Product | People | Potential: Lessons from Three Inspirational Start-ups

When it comes to building something meaningful and making it last, getting your product, your people, and your sense of potential right is everything.

As part of our Product | People | Potential series of interviews, where we feature and showcase the very best UK start-ups and scale-ups, we wanted to take a brief look back at 3 inspirational stories we’ve previously featured:

Jacob & Boris – Hollyhires.ai

Bringing clarity and pace to early-stage hiring.

Product
Jacob and Boris built Hollyhires to simplify how teams grow. They build fast, test ideas early, and put real customer feedback at the heart of their product.

“We use no-code where possible and timebox bold new bets.”

People
When it comes to hiring, their standards are high. Every candidate needs a clear thumbs-up from at least four out of five interviewers before moving forward. For them, building the right team isn’t just important, it’s everything.

Potential
Their advice for other early-stage founders? Look to your clients not just as users, but as believers:

“Get your clients to invest as angel investors.”

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Henri Sant-Cassia – The Conscious Fund

Investing in purpose-led founders from day one

Product
Henri takes a long-term view of product-market fit. He encourages founders to go beyond surface-level demand:

“Once you know why a market exists, you know what is driving it.”

People
For Henri, strong businesses are built by people with insight, resilience and a clear sense of who they’re serving. Founders who are prepared to ask hard questions early tend to build smarter and scale more sustainably.

Potential
And when it comes to funding? He’s honest:

“To scale requires capital – if you cannot raise funds, you are wasting your time.”

“There is no piece of advice that is going to obviate the need for hard work and good investment.”

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Victor Palanco – Shape

Streamlining Data Access for Product and Operations Teams

Product
Shape is designed to alleviate the constant demand on analytics teams by enabling Product, Operations, and Customer Success teams to retrieve insights independently. The tool connects directly to relational databases, analyses the schema, and generates sample queries and insights, which are stored internally to assist in accurately answering users’ plain language questions.

Potential
Shape are striving to make the AI produce queries and answers in a way that is as close to what a good human analyst would do. When in the beta-testing phase, Shape worked closely with multiple customers to refine features. One of the most requested additions is a human-in-the-loop verification system, allowing analysts to oversee and approve Shape’s responses or convert them into tickets with pre-filled queries and answers. This feature aims to enhance the tool’s reliability and integration into existing workflows.

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Want to learn more?

The above are just excerpts. Dive into the full interviews to hear all about their journeys in their own words:

• Hollyhires.ai
• The Conscious Fund
• Shape

The purpose of article series ‘Product | People | Potential’ is to feature and showcase the very best UK start-ups with grand potential, truly inspiring businesses that are shaking up their sector. We capture and share the stories behind the name. We collate authentic peer to peer real talk, while celebrating the growth and success thus far and gather a glimpse of what’s ahead.