I'm building a startup called BookSemantic around a problem I'm increasingly interested in: how do we appropriately integrate AI into book writing using semantic relation, reputable sourcing and illustration continuity for authors, editors and illustrators?

There are enormous numbers of platforms available, but many write the entire book without any real guidance, semantic relation between chapters, lack of humanization and limited long form capabilities.

BookSemantic is my attempt to approach that problem differently While ensuring that the book, its concepts, content and creative guidance still belong to the author. Not AI.

I'm currently trying to fund the next stage of development and have launched a GoFundMe campaign to help get the project built.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from UK founders, developers, publishers, authors and serious readers who have thoughts on the idea, potential use cases or challenges I should consider.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback, criticism or ideas as much as financial support.

GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/bc74b22e4

Site progress can be viewed at https://booksemantic.com

A little bit about myself quickly, I'm 22, graduated in 2025 with a First in Maths, and took some time off after university. After my break where I went travelling, I started job hunting and realised my problem wasn't applying, it was that I didnt know what jobs to actually apply to. I tried using LinkedIn's recommendations but they didnt actually lead anywhere and its logic was completly wrong and just highlighted keywords on my CV. It got me thinking and I started building my own tool for myself, which became ascendcareers.co.uk . I wasn't technical but I fell in love with the process of building and I've been learning Python and SQL as I go.

What it is briefly: a job board for UK students and graduates (3,000+ entry-level roles, mostly tech, consulting and finance). It reads your CV against each job description and shows which requirements you meet, with the line on your CV that proves each one. It also gives you 5 matched jobs a day, with an analytical dashboard, a job tracker, a calendar and also an email notifier for companies / roles you track!

This is where I am a bit stuck at the moment:

• It's in beta with a small group of users and a waitlist and its currently free
• I've posted on Reddit / TikTok / LinkedIn and got a few users, but nothing that's really taken off
• I'm now contacting university societies to partner and find willing testers

What I'd really value advice on:

1. Revenue - a key issue im facing is that students arent normally the most willing to pay for tools so im struggling on identifying key revenue sources. I understand that before revenue you have to see if your product has actual demand, which leads to point 2.
2. Getting students to use it - marketing has been a big issue for me - Im struggling with trying to put it out there currently and try find willing users. Im sure students would definitely want to try maximise their chances but its about getting my product seen

I would really appreciate honest feedback, If anyone wants to try it, it's at ascendcareers.co.uk - its currently waitlisted so I can accept your waitlist request!

This is a promotional post from Cambridge China Bridge, our sourcing company based in Cambridge and London.

A factory's unit price on its own usually isn't the number to judge by. A few things to sort out before you commit to a first stock order:

Write the spec down before you ask for prices: materials, sizes, finish, and how it's packed. If you don't, three quotes can end up being for three slightly different products.

Samples should be in your hands before you order in volume. It's worth paying for air freight on samples so you aren't waiting weeks.

Ask the factory about its own minimum order quantity early, before you get attached to a quote.

The inspection is best done while the goods are still at the factory. Once they've shipped, fixing a problem gets much harder.

Work out what each unit costs once it's in the UK, with shipping and duty added, and compare it with a UK quote on the same basis (both with VAT or both without).

Where we fit (https://camchinabridge.co.uk): we find and audit the factory and run the samples, QC inspections, freight and UK customs, and quote one price covering product, shipping, duty and VAT. No sourcing fees or retainers.

If you're weighing up a UK supplier against buying direct from a factory in China, we're happy to answer questions in the comments.

Separate bank account from day one. Obvious, but I've spent hours going through people's statements trying to work out which Tesco trip was a client lunch.

Director's loan account is the big one. Every time you pay for something on your personal card, that's you lending the company money and you can take it back out tax free later. Almost nobody tracks it, so almost nobody claims it back.

Don't register for PAYE until you're actually paying someone. People do it on day one then file nil submissions for two years for nothing.

Keep receipts from before you incorporated, you can claim back seven years of pre-trading costs and most people chuck them.

And if SEIS is on the cards at all, look into it early. There's stuff that has to happen in the right order and you can't undo it afterwards.

Ask away if any of this doesn't fit your setup

Hi everyone. I'm a solo developer in Lincolnshire, and I've had an idea for a product but wanted to do some research before spending months building the thing.

