Finding the chase and cutting to it

This is a quick recount of forming my own company in the UK from having an idea on the 14th February 2026 and releasing its first product on the 9th April 2026.

That’s 7 weeks and 6 days…

Actually, I was on holiday, 5,000 miles from my home (as the crow flies) without a computer when I had the idea for making the TechoSolara app (it wasn’t called that yet) and realised it could mean I didn’t need to seek funding for my time to do something else (a completely different type of application) in the long term.

In the remaining 12 days of my holiday, with a Kindle Scribe and an e-sim in my smart phone, I formed the business plan, formed the market analysis, and worked out the plan to market.

We landed and I had scheduled my time to start properly on the 2nd March. I spent those 4 days getting the technology working – upgrading my webservices, ensuring I had a content management system, an effective work environment, back-up mechanisms, and updated my servers. I knew once I was “up and running” as a company, there would be little time to do anything else.

I also knew, because it was going to take physical time, that I would not be trading before the start of the tax year.

First task: incorporate a company.

This has loads of implications, but as my business plan was seeking to reach 50 countries in the first 6 months, and I was going to be filing a patent, this was the right choice.

Took 2 hours. Trading date was the 6th April 2026, so that made some things interesting.

Second task: file the patent.

I’m patent pending. As soon as it was filed, I started coding.

Third task: get a developer account on Google Play Store.

Tricky – needs the company to be registered with a DUNS number which takes about a week.

Fourth task: write the actual code.

Actually, I’d already started this, as a background task. I’d also approach some friends for some help. I needed beta testers. It’s the hardest thing in the world to test things. I had a date in mind of the 23rd March and I pretty much made that. Sorting out how that delivery would work relied on…

Fifth task: form a company website.

It’s now mid-March and testing is going OK. So I buy a DNS and launch the website.

Pretty much this time, I have a denial of service attack on my home server! Only knocks out a couple of services and ironically not the “work one”. Still, I lose a morning to fighting it off.

Sixth task: initial marketing and help files.

The beta testers need to be able to use the app as real users do. This means it needs a help file.

Seventh task: have a bank account.

My business needs a bank account so HMRC and Google can talk to each other. I don’t make a good choice but signing up with Starling in the second instance means my account gets cleared and I can now publish when ready.

Eighth task: form automated testing.

While judging the look and feel of a tool is really difficult without a diverse set of users actually using the tool, you can make sure it can add up properly and function quickly and well. Due to the architecture I was using, I was keen to do this “the right way”, so I made use of Claude.AI to identify and write some tests for me – it was something I had never done before – I had automated testing but that was before junit testing existed: interesting story, but the rule is to find the chase and cut to it…

Nineth task: beta testing.

I launched beta testing and got the app on to the Play Store as a managed publishing task.

Friends, Romans, and country men, thank you for your dedication to the task you offered to do. The sales I have achieved are thanks to your dedication.

When I got the all clear from then, on Good Friday, I published that last, cleared and tested version.

Tenth task: the waiting game.

Before the Easter is not the time to do – normally, the whole process takes less than an hour. 4 days later, I got the go ahead and the tool was launch.

Now, you go round the develop, test, release loop ad infinitum to gain more users and help more people get solar panels.

But you now have a business that can be expanded, hopefully, if the ideas are good and the marketing is getting them to before they buy something different.

It’s not necessarily difficult, but setting up a business is time consuming.

So what are you actually selling?

Read all about it at https://techosolara.app . I would love to hear your thoughts on how this can help people across the world take the step or extend their solar generating potential.