PLATFORM Newcastle - August 2024
Insights Briefing
PLATFORM | UK Startup Week - Paul Lancaster
This event is about creating a platform for new and established businesses on how to start and grow a business in the North East next to Newcastle Central Station in Newcastle upon Tyne. There is a private Facebook group to share updates, ask questions and get help and advice and a nice way for the community to help each other, to find out more visit ukstartupweek.com.
Wubbleyou, one of the sponsors of Platform recently did a talk with Paul King about their company and how they developed and grew the business to reach 1-million-pound revenue. Wubbleyou also have a Tech Disreputability Index to understand opportunities and gaps in knowledge at product.wubbleyou.co.uk.
Dibi conference is organised by Andy from Komodo Digital and runs this conference in Edinburgh about helping people deliver tech and digital products to come together and share knowledge and best practices and are looking for speakers. For more information about Design It. Build It. visit dibiconference.com.
Account Technology Strategist, Microsoft - Steve Newton
Steve has been in tech industry in the North East for many years and has spent the last five years at Microsoft and looks after customer accounts and people's strategy.
AI & Copilot - Artificial Intelligence will significantly shape the way we work by automative routine tasks, augmenting human capabilities and drive more data driven decision making. This description was generated by AI when asked to explain itself.
AI timeline was in 1956 when artificial intelligence was first coined by Alan Turing and 1997 was when Machine Learning for machines to learn and 2018 for Deep learning followed by 2019 for developments in generative AI.
OpenAI + Microsoft - Microsoft own 49% and supplement their products with it, to help with things like coding things or getting help with images. You can get text, conversation, code and images with AI and in the near future will be speech which sounds like talking to a human. Prompting is something you give AI to get a response, and the AI understands conversationally what was said in a previous response.
Microsoft 365 Copilot - built on Microsoft's comprehensive approach including Security, Compliance, Privacy and Responsible AI. When using AI there is a whole set of governance that comes with using models. Microsoft 365 apps have Copilot built in including Word, Excel, PowerPoint to provide assistance to users such as drafting content which can be regenerated where needed and edited before being used plus other things such as meeting summaries, responses to emails and more.
Microsoft Teams with Copilot can help with instant meeting effectiveness and be more present in a meeting. As you get into Teams can kick off a transcription, which is based on what everyone said, if you're late to a meeting can get a summary of what was said or can generate meeting notes and shows all the main points and any action items at the end and even understands a North East of England accent. Copilot in Teams can also see what questions were raised and can see the context of where it got the information from in the transcript and can see who spoke and who talked the most. You can see who were engaged and can go over previous meetings and see who attended and what each person talked about and get a recap to know what happened in the last meeting and where you are at.
You can put information into a table using Copilot in Word and you can also stay on top of long email threads and response quickly. You get a long email thread, and you want to know what it was all about, with Copilot it can summarise this and even write a response or say thank you to someone and there are different options for tone including short, medium and long responses. It will use the same kind of language you use in your emails and when happy with it you can keep it and send. Copilot is there to create content not to do it for you, it is up to you to read and check it before you send it.
Copilot can create a rapid business case in Word which can even use information from the web to supplement content. Copilot can understand a prompt about what a business case is from the web and looks at documents from your organisation. You don't have to just look at a blank piece of paper but get Copilot to start and write most of it and you can feed documents into it as a source in order to write a response to it. It is like having your own PA built into your PC all the time. The most expensive thing you can buy is time, how can you be more present in a meeting and the answer is Copilot, it is built in, when using ChatGPT any data is being used to train the model but with Copilot it is staying in the boundaries of your tenant. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is around £24.70 per month as of August 2024.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 has a contact centre and as on a phone call it is transcribing the conversation and providing some of the responses you can do using AI and can be passed onto an agent where needed which can state which answers are appropriate and can link into Teams to bring in people who are appropriate to answer a question.