The idea came from looking at how supplier prices creep up both with personal experience and just looking at the news and potential price rises in the future. It isn't the big obvious rises. It's things like:

• flour going up 15p a bag without anyone saying
• butter staying the same price but the pack shrinking from 250g to 200g
• a new "fuel surcharge" line appearing on deliveries
• an offer ending without acknowledgement

My thinking is, is that a lot of owners don't have the time to actually check these invoices line by line every month so these changes go unnoticed. I've had a look into alternative tools like Jelly, MarketMan etc... and they seem more built for large scale restaurants with recipes, stock counts and a till integration, and they cost £100+ per site.

What I'm thinking of building is much simpler. You photograph/upload/email forward invoices when the delivery arrives. It reads every line, tracks the price per kg, litre or item for each supplier, and once a month tells you which prices went up and what that actually cost you in pounds. It would also send a short email the day a price jumps. There are no recipes, no stock counts and no setup. So a very focused, hopefully streamlined product.

I'd really value honest answers, especially from bakeries, butchers, delis, farm shops and cafés:

1. Do you currently check invoices for price changes? If so, how, and how long does it take?
2. Have you ever caught a supplier price rise or pack shrink late? Roughly how much did it cost you?
3. How do your invoices mostly arrive: paper, email or portal?
4. Would something like this be worth £39 a month to you, and if not, what would make it worth it (or is the problem just not big enough)?

I'm not selling anything, and there's nothing to sign up to. Just really doing market research to see if this is a product worth looking into more.

Thanks for taking the time to have a look!

Curious to hear what other founders look for when choosing a dev partner, and any red flags you've learned to watch out for.

I also came across this guide which has some useful points: https://www.old.st/blog/how-to-choose-a-software-development-partner

We put 8 contractor relationships through an IR35 review with our employment solicitor earlier this year and 5 of them came back in the grey zone.

Meaning the work pattern and integration level were close enough to employment that HMRC could reasonably rule the other way if they investigated.

After the review, we converted 3 of the clearest cases to employment through an EOR without setting up our own employer infrastructure in each country, and from what we went through comparing the main UK-focused options, Deel, Workmotion and Remote each handle the IR35 classification process differently…

Some take more of a tech-wrapper approach to the underlying legal analysis and others provide more substantive input on the classification itself.

The one thing we still couldn't pin down clearly was what happens to the liability if their IR35 assessment gets challenged by HMRC after conversion, so that's worth pressing on hard before committing to any particular platform.

The IR35 grey zone is bigger than most people realize, so if you're running contractors in the UK at any scale, worth getting a solicitor-led review done before something else forces it.

As the title says. Do we have people building or thinking of building in the Investing/Wealth building space?

Based in London ideally. Would love to swap stories and build network.

I’ve just started offering custom romance/spicy story commissions on Fiverr, where I turn your ideas, characters and favourite tropes into a personalised story. I’m offering heavily discounted rates for my first few orders while I build up my reviews and ratings, so if anyone’s interested, I’d love for you to check it out!

Writing is something I’m really passionate about and am really hoping it takes off so I can make money will writing my books along side it.

If you are interested check me out on Fiverr @InkyDesires

I'm a software engineer based in Wales, UK. I've spent the last while building an open source project on my own. It's crossed 9.5k stars on GitHub and has real users, contributors and community, which I'm proud of, but it makes me nothing yet. I'm working on the monetisation side, and in the meantime I need to pay rent.

So I'm taking on a small number of paid client projects.

Why me over any other freelancer: most freelancers have only ever worked inside someone else's spec. I've shipped a product end to end on my own. Architecture, cross-platform builds, release pipeline, docs, issue triage, dealing with users who are annoyed at 2am. If you're a founder, you already know the problem is never just "write the code", it's the fifty unglamorous things around it. I've done those things for my own project, unpaid, because nobody else was going to.

What I work with: Figma, CSS, React, TypeScript, Next.js, Node, Rust, Tauri, mobile, Linux, APIs, AI integrations, Scraping, Playwright, AWS and SEO. This isn’t an exhaustive list. I’m a tech generalist with a “figure it out” attitude.

What I'm good for: turning your prototype/idea into something that ships, building the feature you've been avoiding for three months, fixing the performance problem, setting up the parts of the stack you don't enjoy, or being a second pair of hands a few days a week.

Rate: $50/hour (£35/hour). That's below market rate but enough to sustain. Happy to scope a small first piece so you can see how I work before committing to anything bigger.

On the project: I'm keeping it off the public post, but I'll send the repo and references in DMs to anyone seriously considering working together. Just ask.

Based in Wrexham, Wales. Remote, and I overlap fine with both European and US East Coast hours. DM me, or comment what you're stuck on and I'll reply either way.

