⚡ How did this Start-Up go from an Excel Spreadsheet to Building a Search Engine?

Morning Innovators ⚡ In less than 5 minutes, we’ll cover…

🥳 The best funding opportunities, events and jobs in the Start-Up world this week
📰 This week’s biggest news stories in the Start-Up world
📑 How this Start-Up went from an excel spreadsheet to building a search engine
💎 How you can turn a globally recognised crime into a viral marketing stunt
🛍 A tool that builds you an AI-powered eCommerce store in minutes

✨ Last week’s most clicked link, was this link taking you through to Georgina Smithwick’s LinkedIn post in which she’s looking to invest $1.8m across 8 different Pre-Seed companies.

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

🥇 Entrepreneurs First have opened applications for their winter London Cohort, with successful applicants receiving up to $250,000 in Funding - apply here!

🌉 In addition to that, EF are running their Bridge Residency, an 8-week residency program in San Francisco for young Europeans having graduated in 2023 or later - apply here!

🌏 For our Nordic and Baltic readers, Inception Ventures has just raised a €21m fund to back exceptional technical Founders at the earliest stages in the region - connect with the GP here!

We now have a community of thousands of Start-Ups and Founders, here are the hottest Start-Up job opportunities from the Innovators Uncensored community on our very own Start-Ups Job Board!

💼 Start-Up Jobs

🧑‍💻 Senior Software Engineer, DevAlly
🎬 Creative Strategist, Stocked
🎨 Lead Product Designer, DevAlly

🇸🇪 Sweden’s AI-native startups more than triple funding to €454m so far this year. Sifted

⏸ a16z pauses its famed TxO fund for underserved Founders. TechCrunch

🛍 Shopify says AI traffic is up 7x since January, AI orders up 11x. TechCrunch
 
🤝 Monzo boss to step down with ex-Googler to replace him. UKTN

Planning a trip for business or pleasure?

Final Rentals, a pioneering car rental fintech headquartered in Wales, has revolutionised the industry with its innovative approach and product-centric strategy. By addressing key challenges within the car rental sector, Finalrentals has experienced remarkable growth, increasing its size sixfold in the past 12 months. The company's expansion is not limited to growth metrics alone; it has also successfully established a robust global presence, extending its footprint across the EU and the Caribbean.

Book your rental here!

It’s inevitable that your business will have difficult periods, and often those periods are out of your control. However, there is normally an opportunity hidden in there - perfectly displayed by Boecker!

At this point, the entire globe has seen the robbery of the millions of dollars of Jewels in Paris, and we all seen the clip of them escaping via the furniture lift made by Boecker.

Instead of being downbeat about the situation, or avoiding it entirely, Boecker decided to put together the genius marketing campaign you see above, with the line “When you need to move fast – up to 400kg of treasures at 42m per minute, as quiet as a whisper.”.

If something has gone wrong in your world recently, how can you flip that into a genius marketing campaign?

Each week we highlight our favourite tools - either something we’ve been using in our businesses, or tools that our Start-Up community have recommended.

Build your AI-powered e-commerce store in minutes with Agora. We help you launch a store with built-in features like domain setup, payments, order tracking, analytics, apps, templates, and more. No coding or effort needed.

Shipshape.VC: The Search Engine That Stops Founders Wasting Time

Shipshape.VC is a free investment search engine built to help Founders find the right investors, fast.

What began as a humble Excel spreadsheet (yes, true no-code) has evolved into a fully fledged search engine indexing 19,000 funds, 100,000+ individuals, and users across the world.

Founders using Shipshape have now raised over $1bn - including Shipshape, themselves, and the platform is trusted by Techstars, Oxford + Cambridge business schools, and dozens of accelerators and business schools who want to save Founders time, frustration, and unnecessary rejection.

It’s a tool built by Founders, for Founders - and very much shaped by the painful reality of raising money the slow way.

“Our First Customer Bought From an Excel Sheet”

The early days were as scrappy as it gets. Daniel and the team were founders raising at the time, surrounded by other founders raising - which gave them the perfect first test group.

Their very first customer? Someone who paid £100 for access to their glorified Excel sheet, simply because Shipshape found investors active in the cancer detection space.

Their early marketing, however, was, as Daniel bluntly puts it, “terrible.” Google Ads flopped, various experiments went nowhere, and the lesson became clear:
early on, you must accept that you do not yet know your distribution channel.

The Slow Grind to Real Scale

Scaling wasn’t linear. In fact, Shipshape cycled through several business models before finding one that stuck.

Today, they focus on highly targeted marketing solutions for organisations that support scaling tech companies. Because their own product helps founders perform laser-focused outreach, Shipshape mirrored that philosophy in their own go-to-market strategy:
no spam, no noise, just precise targeting.

Four years in, Daniel says they’re finally finding their groove.

The Pivots, Painful Mistakes, and the £100k Lesson

Daniel’s biggest regret?
Not focusing on revenue early enough.

Instead, they chased investors, listened to too many user types, and got seduced by feature requests from big corporates who never converted. In one infamous example, a Big Four firm assured them they’d buy if Shipshape made a complex change.

Five months of building later…
They didn’t buy. Not even close.

It was the classic Founder trap: building for people who might pay instead of doubling down on those who already do.

Funding: A Cocktail of Angels, Grants and Hard Truths

Shipshape has survived, and grown, through a combination of:

✅ Revenues
✅ Angel investment
✅ Co-funding from Angels Invest Wales
✅ A forward-thinking university partner (UWTSD)
✅ Grants
✅ R&D tax credits

They were pushed into raising early after winning a £100k InnovateUK grant as the second £50k only unlocked once they had spent the first £100k, meaning they had to raise £50k at lightning speed.

Luckily, Daniel and his Co-Founder Alistair had built a Series A at their previous company, so they leaned on that network - plus a few supportive friends and family.

The Biggest Failure? Chasing Investors Instead of Customers

Daniel is very clear about this one.
The company spent far too long chasing funding.

If he could do it again, he’d have:

• built a repeatable marketing and sales process sooner

• focused on paid-for value rather than product complexity

• sold a simple version earlier while building the sophisticated search engine in parallel

But as he admits, “2020/21 were heady days…”

Founders everywhere know exactly what he means.

Lessons From Building in Wales (The Honest Version)

Daniel speaks candidly about the realities of building a startup in Wales:

Pros:

• incredible talent

• lower burn

• fantastic quality of life

• strong universities

• supportive Founder ecosystem

Cons:

• lack of competitive capital

• slow, cautious funding processes

• painful experiences with institutional investors

Shipshape lost around 12 months dealing with one funder, with term sheets agreed verbally and later pulled. It’s a surprisingly common Founder story in the region.

His advice?
Raise capital outside Wales (London/US), spend it in Wales.
Your equity goes further, and your stress levels drop.

“Build for the People Who Already Love You”

Asked what he’d do differently, Daniel doesn’t hesitate:

• Focus on a small number of customers who genuinely love the product

• Ignore the noise from every user type with an opinion

• Stop assuming big organisations will convert

• Spend more time on distribution, not just product

• Use their own search engine more aggressively when raising

It’s classic Founder wisdom, earned the hard way.

Next week I’ll be highlighting another awesome Start-Up, as well as sharing all the usuals including funding opportunities, Start-Up news, plus plenty of awesome tips, tricks and tools.

P.S. Connect with me on LinkedIn…