We’re a small elite team of digital product experts. We do things differently. Established in 2006, Simpleweb was one of the first companies in the UK to invest in the startups that it builds products for.

In the last 15 years we’ve launched over 100 products and invested over £1m in startups, covering everything from global food waste, digitising education, to mental and physical health training. Our mission is to help others create a better planet and it shows as these are the type of companies that we attract.

While we’re not quite a DAO yet, we believe that our team should be literally part of the work that we’re doing which is why we allocate 10% of our investments to the team every year. Every employee has a fantasy micro portfolio which they take with them when they leave. We wrote about it in our latest newsletter.

About You

You give a shit. You care about the world, the people in it, and your impact on it. You have experience in dealing with people from all walks of life and your communication skills are exemplary. As problems evolve you’re constantly thinking of solutions and you’re happy to discard an idea or solution as your understanding changes. Your ability to break down and communicate technical, product, and business requirements is natural to you. You are ambitious and have your sights set on building out your own world class product team in the future.

Responsibilities

• Establish product vision, business goals, product roadmap and potentially rollout plans for client and internal products
• Pull apart a ‘system’ and communicate how to put it back together again better, faster, leaner
• Work individually or as part of a team (the client is part of the team) to understand business requirements and identify new opportunities
• Conceptualise and design products, services, mechanics, models
• Handle roadmap trade-offs to ensure both the successful delivery of features and that functionality ultimately meets customer and business need
• Promote best practice for product development and lifecycle management

Requirements

• Previous product manager experience (no project managers or UI designers please)
• Excellent technical and communication skills
• Rapid prototyping, wireframing and product design skills using pen & paper thorough to no-code environments
• Ability to work on multiple projects, prioritise workload and thrive in a dynamic environment across multiple engineering teams
• Ambition, empathy, leadership

Nice to haves:

• Being an avid gamer or game development experience
• An interest or experience in Web3
• Familiarity with Agile and working in Sprints

 Benefits and Perks:

• Competitive salary reflecting experience
• Team socials
• Investment portfolio consisting of any investment that we make. When we receive a return, so do you.
• Pension
• Your religious holidays respected
• Private medical insurance
• Shared parental leave & pay policy
• Personal development / conference budget
• 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• Remote working and flexible hours (IRL community is a big deal to us so, when you feel it’s safe, we’d like to see you in the office at least once a month)

Sounds good, what next?

To apply please send your CV and why you feel you’d be a great addition to the team to jobs@simpleweb.co.uk.

No GDPR breaking Recruitment Agencies please.

The post Vacancy – Technical Product Manager appeared first on Simpleweb.

We’re a small elite team of digital product experts. We do things differently. Established in 2006, Simpleweb was one of the first companies in the UK to invest in the startups that it builds products for.

In the last 15 years we’ve launched over 100 products and invested over £1m in startups, covering everything from global food waste, digitising education, to mental and physical health training. Our mission is to help others create a better planet and it shows as these are the type of companies that we attract. 

While we’re not quite a DAO yet, we believe that our team should be literally part of the work that we’re doing which is why we allocate 10% of our investments to the team every year. Every employee has a fantasy micro portfolio which they take with them when they leave. We wrote about it in our latest newsletter.

About You

You give a shit. You care about the world, the people in it, and your impact on it. You’re a problem solver, have experience in dealing with people from all walks of life and your communication skills are great. You have a strong desire to learn, try new things and you’re not afraid to take risks. You enjoy being part of a team, have entrepreneurial spirit alongside a great sense of humour, a bucket load of common sense and enjoy delivering quality results.

Responsibilities

• Create/architect creative solutions with founders and/or product owners
• Clearly document and discuss plans and implementation tasks with clients and team
• Extract and understand requirements and constraints, and technically architect digital product solutions to fit
• Participate in client and team workshops and meetings
• Create estimates and sprint plans
• Write well-designed, testable code
• Peer review other team members code
• Document and maintain software functionality
• Provide written daily updates for the client and team on progress, plans and risks

Requirements

We love working with the latest technologies and always aim to use the right tech for the job, we tending to use TypeScript and React Native for native mobile apps, TypeScript and React for SPA’s, but we also see the value in good ol’ fashioned server side rendered views with Javascript to progressively enhance the experience.

