About

We’re a team of passionate folk who work with tech startups to turn their vision into a reality, enabling tech innovation and customer-centred thinking into everything you do.

We are an integral part of the startup team

Being a tech startup isn’t always bear hugs, high fives, pizzas and table football. Crafting an idea from an intuitive hunch into an innovative tech product requires extraordinary effort and insight, and it’s vital that entrepreneurs have the right support to hand.

With experienced entrepreneurs having their own medals and scars, an impressive agile tech team and a lean approach to growing startups, tsf.tech is your partner to help unpack and accelerate your idea to market.

The team

We’re a team of passionate folk who work with tech startups to turn their vision into a reality, enabling tech innovation and customer-centred thinking into everything you do. More grit than glamour, we roll our sleeves up, get dirt under our nails and get stuck in. Meet the team that makes it happen.

Our partners

What is the help and advice you need? We’ve got it covered with partners operating in each key support area to enable growth:

  • HR

    Building your team means understanding the basic requirements of employment – from a legal compliance perspective, having the necessary policies and processes, and the practicalities of employment contracts.

  • Finance

    Before going to market, you need to understand your financial model, work out your pricing strategy and then – above all – determine what your cashflow projections and profile looks like.

  • Marketing

    Before stepping out of the building with your product, you need to develop your brand, create a web site and get connected using social media to create awareness, engagement and connectivity with your target market.

  • Sales

    You may have great domain knowledge but have no prior experience of sales. Do you know how to develop and execute a sales strategy and plan to find, win and keep your customers? Do you know which CRM tools to use?

  • Legal Advice

    The essential legal foundations of setting up a company often go overlooked. You need advice and guidance on company set up, shareholder agreements and possibly IP agreements to give you the protections needed.

Five Pillars

When setting out, we looked to other entrepreneurs for a steer as to what makes for a happy and healthy business. We found this quote from Jeff Bezos: Find the things that are important to you and invest heavily in those things. So we created the Five Pillars to stay focused on the things that will always be important to us.

Vision & Values

  • Our business is about people capital, not venture capital
  • Reach beyond your expectations, every day
  • First names are important, job titles are not
  • Trusting each other is the platform for everything we do
  • Everyone practices humility and self awareness, but also self-esteem
  • We know the mentality to be successful and we have it in abundance

Culture

  • No office hours, but minds always open
  • 40 hours a week maximum; 32 summer hours (4 day weeks) July & August
  • Weekend starts 1pm Friday
  • Team breakfast once a week
  • Working from home and flexible working at our core
  • Team social last Thursday of every month

Knowledge

  • Everyone has a personal R&D project
  • Host Lunch & Learns third Thursday in the month
  • Run four hackathons a year
  • Friday afternoon is your personal learning time
  • Everyone goes to one event a month; everyone has a monthly book allowance
  • Performance of the business is transparent to everyone

Social Impact

  • Actively seek investment opportunities with founders using tech for a positive
    societal impact
  • Supporting initiatives for first-time entrants into tech roles
  • Be generous with our time to help entrepreneurs wherever we can, without a
    benefit to us
  • Mentor a social enterprise
  • Provide paid internship opportunities
  • Active contributor to Manchester Tech Trust

Success

  • We will keep our company small and intimate, with reasonable expectations
  • Our place of work is a welcoming oasis, not a chaotic kitchen
  • Anxiety is not a pre-requisite for progress
  • We are calm by choice and practice
  • Everything is about having a reasonable day, going home, and living your life
  • Success is looking at a visible horizon, and getting there in the long run

Careers

We’re building an amazing company. Be part of our incredible journey, talented people like you will make tsf.tech a great place to be. Come and join us and help shape our future.

We are now an integral part of the EHE Group

The EHE Group which was borne out of the incredible work we have done at TSF over the past six years, in order to further support tech founders on their journey to fast growth.

In the words of Guy Remond, non-exec director of TSF and one of the founders of EHE: When it comes to building fast growing companies, securing investment and helping entrepreneurs to do the same we’ve got decades of experience. Plus years of blood sweat and tears! It’s not easy being an entrepreneur but we’re here to change that. So we created EHE, where Entrepreneurs Help Entrepreneurs.