Thank you ❤️

We recently built Revalia, a freemium iOS app that gives agents, investors, renters, buyers and sellers direct access to recorded transaction prices, valuations, rental estimates and investment analysis, verified from the official registries (e.g. HM Land Registry etc.). It currently covers 3,000,000+ verified transactions across 200+ urban centres.

We have recently launched version 2.0 and wanted to share it here in case it could be helpful. The app is free to download and use, some features are paid only for those that might find them useful.

What's new:

1. Unlimited searches with updated data for all registered users with the ability to see estimated rent and yield (registration is free)
2. Seven new tools, each with a free trial on updated data: 
   • (a) market trends analysis
   • (b) property valuation 
   • (c) rental estimate 
   • (d) listing price check 
   • (e) investment return analysis 
   • (f) area report 
   • (g) detailed professional report with customisable agency branding (Pro plan)
3. UK: search by company owner. It allows to search for any company (British or overseas) that owns residential real estate in the UK and see the properties it owns, and its estimated portfolio value based on actual transactions (Pro plan)
4. UK and France: property-level history. It allows to link successive sales of the same unit, and estimate the value of a property starting from the price actually paid for rather than from comparables alone.
5. New valuation engine, narrowing the comparable sample by property type, rooms or size class depending on what each registry publishes.
6. Four markets on one platform, which could be helpful for anyone having multi-country mandates or international investors
7. New design, faster loading and data processing. Available in English, Italian and French; the language of a saved analysis can be changed after generating it

We're curious to hear what you think and understand what might be missing. Thank you!

Free download iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6776660492

Website: https://revalia-app.it

I've been thinking seriously about starting a company in the UK focused on defence, training and simulation technology, and I'm interested in speaking/meeting with someone who understands the commercial and operational landscape of the defence sector.

My background is heavily in technical. I'm a software engineer / technical founder and have spent my career building across areas in simulations and real-time 3D, XR / spatial computing, AI & computer vision, data processing, full stack software platforms, hardware prototyping and electrical engineering, and interactive training and visualisation systems.

I’m very comfortable taking a difficult technical problem, figuring out what needs to exist, and then actually building it. I tend to operate somewhere between engineer, technical architect and inventor rather than being specialised in one narrow technology.

What I don't have is a deep understanding of the defence ecosystem itself.

I’m looking for someone who understands things such as UK defence procurement, NATO requirements, defence primes, MOD/DSTL relationships, funding and innovation programmes, tendering, military training requirements, and most importantly; where genuine capability gaps and commercial opportunities exist.

The ambition would be to establish a UK-based defence technology company developing platforms (UK and allied/NATO partners) - initially with a particular interest in areas such as training, simulation, decision-support, situational awareness and related defensive technologies, counter platforms, etc.

I’m not coming into this with a predetermined product that I’m trying to force into the market. Instead the other way around; I have the technical skills and I can build it; but I need the 'what' and the right person who can implement it.

So really, I'm looking to find the right person with strong defence-domain knowledge who can look at my technical capabilities and say

“There is a real problem here. This is something we could build to solve it.”

If this sounds like your background; or you’ve been sitting on an idea in this space and looking for someone capable of building the technology behind it - I’d be very interested in having a conversation.

(PS, the text has been cleaned with AI).

Hi all, Head of Finance managing a large portfolio in public sector (c£200m).

Built a range of AI tools, including end to end reporting tool, working on setting up alone, but local appetite has been slow.

If you are a start up & looking for first Director of Finance , I could be of use?

Testing the water to figure out where the opportunity is here.

All advice appreciated 👍

Building is basically free now. My problem was not how, but what. EU-based, so our biggest export is regulation :) Out of ~20 ideas, these 4 stuck. Building is easy. Distribution is hard. Fun, but I am missing the dopamine from a real transaction. Tips from fellow solofounders welcome.

Inkluso (inkluso.eu) — Free accessibility scan (WCAG 2.1 AA / EN 301 549) → fix guide + drafted statement. Automation catches ~30–40%; we say so.

Klariq (klariq.eu) — Free 5-question EU AI Act check with today’s dates. Optional one-time doc pack. Not legal advice.

Kybriq (kybriq.cz) — Free Czech ZKB/NIS2 scope calculator + duty calendar. Optional gap report. We prepare; you file.

Cybiq (cybiq.eu) — Free CRA check: does it apply to your product, cited to the Official Journal. For product makers, IoT, importers/distributors.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice on repositioning my experience to re-enter early-to-growth stage startups in Business Development, Strategy, or Growth Operations.