When you are saying please and thank you, you seemingly get better responses, but it is based on algorithms, so it is showing what the next appropriate response is which is how large language models work. Anything you say to Copilot stays within the model and does not get used to train the model and you can get any output to be as needed such as British English rather than American English and you can even use Copilot with Microsoft apps on Mac. AI can be used for taking notes too or generate a presentation from a Word document in PowerPoint so could then spend less time and within an hour after tweaking images got the results you wanted rather than take a couple of days to put together the presentation. Microsoft is seeing savings with support tickets by generating appropriate responses using Copilot.
Human touch is still important, and Copilot is being used to enhance things, but could it do your work for you or say it could? Who knows where things will be going and how often has each technology been stated to lose jobs but instead created new jobs, but Copilot helps and augments humans, but most organisations aren't generally losing staff but helping their staff achieve more with AI and be more productive and see more returns as then companies are quite happy with this situation. Companies can look how to be more creative with AI and you can even get prompts generated by AI to use with another AI to get information you wanted.
When using AI to do a performance appraisal but if is doesn't produce the results you need as can always change words or remove things that don't make sense or sound right then can move things or change things but can still be structured well and remove words you wouldn't use, you want the content to be a reflection of yourself and how you would write things. You have to be happy with how things are presented and rather than spending hours on something and would be better to use Copilot to do that instead it makes sense so can focus on other things and if you don't use it then you're spending time doing things it could help with and it is that, that doesn't make sense.
Founder, G2 Solutions & Intelligence Fusion - Michael McCabe
Michael talked about their journey taking a business from startup to successful exit. Their background is they were born in the 80s and in school they filled in a survey about what jobs they could do, and it was fence erector. They went to University in Liverpool and joined the British Army and then afterwards worked in the private sector in Iraq and were writing intelligence documents in Word but there was a demand for the data, and they came up with idea to deliver this data to clients in real-time.
They wanted to setup their own business in the North East and asked, if they should do it and didn't have an MBA or exposure to business but at the time they did a consultancy business. Their idea wasn't refined down but they bought a book Set up a Successful Small Business to know how to learn to start a business.
They found guidance by doing networking and to the BNI and got help refining the idea and helped raise some money to build the MVP of their platform using £22,500 of funding. MVP creation using Ambix as a foundation which they used for their requirements, but Ambix owned the IP but was a good way of getting the product out there, They were trying to get a global intelligence feed out there but did a internship with Durham University with around fourty interns from there.
They created their product by using the book LEAN Startup by Eric Ries and also got more funding of around £478,000 but had to pick certain key elements to work on as couldn't do everything at once but this allowed them to build their own platform which was build for them and they owned the IP this time.
They got traction from marketing with visual based analysis which was shared on LinkedIn and are always very visual with their marketing and are B2B, so this was the best avenue as other social media is B2C. Their first customers included Booking.com and Spotify but their revenue was choppy with good periods and bad periods. Through this they found their market fit with intelligence with the depth and breadth of information along with accuracy as their platform was the most accurate on the market. They also had ICPs which helped with sales and marketing, and they had focus on customer acquisition and retention as it is hard to get them so want to keep them.
Scaleup was achieved with more investment including more analysts for that global feed of intelligence and started to do more LinkedIn adverts spending around £5,000 per month and would get twelve product demos a month that way. They also built a new website for lead generation and refined their marketing campaigns with more video content and attending consistent events and picked up an eight-year contract with ExxonMobil to develop their own custom intelligence platform.
Covid then happened and conversations stopped for at least a month and oil prices dropped and the platform with oil and gas wasn't successful at all. They also took matched loans and resulted in a different business environment with more public sector clients.
Exiting was six potential acquirers and ended up selling to Sigma7 who were a startup intelligence company, and they got 9.4x their annual revenue and how much they would pay was how much it is worth to them, and they sold it for £7,000,000 which was how much their investors were willing to take. It was a hard, draining process with need to have an in-depth understanding of company and you still need to run the business. and it takes around six months, and the founder is expected to stay with some equity in the Sigma7.