The team loves helping new team members get up to speed, but there are some requirements that we are looking for to help you hit the ground running:

• Minimum 5 years of experience
• An excellent command of semantic HTML(5), CSS(3) and modern Javascript
• Experience of working with Typescript
• A good understanding of at least one Javascript framework
• Experience with GitHub and GitHub flow
• Experience of developing web and mobile apps
• A good eye for design and user experience
• Confidence in communicating in writing and face to face (virtually or in person covid permitting)
• Experience in shaping and building new products ideally in a Startup environment
• Enjoy working on multiple projects (not at the same time), ability to prioritise workload and thrive in a dynamic environment
• Care about and be confident in demonstrating the work you produce

Nice to haves:

• React Native experience
• Some server side coding experience would be good but not necessary
• An interest or experience in Web3
• Familiarity with Agile and working in Sprints

 Benefits and Perks:

• Competitive salary reflecting experience
• Team socials
• Investment portfolio consisting of any investment that we make. When we receive a return, so do you.
• Pension
• Your religious holidays respected
• Private medical insurance
• Shared parental leave & pay policy
• Personal development / conference budget
• 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• Remote working and flexible hours (IRL community is a big deal to us so, when you feel it’s safe, we’d like to see you in the office at least once a month)

Sounds good, what next?

To apply please send your CV and why you feel you’d be a great addition to the team to jobs@simpleweb.co.uk.

No GDPR breaking Recruitment Agencies please.

The post Vacancy – Frontend Developer appeared first on Simpleweb.

We’re a small elite team of digital product experts. We do things differently. Established in 2006, Simpleweb was one of the first companies in the UK to invest in the startups that it builds products for.

In the last 15 years we’ve launched over 100 products and invested over £1m in startups, covering everything from global food waste, digitising education, to mental and physical health training. Our mission is to help others create a better planet and it shows as these are the type of companies that we attract.

While we’re not quite a DAO yet, we believe that our team should be literally part of the work that we’re doing which is why we allocate 10% of our investments to the team every year. Every employee has a fantasy micro portfolio which they take with them when they leave. We wrote about it in our latest newsletter.

About You

You give a shit. You care about the world, the people in it, and your impact on it. You’re a problem solver, have experience in dealing with people from all walks of life and your communication skills are great. You have a strong desire to learn, try new things and you’re not afraid to take risks. You enjoy being part of a team, have entrepreneurial spirit alongside a great sense of humour, a bucket load of common sense and enjoy delivering quality results.

Responsibilities

• Create/architect creative solutions with founders and/or product owners
• Clearly document and discuss plans and implementation tasks with clients and team
• Extract and understand requirements and constraints, and technically architect digital product solutions to fit
• Participate in client and team workshops and meetings
• Create estimates and sprint plans
• Write well-designed, testable code
• Peer review other team members code
• Document and maintain software functionality
• Provide written daily updates for the client and team on progress, plans and risks

Requirements

We love working with the latest technologies and always aim to use the right tech for the job, but our go-to language and framework of choice is PHP and Laravel as it allows us to get stuff done quickly to a high standard and makes it much easier for our customers to hire their own developers in the future.

The team loves helping new team members get up to speed, but there are some requirements that we are looking for to help you hit the ground running:

• Minimum 3 years of experience as a lead developer
• Experience in PHP (Laravel)
• Experience with GitHub and GitHub flow
• Excellent problem solving skills
• The desire to learn new languages, techniques and skills
• An interest in front end development
• Confidence in communicating in writing and face to face (virtually or in person covid permitting)
• Experience in shaping and building new products ideally in a Startup environment
• Enjoy working on multiple projects (not at the same time), ability to prioritise workload and thrive in a dynamic environment
• Care about and be confident in demonstrating the work you produce

Nice to haves

• Experience with front end technologies such as React, or VueJS
• An interest or experience in Web3
• Ruby on Rails or Node.js (Express & Nest.js) experience (for some of our existing projects and products)
• Familiarity with Agile and working in Sprints

Benefits and Perks

• Competitive salary reflecting experience
• Team socials
• Investment portfolio consisting of any investment that we make. When we receive a return, so do you
• Pension
• Your religious holidays respected
• Private medical insurance
• Shared parental leave & pay policy
• Personal development / conference budget
• 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• Remote working and flexible hours (IRL community is a big deal to us so, when you feel it’s safe, we’d like to see you in the office at least once a month)

Sounds good, what next?

