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.