From the factory floor

About the book

It was in 1978 that Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton and Alan Eramus founded Factory Records in Manchester, quickly joined by Martin Hannett and Peter Saville. Wilson started the company with the inheritance of £12,000 from his mum. He based it in the Russell Club in Moss Side, and released their first EP, A Factory Sampler, featuring acts that played at the club, in 1979.

Factory Records was an entrepreneurial tour de force as a collection of ideas, just as Manchester had emerged originally in C19th. The C20th version was invented by a rousing collective of dreamers, schemers, writers, musicians. It gave amplification to a sense of audacious soundtrack of innovation and disruption that has always been the hallmark of Manchester.

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With that Do-It-Yourself mindset, they made it up as they went along. Like a startup they had to find their market, experiment, working out where their audience was. The founders never rested on their laurels, they retained their spirit, drive, and passion. And that’s what every entrepreneur does too.

And that’s our starting point. Hewn with the same Mancunian ambition, our company name, logo and spirit is inspired by the entrepreneurial endeavour of Factory. If you have a good idea and are willing to work hard and see it through, you can succeed.

But along the way, you need some help, and it’s exactly because of that desire to provide this help is why we wanted to write about in our book. It’s a narrative, providing insight on the how, what and why to focus, prioritise, manage and do stuff for startup ventures.

In this book, we share our experience, insight and explain how to start and build a startup around a core framework of essentials. Our book aims to capture the Entrepreneur’s essentials, helping entrepreneurs launch and build better and more successful tech startups. It is impossible (and quite inappropriate) to try to tell the entire startup roadmap to success in a single book on entrepreneurship. What we’ve tried to do is capture all the ‘must haves’ and invite you to dig in and digest.