To apply please send your CV and why you feel you’d be a great addition to the team to jobs@simpleweb.co.uk.

No GDPR breaking Recruitment Agencies please.

The post Vacancy – Senior Backend Developer appeared first on Simpleweb.

There will always be unpredictable ad-hoc incidents to deal with when it comes to supporting a product – third party API changes, incompatible updates, usability issues, the list goes on. Ensuring skilled people are always available to quickly deal with such issues, while budgeting for the variable costs involved can be a difficult problem for many new businesses to manage. It’s also often overlooked and is essential for success.

As revenues increase the options for Service Level Agreements (SLA’s), retained teams or even dedicated employees all become good options for handling support. This is not the case for many start-ups, where a little ad-hoc emergency help is all that’s needed. For any agency like Simpleweb, it’s also too expensive to keep developers simply waiting around “just in case” they are needed, so where is the middle ground?

At Simpleweb we’ve evolved a system of credit-based support over the years that provides predictability for both parties; freeing our team to work quickly and autonomously on urgent support requests without admin or scheduling delays. This unique way of working hits the right balance for everyone. Efficient support, predictable costs.

Why credits?

Support issues need an immediate, frictionless response, not delayed by admin, estimations, contracts, invoices, payments and so on. Costs still need to be tracked and managed though, and everyone needs to be in the picture. This is where Taskcoin and credits come in.

Credits are purchased in advance, in packs of 8, with discount bundles available too. Each credit is worth an hour which can’t be split; a credit is a credit.

We always encourage clients to maintain a balance of credits in advance of any issue occurring. Think of it as insurance. It’s better to be prepared and covered than caught out with the unexpected. With an available credit balance, the team can jump straight in and investigate issues, deducting the appropriate number of credits from Taskcoin as they go.

We don’t estimate for support (as it’s often quicker to fix something when investigating), but if it becomes clear a task will take more than a few hours or exceed an existing credit balance we stop and discuss the best way forward. A fair, quick route to fixes, that manages costs.

Simple overview for clients

Until now Taskcoin was an internal tool created and used only by the Simpleweb team to track support credits.  We’ve now rolled version 2.0 out to all of our clients – keeping them fully in the picture with support tasks via timely automated notifications and a simple overview. Everything is transparent, simple and clear.

Works with any support system

For simplicity, support requests are sent to Simpleweb via a dedicated, shared support email address. We also happen to have this hooked up to a Slack channel so that the whole team has visibility on incoming requests. None of this is actually tied to Taskcoin though, indeed, any support desk (we use Helpscout) or email system can be used in conjunction with Taskcoin. We wanted to ensure a decoupled system dedicated to the single activity of managing credits used to complete tasks. Simple, lightweight and efficient. Simple is good.

Email (via Helpscout) is used to maintain client communications, with tasks from support requests being added to Taskcoin at any stage. This can be used to simply track credit usage, or for long-running or blocked tasks to check on progress and ensure nothing slips the net with the passage of time.

Where next?

Taskcoin works so well for us and our clients, we’ve realised that we’re not the only business that needs this solution…

If you would like to know more about Taskcoin, or about working with Simpleweb, please get in touch.

The post We built Taskcoin to make ad-hoc support predictable appeared first on Simpleweb.

Popsta allows you to quickly create online popup shops for a simple one-off payment. That means there’s no ongoing subscription, hosting or transaction fees.

It allows people who’ve never sold their products online before to get selling simply and quickly while pocketing all of their profits. But even for seasoned online sellers, Popsta can bridge the gap between you and your customers by selling directly to them.

The idea came from seeing traditional brick-and-mortar only stores having to quickly adapt to find other ways of selling their products due to the current climate. We saw a way how we could solve this problem for them quickly and for minimal cost. Though Popsta aims to be impactful beyond the immediate future by removing all of the usual fees associated with selling your products online.

