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 has built the immortal sneaker for kids
🤑 How you can sell without selling
🔗 A tool that enables you to ship custom APIs

✨ Last week’s most clicked link, was this link taking you through to Founders, Inc who are looking to write $250,000 cheques into early-stage startups.

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

✨ Techstars have opened applications for their ‘Anywhere Accelerator’ (+ a load more), with successful applicants getting up to $220,000 - apply here!

🦅 Barclays Eagle Labs have launched their next Funding Readiness Accelerator - apply here!

⛏ FirstPick have just raised a €25m fund to invest in Pre-Seed tech startups across the Baltics - apply 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

📈 Growth Marketer, Noxus
🧑‍💻 Chief Technology Officer, Voxmind
🛠 Operations Associate, Factored

🤖 UK pledges £40m for frontier AI research lab. Sifted

🏃 MyFitnessPal has acquired CalAI, the viral calorie app built by teens that hit $30m ARR in under 2 years. TechCrunch

📈 Andruil aims at $60bn valuation in new funding round. TechCrunch
 
🛰 UK Space Agency unveils £30m satellite funding pot. 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!

Our European readers will know that the Six Nations is well and truly underway, and the brand of Guinness is synonymous with the tournament.

So, Guinness have gone beyond the pitch for their most recent campaign. They’ve headed to where the majority of people watch the games - the pub! This is even better, because this is literally the exact location and time at which these people will purchase Guinness.

By creating these fun beer mats and leaving them throughout pubs, they’ve put themselves top of mind at the exact point the consumer is looking to purchase, but not at all in a pushy/salesy way.

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.

Many websites don't have public APIs. Anything API fills that gap. Turn any browser work into a production-ready API. Describe the task, and our agents build a custom function that calls the site directly. Ship a custom API endpoint you can deploy serverless, schedule on Cron, or call via API. Tell Notte what you need. We ship the function endpoint.

👟 Dubs: The Immortal Sneaker Built for Wild Childhoods

Childhood is under threat.

Too many kids are stuck indoors, glued to screens. And when they do get outside, their shoes can’t keep up - uncomfortable, badly sized, worn out in months, and destined for landfill.

Meanwhile, for parents, buying kids’ shoes is chaos:
Sizing confusion. Endless returns. In-store meltdowns.

Dubs was built to fix all of it.

Founded by Stuart, Dubs creates radically re-engineered trainers designed for adventure. They’re featherlight, flexible, and built to last - with a single-sole sizing system that means once you know your child’s size, you know it forever. No variation between styles. No guesswork.

Layered into that is a circular model designed to keep shoes on kids’ feet and out of landfill.

Dubs is for parents who want relief from the madness, and for kids who just want to run, climb, jump and play without their shoes slowing them down (or wrecking the planet).

Born From Lockdown + One Very Energetic Three-Year-Old

Dubs didn’t begin in a boardroom, it began in lockdown.

When COVID hit, Stuart lost his role as Creative Operations Director at M&C Saatchi. Suddenly it was just him and his “supercharged” three-year-old daughter, Leila - both restless, both slightly bonkers, both refusing to sit still.

They spent their days inventing games and creative projects, including turning her outgrown shoes into flowerpots.

But there was a pattern Stuart couldn’t ignore.

Leila’s feet were growing every two to three months. Shoes were piling up. Most weren’t built properly for kids in the first place. They were uncomfortable. They wore out quickly. And they ended up in landfill.

Every week, Stuart would vent about it on Zoom to his friend Gary, a graphic designer. Gary immediately saw the same problem: waste, poor design, and a complete lack of real innovation in kids’ footwear.

So they set themselves a ridiculous-sounding challenge:

“How do we build the Immortal Sneaker?”

While Leila napped, often for precisely 37 minutes, Stuart would research manufacturing, sustainability, and footwear design. He spoke to anyone who would talk to him.

Two friends. No jobs. No industry background.
Fuelled by lockdown chaos and one fast-growing pair of feet.

That’s how Dubs began.

