Building SmartUP Innovations

The company has existed since August 2021. It is registered in the United Kingdom under company number 13232073, and I have been its CEO from the first day.

It began as a document. Before there was a company there was a business plan and a pitch, and those were what secured my UK Start-up visa. That order of events matters more than it sounds. A visa application forces you to write down, in advance and for a sceptical reader, what the company will do, who it is for and why it should exist at all. Most founders get to postpone that conversation with themselves for a year or two. I had to have it before I was allowed to start.

A team of 10

I lead a team of 10 developers. At that size a company is past the point where the founder can hold every decision, and well short of the point where process substitutes for judgement. What replaces both is clarity about the product: if 10 people understand what the thing is for, most of the small decisions resolve themselves and only the genuinely contested ones reach me.

The practical consequence is that a large share of my week is not building. It is writing things down until they are unambiguous, deciding what we are not doing this quarter, and making sure the person who has to implement a decision has the same picture of it as the person who made it. The failure mode of a 10 person team is not laziness. It is 10 reasonable people each solving a slightly different problem.

What the company builds and what it sells

The product is Scanner, a document-scanning app with one feature I would defend in any room: when the document is a legal agreement, it uses artificial intelligence to highlight the clauses that matter most, and points the reader at the sections they ought to read before signing.

Alongside the product, SmartUP Innovations provides product management and marketing services to other companies. Running both is deliberate. Client work imposes deadlines that come from outside the building, and it keeps a product team honest about how other people's problems are actually shaped. It also pays for the product work, which means the roadmap answers to users rather than to a runway countdown.

What I brought and what I had to learn

The skills I would claim are product and project management, affiliate marketing, digital marketing, creative production, team management and risk management. Some of those I arrived with. Team management and risk management I learned in the job, in the way everybody does, which is by getting them wrong first at a scale small enough to survive.

One of them I formalised. I took Apple Search Ads Marketing certification in June 2024, because acquisition on mobile is a discipline with its own rules rather than general marketing with a different logo.

Back to the main page, or read the two published interviews about this work.