When your business is acquired, it is not your business anymore, when you sell you sell. Although they have left the company, they do still do contracting for them but when self-employed you create and drive your own vision to your own standards with the culture you want to work in.
Biggest lessons are having more investment in the North East of England and the government needs to invest more but this will only get you so far. You need to get the right people around you such as operations, technology, marketing and sales and if make a hiring mistake then fix it quickly. Also join organisations like Dynamo and make doing business fun. If you are a tech business, you should be able to sell it with a wireframe diagram. There's hard work needed as when in sales you need to pick up the phone and put in the effort as it will pay off. You need to plan for your exit by liking at what your company needs to look like to sell it including revenue level, client base and structure and maturity of the business. For equity is don't give too much away too soon because may get to the point where the equity left doesn't feel worth it, need to balance equity with capital to grow and exit.
If you know your sector inside and out, they make the best salespeople, you have to take an interest in the client to craft a solution around them. Better to take on analysts and teach them sales and give them the tools they need to sell better. Selling to intelligence analysts is easier if you are an intelligence analyst.
LinkedIn worked for them with Pictorial Intelligence Summaries and they were feeling their way through it for their first 100 days but you could ask ChatGPT to give advice about this but make sure to check any figures or anything it may have got wrong but it can help. They now do consulting and will help any North East based businesses with any advice but they have a new business, G2 Solutions based in Cobalt Business Park.
Show & Tell
Founder & Business Change Consultant, Fettle IT - Helen Doherty
Helen helps companies deliver change and their experience is delivering change in many companies, primalily IT focused for a range of industries and companies working on software delivery at at Fettle IT.
Why are businesses bad at change? Change is hard due to risk and upheaval and changes you don't what to do or are behind the times and don't want to be found out or there's new legislation and have to do more compliance changes or maybe you'll lose your job or department. People don't get to get good at change as they don't do it very often.
Big mistakes are inexperience and not fixing the right problem - solutionising and by treating the symptom and not the right cause or not knowing what good looks like. They have seen solutions to make someone read a newsletter with an expensive solution but the content itself was wrong or boring and were looking at the wrong end of the problem. Not treating it like a project and trying to see things work by magic. Planning in a vacuum or in secret and businesses throwing a change grenade over a fence. Unrealistic expectations are common including unrealistic and challenging deadlines for something to be done end-to-end and deliver something in a arbitrarily short deadline.
Wishful outsourcing is buying something to solve your problems and will magically deliver your needs, but vendors can only sell what they have, they don't work for you if they are not building bespoke software. They won't tell you that an existing system can be used more efficiently and effectively and won't recommend a better fit from a competitor. Vendors have their own objectives they don't have to live with the solution, if they give you something that isn't that great what can they do and won't let you customise it beyond a certain point and businesses can get tied in and if they aren't great you have to live with it and may be stuck with what you have chosen - the sunk cost fallacy.
Business impacts can be change is delayed or stalled, rework or additional spend is required if didn't solve the underlying problem and there's time and effort wasted. If throwing a lot of chaotic change this can have an effect on morale plus there can be loss of confidence, goodwill and customer satisfaction. If you're competitors are doing change better and faster your customers will go there instead.
It is not all doom and gloom, Fettle IT can help with experience in project management and are IT focused and can talk the talk with developers and are independent as much as any vendor can be and have no vested interest in any product and offering project management as a flexible service, including getting a project off to a good start or for end-to-end hand holding or if need help with issue with any change.
Benefits with help with change is increased confidence, informed decision making, improved staff engagement and better change, faster. You can't ask your competitor and businesses always want to do massive changes planned years in the future but instead plan a step and do it and keep doing this one step at a time. If staff are seeing you are doing things right and asking the right questions they will naturally be engaged.
