The Future of Finance, Starting with Small Change (and Not Winning Co-Founders)

Sugar’s mission, why our first product is a tip jar, and what five months on Catalyst’s Co-Founders programme gave us: everything except the £10k.

Published on June 02, 2022

We didn’t win. Catalyst announced the ten Co-Founders teams taking home £10,000 proof-of-concept grants this week, and Sugar isn’t one of them. We pitched in the final round and came away without the cheque. Congratulations to the ten who did: Pneuvo, Insurin, ProspectRx, MEDIK.AI, Stable Manager, Pocket Angler, Win it Together, Tapa, Exapt Feedback and Unify.

So this is part mission statement, part post-mortem.

The mission: small change

Sugar Financial Technology exists to work on the future of finance, starting with small change. That’s the whole pitch, and we put it on our own site this week:

We’ve decided that our first product will be a tip jar so we can start from the absolute bottom and scale up, learning about bitcoin on the way.

The mission post on sugarfintech.com, 1 June 2022. Archived copy.

The reasoning is about where we live. Businesses in Northern Ireland are finding it tough to hire staff. Inflation is through the roof, and the cost-of-living crisis has finally made it into politicians’ mouths. People don’t want to do hard work for low wages, and who would blame them? A tip is one small way to make that work pay better, and cash, the thing tips were made of, is vanishing.

So: a hardware, contactless tip jar with bitcoin technology baked into it, and a social commerce network around it to keep the public interested. Person-to-person money, in small amounts, without a bank clipping every exchange.

What five months of Co-Founders gave us

A team. I went into the Hothouse in January on my own and assembled a team around the idea for the programme. Whatever happens to the tip jar, working that way is a different job from running a studio alone, and a better education.

A company. Sugar Financial Technology Ltd was incorporated in April. It has a number (NI687577) and a website, which is more than it had at Christmas.

A first build. In March, as Team Sugar, we built PayMyDesk at a Lightning hackathon: real bitcoin payments, scanned from a QR code, in a week. The first thing I’ve ever made with bitcoin, and proof that the scary part of the technology is smaller than it looks.

A sentence. Pitching week after week forces an idea down to one line. “The future of finance” is not a line anyone can act on. “A better tip jar” is. That lesson alone was worth the entry fee, which was nothing, because the programme is free.