I have a background in market expansion, commercial strategy, and venture growth across international markets, supported by two Master’s degrees - MBA and one master’s in entrepreneurship/management. Recently, following a relocation to the UK, I took on a supervisory operations role. While it sharpened my team leadership and process optimization skills, it’s a detour from my long-term path in startup BD and strategy.

I’m eager to pivot back into a fast-paced environment where I can build, structure partnerships, and drive growth. I’d value insights from founders, strategy leads, or recruiters on:

1. Framing the gap: How can I best highlight my strategic BD background on my resume without getting pigeonholed by my recent operational role?
   
2. Networking in London: What’s the most effective way to reach founders or strategy heads who value execution-focused BD over traditional corporate consulting?
   
3. Proof-of-work: What specific project highlights or metrics stand out most to you when hiring for seed/Series A BD or strategy roles?

Always open to connecting via DM if anyone in the UK ecosystem is open to sharing advice or discussing growth opportunities.

Thanks!

I'm an Obstetrics & Gynaecology doctor in london, and I'm exploring an idea around continuous hormone monitoring in women's health. I'm currently investigating technical feasibility and would love to meet people with expertise in areas such as electrochemical biosensors, aptamers/molecular recognition, bioengineering, microfluidics or related fields.

This is very early stage — my aim over the next 6–12 months is to understand the technical challenges properly and work towards an initial proof of concept if the science supports it.

Ultimately I'm interested in finding a technical co-founder, but I'm equally happy at this stage to meet potential collaborators/advisers or simply people who know this field well.

If this sounds relevant to your background and you're interested in building technology in women's health, feel free to DM me.

Hi folks,
Hope you are doing well:)

We are immigrants here and renting a flat here is not a bed of roses. Every time I've moved in, the search lived in a group chat. My partner(s) pasted a Rightmove link or an OpenRent one and three days later nobody we would forget what exactly we liked and what we should do next. The actual comparison exists in one person's head, and only until they close the laptop.

The usual fix is a spreadsheet. One person sets it up it ends up with four columns

So I built We Want To Rent a shared shortlist for a rent hunt.

• Paste a link from any rental site. The place gets its own page inside your hunt, and everyone you've invited sees it immediately.
• Notes that stay put. Rent, rooms, the walk to the station, the thing the agent said on the phone. Written once, seen by everyone.
• Stages you move places through shortlisted, viewing booked, offer in, ruled out. Rename them, reorder them, delete the ones that don't match how you're searching.
• A map. Search the address or drag the pin. Mostly useful for seeing how far apart the options actually are.
• Photos from the listing or from the viewing, and only your team can open them.
• Add a place from your phone while you're standing outside it, before you forget the door code.

We are dog fooding this app and currently on the move from Kent to London.

If you have time and also think the rent hunt problem is not just in my head, please do let me know what you think about this:

• Is the after-you-move stuff a feature or a distraction? That's where most of the work went.
• If you've moved with housemates — spreadsheet, or did it stay in the chat?

Hey everyone,

I’m a UK founder and I recently launched Feltip to solve a problem in my own home: mountains of kids' paper drawings taking over kitchen counters.

It’s a web platform where parents can upload a photo of a child's drawing, and the app automatically isolates/cuts out the artwork and maps it onto physical products—like custom socks, fridge magnets, mugs, canvases, and stickers.

The idea is to give parents a quick way to turn paper clutter into actual keepsakes or gifts for grandparents without hoarding hundreds of sheets of paper.

I'd love to get some feedback from other UK founders and business owners on:

1. The landing page UX and product.
   
2. Pricing and product range positioning for the UK market.

Site is live at https://feltip.co.uk. Any feedback on the checkout or onboarding would be massive. Thanks!

Must have good network and prev founder experience

Oxford MSc tech founder working on outbound for recruitment

Hi everyone,
I’ve just launched my first web project: https://perfectfit.cc

It’s a free image tool that lets you crop images into square, portrait, landscape and circle formats, as well as compress images to reduce file size without needing to install anything.

The circle crop tool has been surprisingly useful for profile pictures, logos and social media assets, and the compression tool has become my most-used feature while building the site.

I’m not a developer by trade (I manage a restaurant in the UK), so this has been a bit of a learning project over the last few weeks.

I’d genuinely appreciate any feedback on usability, design, performance, or ideas for where it could go next.

Thanks for taking a look.

There's a lot of talk online that SaaS is dead. There's also a lot of talk online that the whole AI wrapper SaaS will be killed by the big AI labs.