From idea to product

A few months ago I posted a message into our #ideas channel in Slack, “ One-click-zero-config-shop”, along with a few thoughts on the technology we could use to prototype the idea. This got the teams attention, so I set out to answer: could we create something that at the click of a button could create a fully functioning shop?

We work with startups a lot at Simpleweb so this was a “put your money where your mouth is” moment. I put a simple deck together to present to the team at the end of the week along with a functioning prototype. Everyone seemed to keen on the idea, it was looking like it had some legs and by Monday morning we had a small team together to get to work on making this a “thing”.

After a few days exploration it turned out the various services I was hoping to leverage and speed things up were not fitting together as I’d hoped. We decided it was a problem worth solving ourselves so we expanded our little internal startup and went about solving it the old fashioned way.

Meanwhile, before we got ahead of ourselves, we used a no-code builder to create a holding page to gather interest and posted our idea up to Product Hunt to help us validate our thinking.

While the tricky technical problems were being worked out we began choosing a name (the hardest part right?), designing a brand and bringing together the user experience. We were dealing with all the challenges our clients as startups face day to day, which is a pretty invaluable experience that will help us as a team to keep improving ourselves.

A weeks few later and we had a fully functioning product together, a little way from being finished but it worked! You could hit that “one-click button” and a brand new shop would be created for you in about 60 seconds.

We took on feedback from the wider Simpleweb team and user tested it getting some positive and constructive feedback. After building that feedback in and few rounds of polish, we had ourselves our “finished” product.

What’s next?

During development we’ve kept track of many really exciting ideas for how to improve and take Popsta further but we took our own advice and made sure to deliver the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as quickly as possible to validate the market for Popsta.

The plan now is to get some users on board and support the feedback from the launch and if all goes well, we’ll start to work on that long list of ideas we have bubbling.

If you’d like to checkout Popsta please head over to https://popsta.co.uk/.

The post Introducing our new product, Popsta appeared first on Simpleweb.

Clients & Investments

Different Dog

Simpleweb investment Different Dog have raised a whopping £748K from private investors, (including us) smashing their original targets. They are about to launch a crowdfunding campaign so everyone can get a bite of the business. You can pre-register for the launch via the Different Dog Seedrs page.

Space for Arts

What a start to 2020. Simpleweb investment Space for Arts has signed a new non-exec director Shannon Mckenzie and a new Director of Marketing, Ellie Pritts. They’ll be working on scaling SfA and rolling out to more production professionals.

OLIO

Simpleweb investment OLIO has raised an undisclosed amount and continuing their work reducing food waste.

SAFR

Jason of Sleep and Fatigue Research is currently working with the NHS on a pilot project.

The Simpleweb vault sessions

Rob Waller of Simplification Centre

Rob Waller, founder of the Simplification Centre came in and gave a talk in the bank vault about the importance of simplifying information and the work the Centre does in helping ordinary people understand information. You know those fat wedges of text you find on the back of receipts, or those complicated energy usage bills you get in the post?

Yes, we don’t understand them either. It turns out some companies purposely make information complex… oh, we wonder why?

Simpleweb talk

This month Andy Kitt gave a Simpleweb talk to the team on automating an app release. He described his workflow and can release apps in a mere 17 mins from a whole day. Nice one Andy.

Projects

We’ve kicked off some new projects, seen some draw to a close and strengthened our ties with existing clients and we couldn’t be happier…

Open Data Institute

We’re continuing our work with the Open Data Institute and Sport England’s Open Active project helping to improve and open up information about physical activity and sporting opportunities across England. Rolling into the next project we couldn’t be more excited about helping the nation get fit.

ClickerME

We’ve recently completed a project with fashion network ClickerMe, a place where fashion creatives can connect, collaborate and showcase their work. Our work was to help improve the performance and scalability of their existing no-code platform. Know anyone who’s into their fashion? Get involved.

There’s loads more things coming up but way too much to include in a blog post. Hacknight, anyone? *cough* *cough*.

The post Roundup: New clients, new talks, and new investment appeared first on Simpleweb.

We teamed up with the team at Fledglink earlier this summer to help refresh the app’s UX and accessibility to make sure it would have the biggest positive impact as possible on fledgeling young professionals.

