Why advertise in Private Eye?
I met my wonderful wife through the classified section, so why not find co-founders too?
Private Eye's readership is (mostly) sceptical, well-informed, and financially literate — not a bad crowd to be self-selected by if you're after a sophisticated investor with a sense of humour.
Pitch
LLM (AI) coding assistants have dramatically reduced the cost of creating a prototype application or website to test a business idea. This opens up niches that were previously too small to economically address. However, there remains a gap between vibe coding an 80% solution and then deploying it safely and reliably on the internet. Additionally, administration costs remain for all businesses.
What if we prototype several website or application ideas quickly, test how well each product fits the market, and improve or kill off products as required?
We aim to finish the initial phase with a handful of viable products across which product development time is shared, without seeking to build features just for the sake of it. We adopt SaaS models with recurring revenue and low costs for each additional customer after acquisition. Meanwhile, administrative costs are shared across the products and new ideas form a pipeline to grow revenue.
We look to use AI assistance in as many stages of product development as possible, but we are not looking to make products which rely on AI for a key feature.
FAQ
Isn't this just AI-copyable? Where's the moat?
Simple products have low AI defensibility on their own — but moving first, or early and best through domain expertise, into a sticky niche buys a few years of embedded customers, and shared functions cut costs while still allowing things like excellent UK-based customer service.
Why not chase big VC money and go for growth?
Taking on big investment early usually means trading away control and ownership for pressure to grow fast rather than sustainably. We'd rather keep that control — partly so we can keep choosing to give back through pro-bono work along the way. That said, if a particular product would benefit from the Go Big Or Go Home approach, we can spin it out.
Ad-supported?
We're not interested in ad-supported businesses; most likely candidates are B2B plays with a paying customer from day one.
Principles
- The number one aim is to not appear in the pages of Private Eye (unless it is in Good News corner)!
- Companies built will be UK-based and UK-incorporated.
- Create a calm, collaborative work environment.
- Employ UK-based workers on at least the living wage.
- Maintain a maximum pay ratio between lowest and highest paid employees.
- Seek to train young people via entry level jobs or apprenticeships where possible.
- Make a healthy profit from our products, while setting aside some team time and expertise to build separate, pro-bono or at-cost products for worthy causes.
Who are you?
You are a sophisticated investor: there are no guarantees that this will work, and we want skin in the game (perhaps £20-40k) to focus minds!
There are two ways to get involved. Hands-on: you know (or can spot) problems worth solving, and have a few days a month to spend on solutions. Hands-off: you're generally interested in helping this work, with a much lower time commitment.
You may be able to vibe-code your own solution this weekend. What you'd still be missing is the engineering judgement to take that 94% complete prototype to something safe and reliable, plus the backing of a team already set up to handle deployment, hosting, and the boring back-office work.
Collectively, we need leadership (move fast and fix things) but we don't need a group of big egos in competition with each other (calm and collaborative work environment, remember). For the avoidance of doubt, if you are a crypto billionaire and not attaching any strings to your investment then you are most welcome to participate.
Who am I?
A software engineer who has been coding for over 20 years, working for banks initially and then startups of various sizes; always hands-on but also running teams, and setting architectural direction. I am eager to start a new venture but do not want to invent yet another tool for software developers so I need co-founders to bring their domain expertise.
Next steps
Book in for an introductory chat or contact me via LinkedIn.
I can bootstrap some of this in my spare time but some investment would allow us to devote more time to it in the short term. I believe we can take investment under SEIS but nothing is incorporated yet and this has not been tested. If this is not ambitious enough for you, you can ask me about my Big Hairy Audacious Goal some time.