There's an assumption that ambitious digital work happens in London, and if not London then Manchester.
We set up in Leicester and Huddersfield instead. Not because it was cheaper, though it is, but because the assumption is out of date.
What's actually here
Leicester has two universities pushing out design and computer science graduates every year, most of whom would rather not move to London to start a career. It has a manufacturing and logistics base that is quietly digitising, which is exactly the kind of work that needs custom software rather than another brochure site. And it sits far enough from the gravitational pull of Birmingham and London to have its own thing going on.
Huddersfield gives us the same picture across the Pennines, and puts us properly in reach of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield without pretending to be from any of them.
Between the two we can get to most of the country in a couple of hours. That matters more than it should. Some conversations only really happen in a room.
The talent was never concentrated in two postcodes. The jobs were. That's a different problem, and remote work has largely solved it.
The bit that annoys us
Businesses outside the big cities get offered worse work and are expected to be grateful for it.
We've picked up plenty of projects where a regional company was sold a template with their logo on it, because someone assumed that's all they wanted. Meanwhile the same business is running its operations on three spreadsheets and a shared inbox, which is a genuine software problem, and nobody offered to solve it.
That's the gap we're interested in. Not "does this Leicester firm need a website", but "what is this business doing by hand forty times a week that shouldn't be done by hand at all".
What we're actually betting on
Three things:
- Serious clients don't care where you are, they care whether you're good. Our work spans well beyond the East Midlands.
- Being local to somewhere beats being remote to everywhere. The clients we work best with are ones we can go and see.
- Custom software isn't a big-city product. A gymnastics club, a restaurant group, a manufacturer: all of them have processes worth building around. Pennine Gymnastics and TableCloud are both exactly that.
Come and find us
If you're building something in Leicester, Huddersfield, or anywhere between, we'd genuinely like to hear about it, including if you just want a second opinion on a quote someone else has given you.