• Read more: Fledglink to support UK’s largest youth consultation

As Fledglink founder and business psychologist Ellie Yell (pictured right) explains: “Our mission is to help every young person achieve their potential. The development of the app has always worked towards this, by offering the best support and guidance to young people and making it accessible and user-friendly.

“One important aspect of this is to provide the best possible resources to help young people grow and develop. The app refresh was all about the user, making everything young people need to develop their early career more accessible and personal.”

Jobs of the future

The free-to-use app provides its users with an array of features including smart matching with employers, employer diversity awareness ratings, exercises and tools for becoming job ready, work and internship opportunities, peer to peer networking and virtual assessments designed to allow users to verify their skills.

The app also makes finding opportunities fun and unintimidating, particularly when it’s been widely reported that 85% of the jobs people will be doing in 2030 don’t even exist yet!

According to Fledgelink game ‘the super future job predictor’, Simpleweb developer Kate who worked on the Fledglink refresh just a year after re-booting her career as a developer, will be best suited as an ‘Upcycling Engineer’ in her future career – bringing to life new products that positively impact humanity (which we think is pretty cool).

• You might like: Adventures in code: a Q&A with developer Kate

That’s not all though, as Ellie adds: “The biggest new feature of the update is the new, customisable ‘discovery feed’. Before we just had a simple home feed that displayed posts written by users. We transformed this into a personalisable news feed, where we post useful resources, blog articles, opportunity alerts and events all carefully curated for our users.

“The most exciting aspect of this is that users can now choose what kind of resources they would like to see on the news feed, from a choice of ten different categories.”

A personal mission

Ellie started out by founding Demo:U, a company that provides immersive assessment and interview experiences for socially disadvantaged and minority individuals. But Ellie wanted to find a way to reach the thousands more young people out there that wanted support and so set about creating the free Fledglink app to do just that.

For Ellie, part of the motivation for setting up Fledglink came from wishing she’d had more support working her way up the career ladder herself.

“Because I’m so old, I didn’t have the luxury of something like Fledglink to help me find out more about myself, get ready for work and discover careers,” she explains. “So I had to work hard to seek out and get opportunities; which paid off.

“The one thing I wish I did more of was work with someone to prepare answers to interview questions. I felt stupid about asking dad or mum to role-play scenarios with me. But all that meant was that I ended up giving stupid answers. I learnt quickly, but I could have got dream jobs at the time if I’d prepared better.”

Meaningful careers

Helping the next generation to find their dream careers is an inspiring goal, but not something that’s easy. The team at Fledglink are now working hard to make sure the new version of the app reaches as many young people as possible.

Ellie explains: “We’re really looking at how we can drive positive behaviour within the app. What this means is asking ourselves how can we encourage users to start working on everything that goes into gaining meaningful employment when they are finished in education.

“If we can achieve this, it will open up a huge amount of opportunity to some who may otherwise not have access to it. We will be using the app to support our workshop programme which we will be developing over this school year.”

Download Fledglink for free via the Fledglink website.

The post Fledglink release new app to help young people find their dream career appeared first on Simpleweb.

We achieved this via the help of our amazing happiness officer Georgie who bakes us homemade cakes, biscuits and treats every week. For every slice of cake we eat, we pop a quid in the charity box.

FareShare South West

With winter on its way and sunny holidays behind us, we anticipate cake appreciation will increase which can only be a good thing given this month the team has selected FareShare South West.

FareShare South West is a charity that last year saved 420 tonnes of good food from being dumped into landfill and instead redistributed it across hundreds of schools, charities and community groups to be transformed into almost one million healthy and filling meals for those in need.

Money raised through charitable events and donations helps FareShare to set up schemes such as ActiveAte – which helped families over the summer holidays who might have otherwise struggled to feed their children nutritious meals in the absence of free school meals and breakfast clubs.

Find out more on the FareShare South West website.

The post Charity of the month: FareShare South West appeared first on Simpleweb.

We’re big believers in meeting up with people outside of your industry. Sometimes, you can learn the most from the people least like you.

With that in mind, this list is a mixture of meetups for founders, creatives and techies that will all welcome entrepreneurs and product teams to mingle and learn…

South West Founders

Bristol’s foremost meetup for entrepreneurs and startup teams is surely South West Founders. The Meetup was originally founded in 2010 by business advisor James Routley. After five years of building arguably Bristol’s strongest startup community, James handed South West Founders over to TechSPARK in 2016.

