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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also knew, because it was going to take physical time, that I would not be trading before the start of the tax year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Took 2 hours. Trading date was the 6th April 2026, so that made some things interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m patent pending. As soon as it was filed, I started coding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tricky – needs the company to be registered with a DUNS number which takes about a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s now mid-March and testing is going OK. So I buy a DNS and launch the website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The beta testers need to be able to use the app as real users do. This means it needs a help file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I launched beta testing and got the app on to the Play Store as a managed publishing task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I got the all clear from then, on Good Friday, I published that last, cleared and tested version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, you go round the develop, test, release loop ad infinitum to gain more users and help more people get solar panels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n