First Customers: Pure Hustle

There was no marketing budget.

Both founders were freelancing to survive, building Dubs on the side. Money was near non-existent.

So Stuart did what scrappy founders do: he hustled.

He researched small footwear brands, studied their social feeds, then picked up the phone. He offered help with brand tone and social strategy in exchange for advice, introductions, and manufacturing insights. It was pure skill-swap networking.

Eventually, they partnered with an ex-developer from Clarks who helped refine their bold designs into something anatomically sound for real kids’ feet.

Then came a breakthrough: a £25,000 grant from Innovate UK. That funding allowed them to create serious prototypes and conduct proper wear-testing.

After countless iterations, they had something that worked.

With no budget for a traditional launch, they turned to crowdfunding and launched on Kickstarter. In a single month, they pre-sold enough trainers to fund their first production run, raising £9,000.

The first pair went to Leila.

Her friends wanted them.

Then their friends wanted them.

No glossy ad campaigns. No paid social machine.

Just kids refusing to take them off, and parents telling other parents.

Word-of-mouth did the heavy lifting.

Scaling With Heart (and Relentless Listening)

One of the most emotional turning points came from an unexpected place: families in the SEND community.

Parents began sharing that their children, who often struggled with uncomfortable or restrictive footwear, finally had shoes that didn’t slow them down.

Dubs had started as a solution for one child. Now it was solving problems for many.

To grow, the team doubled down on what frustrated parents most:

• Sizing chaos

• In-store meltdowns

• Endless returns

They introduced AI-powered sizing to improve fit accuracy and stuck firmly to their single-sole system - so a size six is always a size six, regardless of style.

Sustainability wasn’t treated as a buzzword. They partnered with London South Bank University and Read London to validate their circularity claims and avoid greenwashing.

Growth has come through awards, pop-ups, partnerships and constant feedback loops - not big ad budgets.

It’s still hustle.

But it’s focused hustle.

Bootstrapped and Built the Hard Way

Dubs has been bootstrapped from day one.

Stuart still works four days a week elsewhere to fund the journey, dedicating at least one full day, realistically many more, to building Dubs.

Funding so far includes:

• £25,000 Innovate UK grant

• £20,000 of founders’ own capital

• £9,000 from Kickstarter pre-sales

No debt. No equity given away.

Every pound has gone back into improving the product and building trust with their growing community.

Now revenue-generating, Dubs is beginning to explore what a pre-seed round might look like, and how to scale properly without compromising its mission.

Breaking Into a Stubborn Industry

Footwear manufacturing is notoriously complex.

Factories prioritise large orders. Supply chains are rigid. Small brands have little leverage. Add sustainability requirements on top, and complexity (and cost) multiply.

Dubs could easily have produced cheap, off-the-shelf trainers.

But that would betray the mission.

Sustainable materials and circular practices come at a premium. Cash flow has been a constant balancing act. There have been failed prototypes. Production delays. Hard lessons.

But each setback has sharpened the product and strengthened the brand.

Lessons From Building the “Immortal Sneaker”

Stuart’s biggest takeaways?

1. Resilience beats perfection.
You won’t have all the answers upfront. Adapt quickly. Listen constantly. Don’t get precious about being “right.”

2. Community matters more than ego.
Parents and kids have shaped Dubs as much as the founders have.

3. Find other Founders sooner.
The Founder community is a source of hard-won wisdom and support, and he wishes he’d leaned into it earlier.

4. Protect your own energy.
This journey is stressful and lonely. Burnout can creep in quietly. Making time for yourself isn’t indulgent, it’s necessary.

Raising the Bar for Kids’ Footwear

At its core, Dubs isn’t just a shoe brand.

It’s a response to waste.
A response to poor design.
A response to the chaos parents quietly endure.

And it all started with one dad, one lockdown, and one little girl who kept growing out of her shoes.

The mission now is simple:

Build the shoe parents recommend.
Build the shoe kids refuse to take off.
And keep childhood wild.

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…