Catchlove Ltd: Getting started

Crikey there’s a lot to get excited about! Amy and I got married, now it’s straight into starting up my new venture as an independent technical leader or fractional CTO, whatever you want to call it.

There’s a lot involved in starting a business. Once you’ve decided the strategy, target market, ICP, what you’re actually going to sell and how, it’s then straight into naming, positioning, branding, tooling and the list goes on. The decisions seem endless. I thought I’d share what I chose to do and I’ll let you know in time where I made the right decisions, and where I didn’t…! This isn’t going to be the most technical post, but hopefully it’s interesting to see what’s involved and the decision-making process.

Firstly, for accountancy and incorporation I chose Gorilla Accounting - https://gorillaaccounting.com. Not only were they very competitively priced, their new business team were really helpful answering questions and they handle the company incorporation and all the registrations for taxes, payroll etc. They include FreeAgent in the package as their accounting software which made that decision for me. I did consider Xero but it’s just extortionate. Step one complete, officially a company director.

Then you need a bank account, which is where Starling https://www.starlingbank.com won the toss (despite using the www subdomain for their site, which is a pet hate of mine - it’s not the 90’s anymore!). Even so, no relevant fees and no additional packages including software or features I don’t need. Easy decision. Tide and Monzo deserve a mention as the runners-up, but I’m very pleased with Starling so far. Account approved overnight, card available to use with ApplePay instantly and it was really easy to link with FreeAgent. Oh, and basically no fees remember, that’s the key!

Next job, the company needs an identity.

I initially registered as “The Catchlove Group Ltd” but quickly noticed that sounds like a parent or holding company, which totally contradicts my positioning as independent. Quick submission of the digital NM01 form to Companies House and £20 later it’s Catchlove Ltd. That’s just the official name though, I’ll trade under my own name to reinforce the independent and personal nature of the offering. Who knows, maybe one day you could join me at Catchlove Ltd, as it grows!

The branding was all done by Twig Design Co https://twigdesign.co. Full disclosure, that’s Amy, my wife. She’s been designing and branding for 15+ years and worked at top London agencies, so I’ve been spoilt really.

Too many tech companies use blue as their primary colour which ruled that out for me, so Amy went with my favourite colour: orange. The logo is a twist on my name, M + @ = Mat and the rest is all down to Amy’s pure talent. I couldn’t justify the price of a web licence for the beautiful font Amy chose, so we had to swap over to an open-source Google font, but it’s close enough. Thanks wifey!

Then we start thinking about the day-to-day: email, telephones, website, task management… There’s a whole host of SaaS tooling out there, it’s a total minefield trying to sort through the pro’s and con’s of each, what’s included in each pricing tier vs what I actually need as a lean start-up.

I know Azure inside out, so it was a no-brainer to go with Microsoft O365 for emails and productivity with Office and Teams. Half a day of admin setting up users, domains, DNS, shared mailboxes, signatures, security (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and we now have some company emails.

A new mobile contract with an eSIM covers most of the client calls, but I really wanted a VOIP service for marketing and sales calls. I chose CircleLoop over bOnline for that as their packages aligned closer to my needs. If you’ve not tried these services, check them out - big business VOIP phone features like call recording, recorded messages, out-of-hours rules etc for a very sensible price!

Task management was an interesting one. I used Jira and the Atlassian suite extensively at IBM. More recently Asana at Vizora and I also tried Vikunja to keep on top of wedding planning (yep, I’m THAT guy…). Monday is another obvious choice in this camp, along with so many others. Frankly, I really don’t need much, a serious to-do list should be plenty for now. I opted against Trello as it’s board view only on the free version and I prefer list view. I’m currently using Todoist on the free trial. So far so good but it’s early days.

Then it’s the website - mat.catchlove.co.uk. Again, hoards of managed service providers: Wix, Squarespace, Replit etc. I went for a custom Next.js site hosted on Vercel as I’ve got big plans in this space, which I’ll save for a future post. Tune in next time for an update on that!

Anyway, we’ve just about scratched the surface of the decisions involved in starting a business. Thanks to everyone for your help so far and well done to you for getting this far through the post, that’s some serious procrastination…!

Thanks for reading and catch you next time, hopefully that’ll be more technical too.

Cheers, Mat