Big ideas, scribbled on small surfaces.
The daily standup was supposed to keep teams aligned. Instead, it's become the centrepiece of a meeting culture that's quietly strangling productivity in UK software shops. It's time for smaller teams to stop performing agility and start practising it — and that begins with cancelling a lot of calendar invites.
While American tech firms race to hire thousands and burn through venture capital at breathtaking speed, a quietly confident cohort of British software companies is doing something radical: staying small, staying profitable, and — whisper it — actually enjoying themselves. This is an argument for the boutique, the niche, and the deliberately unglamorous business that turns a tidy profit without once appearing on a VC's radar.
Some of Britain's most interesting software products began life as a scrawl on a pub receipt, a beermat, or the back of a Pret sandwich bag. We spoke to indie founders and small-team developers about the chaotic, brilliant, deeply unglamorous process of turning a rough sketch into something people actually pay for. Turns out, constraints aren't the enemy of creativity — they might just be the whole point.
Naming your software company is one of the most important decisions you'll make — and an alarming number of British founders are getting it spectacularly, sometimes hilariously, wrong. From domain names that accidentally spell something unspeakable to perfectly innocent words that mean something horrifying in American English, we've rounded up the finest examples of nominal catastrophe the UK tech scene has to offer.
Every great British tech startup begins the same way: a eureka moment, a biro, and the back of something disposable. But somewhere between that glorious scribble and a working product, thousands of founders watch their funding evaporate into thin air. We dig into why so many MVPs die before anyone gets to use them — and what you can actually do about it.