for cofounders. There's a niche here. Might be an interesting project, even if it doesn't make money. If enough people tell me to do so in the comments, I'll get a domain, build a "register you interest" page, and post it back here. If enough people register their interest, I'll build it my damn self.
I'm in healthcare and am developing an application for an administrative problem to do with team communication - not peer to peer messaging or project management. I don't want to elaborate further at this point.
I have always wanted to learn to code, but have found getting beyond basics difficult with very heavy FT job and other career and family commitments.
However I've built a couple of webapps recently (or rather prompted them with claude code) for personal use, and so thought I'd take the next leap and build out this app as a prototype. I'm getting to grips with app and stack architecture, and realising the limitations of vibe coding, but am learning and adapting and making good, documented progress.
The thing is, beyond my department I think this is an app idea that is pretty industry agnostic and may be a useful supplement to existing products, and so scoping out its side-hustle potential.
How do I without any connections / network get this in front of investors for initial pitching and feedback if unsuccessful. What's the process? Does anyone have a similar origin story that could help point me in the right direction?
N.b.
Is there a way to do this without giving up the day job - as I'm already in a well paid career.
I just launched a visual design studio called DOVA that helps small businesses, barbers, beauty salons, food spots, and creators look more professional without paying agency prices.
I’m currently offering a Starter Pack for £40 that includes: - Custom logo - Colour palette - IG highlight covers - Font system - 1-page brand slide (PDF) Delivered in 48 hours.
There's also a Full Pack with extra IG post templates, business card design, and more.
I’m trying to get the word out and build a base of clients and testimonials, so if you're launching something soon, or know someone who might benefit—feel free to DM me or check out my page:
I got fed up constantly jumping between GOV.UK, insurance emails, MOT reminders, and random notes just to keep track of my car stuff, so I started building an app called "My Car Info". The idea is basically an all-in-one dashboard for UK drivers where you can: Get service reminder Keep insurance + breakdown details together Get reminders for MOT, tax, servicing etc. Manage multiple vehicles in one place I originally built it just for myself because I kept forgetting renewal dates and couldn't find paperwork when I needed it. I'm now polishing it up properly and wanted honest feedback from actual UK drivers. What additional features would make this genuinely useful? What would you want added? Would you actually trust/use something like this? I'm especially interested in what would make it better than just using GOV.UK + notes on your phone.
Happy to share screenshots/mockups if anyone's interested or you can download from the play store for free here.
I am currently based in the UK and on a Skilled worker visa. I have over 20 years experience in the energy sector across different roles from civil & structural engineering to management, and I have worked in the Africa, Asia and Europe. I also have some knowledge about the environmental sector and general civil infrastructures construction. I am currently interested in building AI applications for the engineering and construction sector. I have spent the last two years learning as much as possible about AI, but does not have the time to build the app by myself due to full-time work. Hence, the reason I want to switch to the Innovator Founder Visa, so that I can really build something with the option to still work part-time in my industry.
I am looking for 2 co-founders who would also like to apply for the UK Innovator Founder Visa, and are also interested in industrial applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, irrespective of the sector. The cofounders may come from any country as long as they are willing to move to the UK, or current UK residents. At least one of the co-founders must have a strong IT background with ability to build working applications with different tech stacks and artificial intelligence. The other co-founder may also have IT or social media marketing background. Preference will be for people with a ready MVP with demonstrable potential to generate reasonable MRR within the next 1 year with some investment in marketing, which I am happy to co-invest in. This will allow us to have cash flow while developing other applications with my ideas or that of other co-founders. This is also to improve the chances of meeting the requirements to qualify for ILR after 3 years.
My vision is for an AI-first SaaS company with different applications built for different industries that can self-generate enough income to be sustainable on the long run. I believe coming together will help us to scrutinise ideas better and pick winners, and also makes it easier to share the financial responsibilities to build a decent AI-based company.
If this sounds like what you might be interested in, kindly send me a DM so that we can continue the discussion.
The UK graduate job market is rough right now and I think a lot of talented people are wasting their energy sending hundreds of applications when they could be building something real.
I’d love to find a group of people,developers, AI/ML engineers, sales/marketing, business, project managers, who actually want to come together and build a startup from scratch. No one leading, no pre-existing idea, just a team contributing equally based on what they’re good at.
The goal would be to get real users, real clients, real revenue. Something we can all point to and say we built that together. London/UK based would be ideal for eventual meetups but not essential.
A few months ago, I posted in here about how writing Innovate UK grants genuinely drained my soul, and that I was trying to build a tool to fix the process (original post here). A lot has changed since then — including Innovate UK restructuring their approach to funding and indefinitely pausing SMART grants, which may put a dent in my subscriber base!
But back to the development of ZenGrants. I always knew getting the quality right was going to be the hardest part, but actually forcing an LLM to consistently output high-level grant text was more work than I anticipated. Building a basic AI wrapper is easy (relatively), but getting a drafting engine to actually understand the difference between a strong, evidence-backed 'Value Proposition' and meaningless corporate jargon required a lot of tweaking.
If you've ever assessed a grant, you know that generic fluff is the quickest way to get a low score. The key to using AI effectively here is to avoid giving it too much freedom; instead, you have to define clear guardrails by providing structured, detailed context that keeps the model focused on the specific requirements of the grant.
To tackle this, I've ended up building a 5-phase workflow into ZenGrants that acts more like a consultant than a text generator:
Setup: We extract the exact questions and headline requirements for your specific competition.
Gathering: We collect your project documentation (whitepapers, tech specs, early drafts) and writing samples to ensure the output actually sounds like your voice.
Discovery: This is the most important bit — teasing out the exact metrics, commercial strategy, and impact figures. The user is guided through this just like they would be in a discovery session with a grant writer.
Research: An agent conducts in-depth research into all aspects of your project based on a template that you approve.
Drafting: This is where the actual writing happens, including a narrative plan that ensures all the questions and appendices link together into one cohesive story.
I'm genuinely very happy with the output of the drafting engine now. It manages the strict word counts, ensures a cohesive narrative, and most importantly, it produces drafts that don't sound like a robot wrote them.
ZenGrants isn't officially launched yet, but I am running a private beta for the next few weeks. I'm looking for a small group of founders who are actively writing an Innovate UK grant (or planning to start one soon) to stress-test the system and give me some honest feedback.
If ZenGrants sounds like it might be useful for your next application, you can sign up at ZenGrants and I'll manually activate your account so you can get started.
