PS - Also looking for any UK butchers that could be worth integrating (have various connector adapters, but bespoke scrapers are also fine). There's a good number there already, but keen to integrate anything that would be useful (ideally nationwide in the UK)
Also the price per kg is an ongoing area of improvement, lots of misleading data on various sites, so it's a mixture of heuristics + exceptions + improvements to keep that on point across all the sites in a generalised way.
Struggled to find the best priced meat from UK butchers keeping up-to-date in my spreadsheet so built a comparison site with multi platform scraper (and a taxonomy matcher to allow “apples” to “meaty apples” comparisons).
UK only for now, and very much a “solves my problem” side project, but easily scalable to other countries of the need is there!
TLDR - Sort out your finances first, startups are extremely stress inducing and even now with our startup at the point of break even, £1m ARR and 100% growth predicted for next financial year, I still currently earn less than I need to live but with the promise of a strong exit in the next 3-4 years if we hit our targets.
Previously I contracted as a full stack developer bringing in other developers on projects as and when the project timescales wouldn't have been achievable with just me. Running a software consultancy alone, dealing with all of the usual rigmarole of a business and performing proper client outreach was stressful, but financially and personally very rewarding (especially when you close a big deal completely on your own).
In order to get involved in my current startup, which at the outset was comprised of a designer, biz dev (CEO) and myself as CTO I had to cut off ties with my previous clients and dedicate all of my available time to the new startup. I had leveraged myself quite a bit running the previous consultancy as billings were growing year on year, so my VAT/Corporation tax accounts were generally paid out of job fees towards the end of the year rather than set aside throughout the year, leaving me in a negative cash flow position when stopping work for existing clients. Luckily there were some ongoing payments that didn't require development resource, so the small admin time required to invoice and chase up was all that was required, and enabled me to setup payment arrangements with HMRC to settle these liabilities over a period of time, out of this cashflow. Setting up these arrangements was very stressful, and I would strongly advise anyone coming into a startup to fully evaluate their financial situation before committing even if the opportunity seems huge.
Initial salaries in the new start-up were minimal (£1000 p/m approx), and it took a solid three years, extremely long working days, almost unmanageable personal stress and around £0.5m of funding before we're now up to an above average average salary, £1m ARR, a team of 15 and strong growth projected for the coming year.
Success is a subjective term and occasionally I have to refocus to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but with enough grit, luck and determination, it’s possible to tip the balance to a point where success is now more likely than not.
To further add to this, it's not necessarily the fact that they take a service charge that I take issue with. It's the complete lack of transparency up-front and only once you're close to getting on the program that it's ever disclosed.
This particular one was £50k investment for 9% equity, plus they send an additional £50k to the company, which is transferred immediately as a "service charge".
Writes off £50k of your SEIS allowance as a business, which as I'm sure you know is like gold dust for the first £150k, as 50% of the investment can be written off against investors income tax, then a further 30% if the company fails.
If the company succeeds, the investors pay no capital gains on sale of shares.