This week’s Startup for 10 comes from Made Tech, a company providing Digital, Data and Technology services to the UK public sector. Around since 2012, they moved an 8-srong team to Bristol in 2020.
Here to answer out 10 questions is Tom Taylor, Market Principal at Made Tech Bristol.
In your own words, what do you do?
The short answer is ‘we make really good software’. The longer answer is that we are experts at agile software delivery, and we’re really good at helping our clients become experts too. Specifically in the public sector. We’re basically helping the UK government go digital. We also run a software academy and spend Friday afternoons learning.
What’s the most exciting thing about what you’re doing?
We work on some pretty amazing public sector services. Services that actually make life better for quite a few citizens and put the UK government at the forefront of digital.
What are you most proud of so far?
I personally worked on our GovWifi project, which now has over 250K monthly active users. It’s how you get online if you work in government. It saves the UK a LOT of time and money. It also costs a lot in lost productivity if it goes down, so it was a technically challenging project too.
What have you found most difficult about being a startup?
Hiring is always hard. We’re always on the look out for good engineers. The upside to this is that we created the Made Tech Academy, a 12-week programme to teach passionate learners the best software engineering practices in the industry, which has trained eighteen new engineers to date.
What would you do differently if you started now?
We started off working with funded, high-paced startups, and now we focus entirely on the public sector. Our startup heritage is a big part of our story and taught us a lot. We’re finding that applying those learnings to the public sector is having a huge impact. So it’s hard to say if we would change anything, the journey really is what got us here.
Where do you think you’ll be in 12 months?
Still working from home? Haha, I really hope not. Honestly, with the rate we’re hiring at we’ll be a much bigger team by then, so I can see us being a well known name contributing a lot more to the Bristol tech scene.
What’s the best thing about the Bristol and Bath tech cluster?
Until the world ended I would have to say the meetup scene. Everyone is really friendly and keen to meet and chat tech.
Who will you be nominating for a Sparkie next year?
The digital platform team at HMRC. It’s probably a bit strange to see a government body nominated for a tech award but these guys and girls are doing some seriously amazing stuff, including running a DevOps apprenticeship programme.
Where can we find out more about you?
We’re engineers, so we put our company handbook on Github: https://github.com/madetech/handbook. If you want to know what it’s like to work at Made Tech, that’s got all the info. You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
A Mettle business account for sole traders and limited companies with up to two owners could help you get your startup on the right track. Read more about Mettle here.