Founder & Director, The Digital Lighthouse - Tom Chandler
Tom is from Whitley Bay and is the founder of The Digital Lighthouse and specialises in delivering performance driven marketing strategies that enhance business growth. They are a guest lecturer at Newcastle University for that next generation of marketers with practical real-world experience.
They stand as a beacon of excellence in a crowded digital space by being solely focused on paid digital media. They have worked with large and small clients and working with e-commerce and financial service clients and can bring in a vast array of experience from a variety of clients.
They offer integrated performance marketing services with experience in full-funnel performance campaigns across major ad networks to boost your brand's reach and impact. They integrate things with LinkedIn, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon and others.
They have three key pillars, the first is advise where collaborate with in-house teams or external agencies providing expert guidance to achieve business goals. The next is to deliver by boosting growth on all digital platforms powered by unmatched performance marking expertise and finally they educate by building tomorrows marketing and lecturing with digital learning and global partnerships to elevate skills.
They focus on delivery advantage and are an agency of specialists over generalists and prioritise delivering results and maintaining effective communication which sets them apart in a market dominated by broader offerings. They want to integrate and deliver for their partners. They also deliver high-impact performance with a strategy with audit and aligned benchmarks and then setup by establishing multi-channel platforms and advanced analytics and then have execution with deploying and optimising campaigns and refine strategies and grow by scaling successful campaigns.
Their impact has been to deliver industry-defining digital events, mentoring the next generation and giving back to their community and their work shapes future of marketing and supports growth locally and globally. Important industry updates including Google's monopoly ruling raises uncertainty about long-term market, TikTok and Amazon are integrating closer for seamless customer experiences, Facebook reports higher ad engagement and reduced costs in 2024.
Privacy and measurement in how you collect and utilise user data is more difficult because of consent banners and the features is making understanding user journeys more difficult and making it harder to connect the dots to allow marketing teams to make decisions of the back of data is a challenge being faced. Foundation of robust digital management is important along with connected excellence, they docus on leveraging their network of like-minded quality obsessed specialists across all disciplines to make sure that broader marketing needs are met such as PR, Design, Business Consulting and SEO.
In Conversation With...
O.agency - Rachel Hodgson speaking to CO-Founder & COO, Haystack - Mike Davies
Mike is one of the co-founders of Haystack, they used to be a software engineer, but they don't do so much coding anymore but spends time running the business instead.
Rachel asked what is Haystack all about? It is a bit of a disrupter for the recruitment space, they are a tech hiring space who connect people writing code and connecting them with tech employers and for those growing their teams just starting out or existing large companies recruiting many people or for a diverse hiring.
Rachel asked how did they see the gap in the market with Haystack? They did computer science at Newcastle University and did things deliberately to know how to build a tech product and at university they got hired to build the app as were looking for someone who knew how to write code and build mobile apps and it still gets used now and was their first experience building a product used by many people. After university they joined a startup, Hive, was to find coolest B2B SAAS company at the time and after six months grew company and teams and the product, at every stage of the journey there was a pain point which including hiring software engineers. They though how can't people like them find a company like Hive. Employers when they raise investment and take on a contract, they need more staff so turn to a recruitment agency and for software engineers it is hard to find a job and need to use recruiters or job boards which are all exactly the same with little or no context and with LinkedIn you're bombarded with texts and spam.
Rachel asked if lack of transparency with recruiters an issue? Haystack gives you context as it gives that information like Rightmove when looking at the property you want people use Haystack in the same way to look for a new job but people also use their app in the same way to passively use it as a research tool and have full control in their hands and seems they are on to something and have over 100,000 candidates on their system.
Rachel then asked who is the dream client they have won? They did somehow with American Express, these opportunities land on your desk sometimes such as them and Lloyds Bank and Raytheon along with big employers such as Amazon and Meta.
