⚡ How this Start-Up Became the Invisible Engine Behind Design

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 is this Start-Up the invisible engine behind design?
👋 How showing, not telling, can win you plenty of customers
👥 A tool that helps you find Co-Founders

✨ Last weeks most clicked link, was this link taking you through to apply to Entrepreneurs First, with successful applicants getting the chance at £250,000!

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

💊 There is a £7.5m prize pot in this year’s Longitude prize, aimed at Start-Ups using AI-based approaches to transform drug discovery for ALS - Apply here!

✍️ Chris Smith (Managing Partner of Playfair Capital) is holding 1 to 1s with 10 Founders raising their first round, you can get in touch here!

💪 Google are running their AI for Energy accelerator for Pre-Seed to Series A stage Start-Ups focused on energy solutions- 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

🫵 Operations Associate, V&Me
📈 Marketing Graduate, SudoCyber
🧃 National Account Manager, Flawsome!

💳 Starling Bank sets sights on North America expansion with banking license push. Sifted

🧑‍⚖️ Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books. TechCrunch

🤖 Google unveils Gemini CLI, an open source AI tool for terminals. TechCrunch
 
🌮 Just Eat launches DaaS platform in the UK. UKTN

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Everyone does billboards, but no one does billboards like Canva!

Canva’s recent campaign was a masterclass in “show, don’t tell“. Instead going on about all of their features and telling everyone just how good they are on these big billboards, they were able to clearly illustrate their value in just a few words.

The picked a number of popular use cases for Canva, so they knew that there was a good chance that it would speak to the pains of a larger number of passers-by, and literally acted them out through the billboard.

It’s easy to understand, shows what Canva does and highlights the value of it.

When putting a marketing campaign together, how can you show and not tell?

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.

Finding the right Co-Founder is harder than finding a flat in London, but OnlyFounders is creating a product to facilitate the whole process. So far, they’ve had over 30,000 Co-Founder matches and over 100,000 swipes.

Design Huddle: The Invisible Engine Behind Better Design Experiences

Design Huddle is a design and video creation platform that’s quietly powering some of the most innovative digital experiences out there. But you won’t always see their name on it.

That’s because Design Huddle is built to be embedded directly into other software platforms - giving their partners customisable, on-brand design and video capabilities through either an API or UI integration. Whether it’s for ecommerce personalisation, dynamic content creation, or enabling end-users to customise print assets, Design Huddle makes it seamless.

It’s the design tool behind other tools, and that’s entirely by design.

From Internal Fix to External Business

Design Huddle wasn’t dreamed up in a vacuum, it was born out of a real need.

Dave and his team were running a different business when they kept coming up against the same roadblock: the lack of flexible, embeddable design functionality. So, they built something in-house to solve it. It worked so well, they realised they hadn’t just fixed their own workflow, they’d built a new business.

By bootstrapping the platform from their existing business revenue, they were able to stay lean, move quickly, and validate the product before making any big bets. It gave them a unique level of insight - and room to breathe without needing outside investment.

First Customer? Themselves. Then the Competition.

The very first user of Design Huddle was Dave’s own team, using it inside their previous business.

From there, the logic was simple: if this tool solved their problem, it could probably help others in the same space - including competitors. And it did. Their early traction came from reaching out to their own network and offering the solution to similar companies. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), some of those early adopters were direct competitors.

It quickly became clear that this wasn’t a niche tool, it had cross-industry potential. But rather than chase everyone at once, the team identified a sweet spot in the web-to-print industry, where Design Huddle could have an immediate, tangible impact. That focus unlocked a wave of early traction and strong inbound interest.

Hiring with Purpose, Not Hype

As a bootstrapped company, Design Huddle didn’t make flashy early hires or build out a massive team overnight.

Instead, they brought people in only when they could afford to, and only where the founding team lacked firepower. That meant starting with marketing and client services, where they needed more support to serve growing demand.

Dave leaned into his existing network, built up over the course of a previous business, to find trusted, capable people who could make an impact from day one. No agencies, no hiring frenzies. Just smart, targeted team building.

Friends Become Co-Founders

Design Huddle wasn’t assembled in a boardroom.

Dave started the business with people he’d known for years. One he went to school with two decades ago, one he met through a mutual friend, and another who came via an existing Co-Founder. These were relationships built on trust and time, not just shared spreadsheets.

That long-standing connection gave them a head start when it came to communication, collaboration, and decision-making - they already knew how to work together.

Funding from Within

Design Huddle didn’t raise external funding. They didn’t need to.

Thanks to the profitability of their previous business, they were able to use that revenue as a self-funded seed round. That early capital gave them the freedom to build properly - no rushing to fundraise, no need to chase short-term growth for investor optics.

It’s a path Dave now advocates strongly: if you can fund your idea from an existing business, it buys you time, clarity, and control.

Looking Ahead: Quietly Embedded, Widely Used

Design Huddle continues to focus on what it does best, powering seamless design and video functionality inside other platforms.

Whether it’s web-to-print, marketing tech, ecommerce, or digital signage, the goal remains the same: let businesses offer beautiful, on-brand creative capabilities to their users, without having to build it themselves.

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…