South West Founders is super casual, with a free bar and a strictly ‘no selling’ rule so you can mingle freely, meet interesting people and make useful connections without worrying about getting bored to death by pitches.

The meetup has a good mix of entrepreneurs, investors and mentors and is one of the best places to meet interesting people who can help your business and to learn from others who’ve been where you are.

South West Founders is on the 2nd Wednesday of every month from 7pm-9pm at the Watershed, Bristol. Join and sign up on meetup.

TechSPARK and BathSPARK

TechSPARK brings together the people of Bristol who are building innovative businesses in the tech sector. It aims to create opportunity, encourage diversity and spark new ventures. Coder meet creative. Creative meet entrepreneur. Entrepreneur meet talented graduate.

TechSPARK runs regular Techie Brekkies on specific tech-focussed topics along with a variety of other talks, socials and networking events throughout the year – including annual tech and startup awards the SPARKies.

BathSPARK is the Bath leg of TechSPARK. They also run regular networking events, workshops for startup founders and monthly talks with university startup incubator SETsquared.

Simpleweb Challenge

A great opportunity to get involved in the tech scene, even if you’re not a techie.

In the past, the Simpleweb Challenge has been a simple hacknight, aimed purely at developers, but has since opened up to anyone interested in prototyping an app – regardless of technical knowhow (or lack thereof!).

The Simpleweb Challenge is fun and friendly evening where attendees are invited to prototype a new web or mobile application in just 3 hours. Developers are encouraged to create working prototypes, whereas non-developers can create digital or paper mockups to demonstrate how their app would work.

• Read more: Hacking into a distracted world at the Simpleweb Challenge night

The nights are always laid back and fun with fresh, homemade food, plenty of drinks, a mixture of interesting people and even an in-house DJ. Oh and prizes for the best ideas!

The Simpleweb Challenge is organised on an ad hoc basis. Join the Simpleweb meetup group to find out about upcoming events.

Women’s Tech Hub

Women’s Tech Hub Bristol (WTH Bristol) was founded in 2016 by Serrie Chapman and Constance Fleuriot and has slowly but surely become the heart of all things gender diversity in the South West.

WTH Bristol hosts a good number of events and workshops aiming to get more women into technology careers, as well as helping to organise and promote other women’s tech meetups such as Women Tech Founders and Bristol Girl Geek Dinners.

If you’re new to Bristol or out of work and looking to get into tech (or you’re a founder that’s looking for diverse talent), Women’s Tech Hub runs free co-working sessions at DeskLodge every Friday and a recruiter-free careers fair Tech3Shed. They also offer a mentorship programme for tech returners who have been out of work for a long while and are looking for support to get back in – called ReBoot.

Yena

Yena was founded in Bristol by Ash Phillips in 2013 out of frustration with a founder support system that often felt inaccessible, intimidating and old-fashioned. He has since developed Yena from a free networking meetup in Bristol into a global business community for the next generation to thrive in.

The free networking sessions (now called Rebel Meetups) still take place today, except that they’re now hosted in over 19 cities across the globe from London to Mexico City. Yena also offers a membership option which provides access to further support, resources and regular workshops.

The Business Brainstorm

The Business Brainstorm is a group for entrepreneurs to meet up and talk through their ideas.

Rather than a ‘drinks and chat’ style networking event, the Business Brainstorm invites three entrepreneurs to present their ideas or particular issues they’re facing, and the group works together to brainstorm solutions. You can put your idea forward when you sign up.

The Business Brainstorm is held on the first Wednesday of every month. Join the meetup group to find out about their upcoming events.

Know of another fantastic meetup for startup founders and entrepreneurs in Bristol? Let us know.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2016 and has since been updated for optimum accuracy and comprehensiveness.

The post The Best Startup Meetups in Bristol and Bath appeared first on Simpleweb.

Particularly for technology businesses existing in an ever globalised world, going international is the next step in securing a solid future.

To share a sense of both when, how and what it means to take your startup international, we caught up with Alex Marshall (pictured right), Business Development Manager at Coherent, a startup that has been in the process of preparing for internationalisation over the past year.