And as a further development to the EHE Group, EHE Ventures has been launched to provide better access to this advice and support. This is being further enhanced by the launch of an AI-focused, EIS qualified fund for UK based, early stage & fast-growth companies. 

Register here now for more information and early access to the fund

Our Technology

Technology expertise and engineering are at the heart of our value proposition. Here are some of the technologies we are working with.

  • Cloud-native architecture

    When building a startup tech product, we want to start small – nimble, efficient and cost effective, but be able to scale big and quickly. We expect to pivot the business model – so we need to pivot technology as well. Doing so in the modern cloud-powered world, requires cloud-native architecture – driven by automation and agility, utilizing many existing managed services, self-healing and reactive to change, fully monitored and transparent. At TSF, we start every tech product, no matter how small, with these principles in mind – so we can scale quickly and scale big when opportunity arises.

  • Microservices

    Startup world thrives on agility – quick off the mark, fast paces changes on the market demand. At TSF, we look to apply the same principles to software design and architecture, which is why we adopted microservices as a natural extension of the cloud-native architecture. Encapsulating the responsibility within the well defined microservice boundary allows us to focus on a specific problem at hand, build and test each service in isolation, with established API-enabled and asynchronous communication channels. Starting from those simple building blocks, we can compose responsive, resilient and elastic system, that can be operated on a small scale to begin with, and scale horizontally as quickly as required.

  • Containers (Docker/Kubernetes)

    Containers are fundamental to our development process, they enable us to combine the best technology choices, free us to run the same code in different clouds and environments and simplify the deployment and management processes allowing us to focus on the real business value problems.

  • Mobile strategies 
(PWA & cross-platform & native)

    Every startup is different but most need to bring the product to the consumer wherever they are and whatever device they own. There is still no single solution for all platforms. But by using the right tools and technology we can efficiently build an application once and deploy to many platforms.

     

  • Open source technologies

    We are strong believers in collaboration on every level – creating clusters of startups that help each other while growing their business models is our goal – and the same applies to tech. Adopting Open Source libraries and frameworks, allows us to stay ahead of the curve, using the best new breed of technology for common tasks, ensuring we have time and capacity to innovate where it really matters, at the core of the tech business we’re building.

  • Languages (Javascript, TS, Scala, Python)

    We are polyglot multilingual developers using the best language for the task at hand. For example: Scala for Fintech platforms that need strict guarantees and Python to leverage image processing or scientific computing libraries. But the goto choice for most startups is Javascript/Typescript. Javascript is relatively easier to learn and to recruit for than other languages. It has one of the largest communities providing tutorials and open source libraries including mature frameworks for the full application stack, supporting Web, Mobile App, Server and Database components, so your development team only needs to learn one language.

  • Continuous Delivery and Observability (Devops)

    Designing and building scalable tech products must be always viewed through the prism of efficient integration and release as well operational excellence. In order to deliver a holistic tech product vision, it is critical to consider these less functional aspects of any platform with the same critical view as features and functions. Devops and Site Reliability Engineering are common names for such practices – for us, names are not that important. What is important, is to have a well defined, automated, continuous integration and deployment process, with one-click releases and easy rollback and complete transparency and observability of the internal functional of any product – including log aggregation, monitoring and alerts. At TSF, we make sure that such continuous delivery practices are included within the development process, so they are not as an afterthought, but as a key part of the process once the first line of code is written.

  • Tech as part of the business model
 (Scala -> Fintech)

    Startup mantra ‘deliver quickly and deliver often’ is embedded within TSF culture from design and architecture, to tech stack selection and team structure, the aim is always to deliver quality, fast and often. However, we are aware that sometimes, the technology itself can become a core marketable part of the product. Think of it as a technology as a marketing or a sales tool, be it to attract the best talent, or prove credentials regarding scalability or security in a certain sector of industry. Just like the scale of Netflix introduced the concept of Chaos Engineering (where system is designed against a constant forced failures within it), we have seen first hand how fintech products are rigorously reviewed their security and encryption features, or Scala / Akka programming ecosystem showcasing cutting edge of software development of scalable reactive system. With this experience, we are able to select the right technology for the job – looking the speed and flexibility of course, but always considering alternative choices that would help product adoption and growth

We’re ready to talk...

Wherever you are on your startup journey, get in touch and let’s unpack your thinking together and see where we can help turn your idea into a reality.