Rachel then asked what was the biggest learning curve? Do you just build a product and people will come to you, well no but they joined Ignite program and tried to meet as many people as possible and networking events are like a lottery and you don't know who you may meet, and they found Dan who co-founded Bede Gaming who came on board and accelerated the business. They were in that frame of writing code but how to you roll it out but as business grows you try to work it out as you go along.
Rachel then asked does people having more than surface level knowledge important? You have to be able to know how to sell a product and cohesively understand the product to explain it to an audience. Apple reframed the iPod was a million songs in your pocket rather than 1Gb of storage.
Rachel then asked How do you hand things over and does it become easier? Four years later it is even harder it never gets easier, but the sales side is getting people in who want to learn and thrive in a startup environment and how do you take things in their and co-founder head and deliver that to their employees and look at how do you scale your sales people.
Rachel asked were things looking like they are going in in the right direction? They have to worry about tech candidates and businesses and built out the former first but as soon as they landed on a few thousand they weren't charging initially so now they have something that works and can put a price tag on it. The B2C is to see if people are using the product as it is intended to be used and reaching that end goal to get a job.
Rachel asked what was surprising aspect of business? Covid was a surprise, and they hired their first employee the first day of lockdown and had got £400,000 investment but was a nightmare to build a team remotely and how to build a startup culture when working from home. They managed to ride wave of using software, but a lot of tech companies had over hired for roles, but things have settled down. Employers get a lot of irrelevant applications so how do you reduce that and how do you make them more appealing on Haystack.
Rachel asked if they have any mentors or advice? They have lots of mentors, you can't do it yourself and have to be good at delegating, you may be invested more but need to figure out the customer success piece for example but may not be the best at that and need to delegate and look for best person. For sales they were good, but they couldn't dedicate 100% of their attention so they needed to delegate.
Finally Rachel asked for the next five years what is the plan for Haystack? When investors invest, they want to see an exit and a return, but they are on to something and could expand beyond the UK but will still focus on tech but new markets are next expansion and look at more later on.
Audience questions included what challenges are there? Haystack doesn't exist without the candidates and to build a platform loved by tech people was important but for marketing is they have built a community liked by tech community so don't spend anything on acquiring candidates and rely on word on mouth.
What Haystack offer compared to recruiter? Employers tap into candidates directly and don't have to pay recruitment fees. They are also used to hire more diverse tech talent and challenges are different on a customer-by-customer basis.
How to do marketing to keep growing? The market can be a surplus of candidates which is at the moment or if a surplus of jobs means they may do advertising, do app store optimisation and offer a referral scheme to have tools in their toolbox to pull on so could spin up adverts if needed but have different growth levers they could turn on when needed. Haystack have found passive candidates who are happy in their current role are the most valuable candidates as if get those who are casually browsing is where you can find those gems who are sort of happy but something that lands in their lap that may interest them.
How are they challenging goals for creating tech developers? There are a lot of entry level candidates and Haystack work with company like Tech Returners to get people back into tech companies and work with North Coders to take entry level students and get entry level talent. Entry level jobs can be posted on Haystack for free and is a genuine challenge they have been wrestling with for many years. They often encourage companies to look internally and train them up for tech roles within a company, they are the marketplace to find opportunities but work with organisations such as Treehouse which have really good training initiatives for people from a different department who really wants to learn how to code and train them up into those positions.
Do they have anything for developing countries to insource capabilities? Haystack would like to look at new markets and place a lot of people on visa sponsorships but is something they would be interested in looking more into in the future.
Conclusion
Paul does business coaching and helps people who are good at what they do but feel overwhelmed and struggling to focus and be productive and help remove some of those barriers and has got some good results from this with the Five Star programme. Sunderland Startup Week which has sponsors now including North East BIC, Waterstons and BJSS and has been held in Newcastle before but now in Sunderland but for the whole of the North East and the UK about how to get started, get ideas to life, how to grow your business, building a team and how to know what it working and isn't will be happening over that week and is a great networking event and can be found at ukstartupweek.com.