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 rebuilt how elite teams bond
🗜 How a car clamp can perform better than a billboard
🤖 An AI tool that builds agents for your operations

✨ Last week’s most clicked link, was this link taking you through to NatWest’s pitch competition with £100k equity free cash up for grabs.

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

🌍 Impact Shakers are looking to invest in 3 x €250,000 cheques into early-stage companies building better infrastructure for the future of Earth - apply here!

✈️ Lockheed Martin Ventures have just announced their $1bn evergreen fund investing deep tech and dual use technologies across multiple stages - submit your pitch here!

🇪🇺 Highland Europe have just announced their latest sector agnostic growth fund of $1.1bn investing in Europe’s most exciting companies at Series B and beyond - connect with the team here!

We want to know more about you! We’ve got some big content changes coming up, and we want to make sure we’re delivering the very best to your inbox every week!

💼 Start-Up Jobs

🎨 Product Designer, AIOS
🪙 Product Manager, Koinly
📈 Community Growth Manager, Reedsy

💰 UK Pension providers in talks for £1bn Scale-Up fund. Sifted

📦 DoorDash is building its own drone delivery business. TechCrunch

🏋️‍♂️ Synthesia’s AI training platform is moving beyond videos into live coaching. TechCrunch
 
 💸 Moneybox hits £800m valuation after PISCES share sale. UKTN

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Paddy Power are known for pushing the boat out when it comes to putting comedy in their advertising, but this one really takes the biscuit!

From the 23rd - 26th of July, there is a comedy festival being hosted by Paddy Power in Dublin - and they are very much taking advantage of that with their most recent campaign.

The campaign went like this: go through the streets of Dublin putting a fake wheel clamp on cars dotted around the city with the dates and details of the festival plastered on the clamp. Now, of course you’ll get the attention of the car owner with a bright yellow clamp on their car, but every single passer-by will look at it. We’ve all walked alongside a car with a clamp on and thought “I’m glad it’s not me”.

Suddenly, you’ve got hundreds, if not thousands, of people looking at the promo for your event. A normal billboard is easy to ignore, this is something that grabs attention.

How can you create this alternative-billboard style campaign for your business?

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.

Pazi is an AI team for that idea you keep coming back to - a book, a shop, an app, a skill you want to sell. Tell Pazi what you're trying to do and it builds a team of agents around your idea and starts making things happen: a website, first outreach, content, the next step. Every time you come back, something has moved. You stay in control; your team does the rest alongside you, one real step at a time. Like vibe coding but for business operations.

Midstay: Reinventing How Companies Plan Events and Hotels Win Business

Planning company retreats is rarely simple. Between sourcing venues, coordinating logistics, managing suppliers and handling endless email chains, organising an event can quickly become a full-time job.

That's where Midstay comes in.

Co-Founded by Florian, Midstay helps businesses organise team retreats and corporate events across Europe and Asia. Over the past few years, the company has delivered everything from intimate 20-person offsites to large-scale retreats with more than 500 attendees.

But as the business grew, Florian and his team uncovered a much bigger opportunity.

Working with hundreds of hotels exposed just how outdated the industry's sales processes remained. Group bookings were still being managed through spreadsheets, Word documents and lengthy email threads.

That insight led to the creation of MicePro, Midstay's AI-powered sales platform built specifically for hotels.

While Midstay owns the demand side by helping companies organise events, MicePro helps hotels manage enquiries, create proposals faster, collaborate internally and ultimately win more group business.

Together, the two businesses are modernising both sides of the corporate events industry.

From Surf Sessions in Indonesia to Startup Co-Founders

Florian met his Co-Founder, Magnus, during the COVID pandemic while both were stranded in Indonesia.

Their routine quickly became a memorable one.

Most mornings were spent surfing before both headed back to work remotely for clients in the afternoon.

Between surf sessions and work, conversations naturally drifted towards startup ideas.

Over time, they realised they complemented each other perfectly.

Florian brought strengths across product, commercial strategy and design, while Magnus was an exceptional engineer capable of turning ambitious ideas into working products at remarkable speed.

Years later, Florian believes the secret to their partnership hasn't been constant agreement.

It's been trust.

Like any Founders, they've had disagreements, but they've built the confidence to rely on each other when the difficult moments inevitably arrive.

Winning Customers One Conversation at a Time

Midstay's first customers didn't come through clever growth hacks or sophisticated marketing funnels.

They came through persistence.

