Software developers launch venture to help start-ups
TWO successful software developers have launched a business specialising in helping start-ups reach the market quickly, economically and with reduced risk.
Royd Brayshay and Phill Luby are now directors of NewRedo, based in the Round Foundry Media Centre in Leeds.
The pair’s past clients include US multinational retailer Walmart, telecommunications giant Orange, airline easyJet, the Lotus F1 Team and business software experts Sage.
Brayshay said NewRedo was offering a “highly viable alternative” to traditional software providers for new business ventures, which was literally available from only a handful of companies globally.
He said: “For early stage start-ups, spending money in the wrong area can be terminal. We help our clients focus on the features that are fuelling growth and enable them to stay flexible in response to customer behaviour.
“We’re hugely commercially effective in building software, as we’re experts in taking a vision and stripping it down to the real essentials. We can get start-up businesses to market, fairly typically with only 25 days’ development and for less than the cost of a family car, while also allowing them to understand their customers better.
“We don’t go in for long contracts or committing clients to massive expense. We have less exposure to them, and them to us, than under traditional arrangements.”
He said NewRedo is founded on the principles of agile and lean development. The former involves collaboration between cross-functional teams, aimed at delivering rapid and flexible responses to change, while the latter is based on principles close to those of lean manufacturing, such as eliminating waste, delivering as early as possible and seeking fast customer feedback.
Brayshay said: “We now have our own team and are bringing lean start-up expertise to Yorkshire entrepreneurs. Lean start-ups focus on early customer discovery to validate innovative product and service ideas, often delivered through the internet.
“They devise experiments to test business hypotheses and aim to eliminate investing money where returns seem unlikely. Spending investors’ money building the wrong thing is one of the most common causes of start-up failure.”
The duo met more than 10 years ago while building a ground-breaking energy trading platform for another Yorkshire company, ICIS Technology. That product proved so successful the business was eventually acquired by engineering giant Siemens.
Brayshay added: “Phill and I have spent years at the sharp end, writing code, and have real world experience from the highest volume websites to the most popular shrink-wrapped software. We therefore understand the challenges start-ups and other businesses face and have founded NewRedo because we’re passionate about delivering top quality, high-value engineering to them.”