Founded in 2015 by Gavin Eddy after he’d spent almost a decade running his own co-working spaces, Coherent is an all-in-one shared workspace management platform that takes care of workspace admin and connects communities.

Simpleweb: So tell us a bit more about your plans and what made you decide to take the leap into international markets?

Alex Marshall: We’ve been building the Coherent software for somewhere between four and five years, so we’ve spent a long time testing the product with our users, attracting new customers of different shapes and sizes and seeing the variation across the UK in terms of how different workspaces are run.

Through this we’ve been able to build-in additional features and flexibility so the product is ready to be sent out into a wider audience.

On the business side, there’s been a lot of co-working space activity all over the world at the moment, particularly in Europe where we’re going to lay a fair amount of our focus in the beginning.

It’s a really interesting industry to be in because the coworking industry itself in terms of actual office spaces is, at a push, probably 20 years old in the US market. In the UK it’s more like 15 years old. So the fact that that industry is so young means that the industry for coworking management software is even younger.

The competition is definitely there, but it’s not so fierce that we can’t make our mark.

SW: Is there ever a right time or a wrong time for startups to go international?

AM: It varies so much from company to company and industry to industry, so there isn’t really a blanket rule.

However, you need to make sure you’ve got a really solid foundation in your product and also your business in terms of the team you’ve got behind it. Going international means you’re going to get an influx of new customers, but you’re probably also going to get an influx of new customers with a completely different set of needs that require new or different features.

Unless you’ve got the team, structure and processes behind you, you’re unlikely to survive long term on the international market because you won’t have the in-house support to be able to handle it.

I think if we’d tried to go international after only a year of development, the product would naturally not have been quite as strong, and wouldn’t have had enough features in place to address the wider set of needed that an international audience would have.

It’s very easy for companies to think that they’ve got to go global as soon as possible when they see a global audience they could capitalise on, but there’s really something to be said for taking a step back, slowing down a bit and getting everything right on a small scale before expanding things onto a much larger scale.

SW: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in preparing for internationalisation?

AM: On the development side, the biggest challenge we’ve faced has been dealing with time zones.

The core of Coherent is around the invoicing and billing process, to make sure that coworking members are billed on time – and a lot of that is based on dates and times.

For example, making sure that it if an invoice is supposed to be raised at 1am on the 1st of the month, that it’s raised at 1am on the 1st regardless of the country it’s in.

Building that in and making sure that every single piece of Coherent is working according to the relevant time zone when there’s so many areas of the software that use dates and times was a bit crazy.

In terms of the business, although we haven’t started the full international marketing push, we’ve been getting quite a bit of interest from international co-working spaces contacting us to find out if Coherent is ready.

Going forward, trying to develop a marketing strategy that’s as broadly appealing as possible to different countries with different cultures and languages is going to be tricky.

If you’re writing a blog post for example, you can’t assume it’s going to appeal to customers in the UK, the US and Germany for example.

We don’t have an enormous marketing team so we can’t have individual team members focused on specific countries. However, I think this will be a fun challenge and is something I’m looking forward to working on.

SW: What advice would you give to other startups looking to start planning their internationalisation strategy?

AM: Something that we have done quite successfully on the development side of things, is breaking things down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Knowing what hurdles a product like ours might face internationally was key to being able to break those down into individual issues (such as time zones, VAT, currency, languages etc) and then approaching them in a step-by-step manner.

Starting off you need to have a really good understanding of how the core of your product works so you can prioritise which features you need to add in order for it to work on an international scale.

We knew building in time zone functionality into our product was the most important thing for us for the product to work internationally, and our biggest hurdle too, so we prioritised this. Alternatively, translations of the product into native languages we see as more of a ‘nice to have’ feature because the product will still work without it.

For any startup, focus on what’s most important in order for your product to work internationally and do that stuff first – all the extra bits and pieces can come at a later date.

I did international marketing at university and there’s a phrase that’s stuck with me to ‘stay local when you can, go global when you must’.

It’s saying to keep things as small as possible for as long as possible because that’ll mean you’ll keep developing the product, working on the team and on the actual business behind it. Then, when it gets to a point when you’ve satisfied your local market or a new international market emerges, your product and business will be ready to expand into it.

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