Florian spent months reaching out to companies on LinkedIn, sending cold emails, joining Founder communities, asking for introductions and accepting virtually every meeting opportunity that came his way.

It was entirely manual.

The first events were secured through outbound sales and referrals, with every successful retreat helping generate credibility for the next.

As more companies experienced Midstay's service, word of mouth became one of the company's strongest acquisition channels.

Today, the business generates inbound leads through SEO, Google Ads and content marketing.

But Florian credits those early months of relentless outreach for building the foundation.

Every customer was earned through genuine conversations rather than automated campaigns.

Building Internal Software That Became a Business

One of Midstay's biggest breakthroughs came from solving its own operational problems.

As the business grew, the team realised they couldn't continue relying solely on individual knowledge and manual processes.

They documented workflows, hired specialists rather than generalists and invested heavily in building software to run the business more efficiently.

Ironically, the internal tools they created eventually evolved into an entirely new company.

The software originally built to help Midstay manage hotel partnerships and group bookings became MicePro, the client-facing platform now helping hotels modernise their own operations.

What started as an internal productivity tool became a commercial SaaS product.

Alongside that, Florian discovered another valuable lesson.

Every customer interaction is market research.

Rather than trying to invent new products in isolation, the team simply paid close attention to the recurring frustrations companies and hotels kept describing.

Those conversations consistently pointed towards the next opportunity.

Validate the Problem Before Building the Solution

Looking back, Florian believes one mistake many Founders make is falling in love with their solution too early.

His advice today would be simple.

Spend significantly more time speaking to customers before writing a single line of code.

The better you understand the problem, the easier it becomes to build something people genuinely want.

He also admits he waited too long to hire sales support.

For years he wanted to stay involved in every sales conversation because he genuinely enjoyed speaking to customers.

Eventually, however, that became the company's biggest bottleneck.

Delegating sales earlier would have freed up more time to focus on building the business itself.

Growing Through Customers Before Capital

Like many startups, Midstay began by funding itself through client work.

Revenue generated from organising events was continually reinvested back into growing the company and improving the product.

Only later did the business raise several SAFE investment rounds from business angels who believed in the long-term vision.

Importantly, Florian says fundraising was never the objective.

Customers came first.

Investment simply accelerated progress that was already happening.

That customer-first mentality meant the company was building something people were willing to pay for long before external capital entered the picture.

Fundraising Was Built on Relationships, Not Cold Outreach

When Midstay eventually raised investment, the process felt surprisingly natural.

Most investors had already been following the company's progress for some time.

They had been introduced through existing relationships, watched the business evolve and developed confidence in both the Founders and the direction of travel.

By the time fundraising officially began, many conversations had effectively started months, or even years, earlier.

The lesson was clear.

Strong relationships built over time often prove far more valuable than approaching investors only when capital is needed.

Learning When to Let Go

One of the hardest lessons Florian has faced has been learning to pivot.

Like many successful startups, Midstay didn't end up exactly where it began.

Changing direction is emotionally difficult.

Founders naturally become attached to ideas they've spent months or even years building.

But markets don't reward emotional attachment.

They reward solving real problems.

Learning when to abandon ideas that weren't working became one of Florian's biggest personal growth moments.

Alongside that came another challenge unique to Midstay.

Running a services business while simultaneously building a SaaS company meant balancing two businesses with completely different operating models.

Services demand immediate execution and customer delivery.

Software requires long-term product thinking and continuous development.

Although difficult to manage, Florian now sees this combination as one of Midstay's greatest competitive advantages, with each side constantly informing and strengthening the other.

Outcomes Matter More Than Features

Reflecting on the journey so far, several lessons stand out.

The first is that customers rarely buy features.

They buy outcomes.

Technology is only valuable if it helps people achieve something they couldn't achieve before.

Secondly, speed almost always beats perfection.

Florian would rather launch a product that's 80% complete, gather real customer feedback and improve it than spend six months polishing something in isolation.

Perhaps most importantly, he believes surrounding yourself with exceptional people changes everything.

Whether it's a Co-Founder, employees or investors, the right people make the inevitable difficult moments far more manageable.

Finally, he's learned to ignore the constant noise surrounding other startups.

Funding announcements, LinkedIn success stories and headline-grabbing valuations can easily become distractions.

At the end of the day, none of them matter as much as speaking to customers and building something they genuinely want.

For Midstay, that relentless focus on solving real customer problems has transformed a simple event management business into a company now modernising the technology behind an entire industry.

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…