Into the Hothouse: Taking Sugar onto Catalyst’s Co-Founders Programme

After years helping other people’s startups, I’m doing it with my own. What Co-Founders is, what Sugar is, and why a studio owner signed up.

Published on February 01, 2022

I’ve spent years helping other people’s startups. This year I’m doing it with my own. At the weekend I took Sugar into the Hothouse for Catalyst’s Co-Founders programme, and came out the other side with a team around it for the programme.

What Co-Founders is

Co-Founders is Catalyst’s programme for people in Northern Ireland with an idea, or a skill, and nobody to build with. It has been running since 2017, it’s free, and it happens in the evenings so you can do it around a job. Catalyst describe it as “a unique entrepreneurship programme, helping ambitious individuals to develop a new product innovation focused on science, technology and engineering”.

The shape of it this year:

Hothouse weekend, at the end of January: “meet the cohort and find your start-up team”.
Design bootcamp weekend in mid-February.
The core programme: Monday evenings from 21 February to the end of May, online over Zoom.
Demo evening at the end, where the top teams pitch for ten £10,000 proof-of-concept awards.

Catalyst’s Co-Founders programme page for the 2022 cohort: January to May 2022, online — Catalyst’s Co-Founders page for the 2022 cohort. Archived copy, 13 December 2021.

What Sugar is

Sugar has been sitting on a holding page since November 2020 as an Invisible Building side project: “fresh fintech, coming soon, based out of Northern Ireland”. The idea is a digital tip jar: small, person-to-person payments, with savings and social elements built in, powered by bitcoin. The line I keep coming back to is the future of finance, starting with small change.

It’s a small product on purpose. Nobody can pitch “the future of finance”. Anybody can understand a better tip jar.

Why a studio owner is doing this

Two reasons. The first is that I work with founders every week, through Raise Ventures and through Invisible Building, and I’ve never stood where they stand. I’ve pitched projects for charities and clients. I’ve never pitched a company of my own.

The second is the team. Running a studio, I decide things on my own. A startup doesn’t work like that, and the Hothouse is built to fix it: you put the idea in front of the cohort and see who wants in. The idea is mine and so is the company, but for the next four months there is a team around it. That changes how it gets built, starting with the fact that I have to explain myself.

What’s next

Design bootcamp, then Monday nights until the end of May. In between I’m working through the Bitcoin Design Guide, because if Sugar is going to put bitcoin in the hands of someone who has never used it, I’d better understand how the people who do this for a living design it. More as it happens.

From the archive: written up in 2026 from our notes and records of the time, and dated to when it happened.