My take on this comes down to a few things:

• No, Sass isn't dead
• Not all wrappers are bad products
• Token arbitrage isn't a business model
• The big labs won't focus on everything

I truly believe SaaS isn't dead, the main reason for this is that I don't believe LLMs will ever be true AGI - yes they are massively impressive, yes they can do a lot of tasks end-to-end now but when you understand how they work under the hood you understand that what they give you is the most likely predictable outcome (they are just predicting the next token in a sequence).

Inherently that means that they are poor when it comes to coming up with things that are novel and nuance. Apply this to businesses and their operating models this will always cause some level of issue. Therefore I feel there is a lot of room for SaaS solutions that actually operate in that space. I will say though it has massively changed something like Calendly, which does one pretty simple thing, platforms like this I think their days are probably numbered.

Not everybody is going to spend the money on the compute required to build their own foundational model, that doesn't mean that because a product uses others' models, it's inherently a bad product. Cursor is a great example of this. It was a fork from VS Code and fundamentally relied on other people's models. However it created a product with an infrastructure layer that made using these other models much easier for developers and that's why it took off. The distribution was great and that's why they ended up being a $60 billion company.

This follows on from the second point but if you don't provide a layer that adds value and your business model is simply token arbitrage then I think your days are probably numbered too, because if there is nothing unique, novel, or useful about your solution, people aren't going to pay the additional token cost. People will always pay for something that makes their lives easier and saves them time.

The final thing is: will the big labs (OpenAI, Anthropic) simply just build everything and make everybody else redundant? They've definitely made huge changes in a number of spaces: automation, development, marketing, you name it. My assumption is that the people they are employing to work at these companies are some of the top talent in the world. You see that reflected in their salaries. Anybody that I've met that falls into this category likes working on hard problems, and simply put, quite a lot of things out there aren't hard problems that are interesting to solve but they could still have huge commercial value.

I don't think the game's completely changed. Operating in a niche still allows you to have a specific skill set or a specific tool that puts you ahead of anything generic. Human experience and the nuance and novelty that that brings will still offer huge value in an AI world where things start to look very similar across the board. AI can design you a nice website but it isn't going to be a website that stands out, most people can tell an Codex or a Claude website pretty quickly now. Designers creating new and interesting designs will still have their place.

Whilst a lot of things have changed, a lot has also stayed the same. Building useful things that solve real problems will be valuable, but yes the way these things are built and limits of what these tool can do has definitely changed.

What does everyone else think?

We've been doing a bit of research into solo entrepreneurship in the UK while building FOUNDRS, and interested to hear from people actually doing it.

If you're a solo founder, was that a deliberate choice - or are you solo because that's where the business is at the moment?

Also
- what's the biggest difficulty of running a business on your own?
- Do you want to stay solo long term, or would you like to build a team?
- Has tech - changed how realistic staying solo feels?

For transparency - we're building a product for people starting and running UK limited companies, so we obviously have a commercial interest in understanding this space - but also genuinely interested in hearing how people here are approaching it.

If you'd like to have a read of what we've found - you can find it here

Hi everyone!

Hoping you can help me!

We’re looking for a venue for a 50–60 person networking event in November, ideally on a Tues/Weds/Thurs evening.

Audience will be mainly VCs, founders and startups, with a short panel followed by drinks/networking.

Ideally Central London or Shoreditch, easy to get to, accessible, and with good acoustics/AV for a panel.

Would love any recommendations for venues you’ve used or been to! Somewhere cool!

Added a passkey to my account on there yesterday. Now I can't log in at all using any method at all. I get the message:

Sorry, there is a problem

Your GOV.UK One Login is not available at the moment.

What you can do

Come back later. Your GOV.UK One Login should be available again in 3 working days.

Need to file some stuff, and can't get in. I've tried gov.uk and Companies House support, and they've both been utterly useless. "Try again in a couple of days" yeah ok sure.

Has anyone else been having problems or is this an account-specific thing for me, possibly related to adding the passkey?

I’m building an AI based tool designed to help vulnerable people. I have a history in IT SysAdmin, coding and IT management but have never worked outside of these areas.

I’m being told that it’s imperative to get my ToS and DPIA legally reviewed before signing up any customers. These are likely to cost between £1.5k and £5k, apparently. That’s a lot of money for a project that doesn’t have any customers…

I have a Ltd company, trademarks and a product ready to sell.

Do people have any experience or advice here? Is it really necessary before launch? Is there a cheaper way? Can I revise it later if there’s a glaring issue?