Sugar: our own fintech, pitched for real.
Our own idea, taken through Catalyst’s Co-Founders programme: fairer everyday money, and a lesson in what it is like on the founder’s side of the table.
Sugar Financial Technology was a startup of our own: “the future of finance, starting with small change”. The idea was to redesign the humble tip jar: contactless, with bitcoin technology baked in and a social layer around it. In 2022 we took it through Catalyst’s Co-Founders programme in Belfast, pitched in the final round, and missed out on one of the ten £10,000 grants. This is the record of it.
- What
- A fintech startup, begun as an Invisible Building project in November 2020
- Concept
- A contactless tip jar powered by bitcoin, with a social network around it
- Programme
- Catalyst Co-Founders, 2022 cohort, January to May 2022
- Company
- Sugar Financial Technology Ltd, NI687577, 2022–23. Founder and sole director: David Shawe
- Along the way
- PayMyDesk, a Lightning hackathon build as Team Sugar
- On stage
- “The Future of Fintech” panel, Digital DNA, June 2022
Start from the absolute bottom.
By the spring of 2022 inflation was climbing, the cost-of-living crisis had reached the news, and businesses across Northern Ireland could not hire staff for hard work at low wages. A tip is one of the few ways money still moves directly from one person to another. As cash disappears, the tip jar is disappearing with it.
Sugar’s answer was small on purpose. As we wrote at the time: “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.” A hardware, contactless tip jar with bitcoin technology inside it, a savings element, and “a social commerce network to keep the public interested”. Person-to-person money, in small amounts, without a bank in the middle of every exchange.
It was also a design thesis. If you can make bitcoin invisible enough to work for a barista and a customer with ten seconds to spare, you have learned most of what there is to know about designing new money. That is why the same year went into studying the Bitcoin Design Guide.
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sugarfintech.com, May 2022. Archived copy. -
The mission post, 1 June 2022: the future of finance, starting with small change.
David Shawe went through the programme in 2022 and it was fantastic to see the passion and determination for exploring entrepreneurship that he and his fellow participants on the programme had.
Hannah Cummings, Catalyst Co-Founders
The programme
Catalyst describes Co-Founders as “a unique entrepreneurship programme, helping ambitious individuals to develop a new product innovation focused on science, technology and engineering”. It is free, it runs in the evenings, and in 2022 the weekly sessions ran online.
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Hothouse weekend
Late January. Meet the cohort and find your team. David went in with the idea for Sugar and assembled a team around it for the programme.
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Design bootcamp
February. A weekend of turning an idea into something testable, which is home ground for a design studio.
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Monday nights
From 21 February to the end of May: validate the idea, test it in the real world, build the business, practise the pitch.
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The showcase
Teams pitch for ten £10,000 proof-of-concept awards, funded by the Department for the Economy. In 2022 it was held in person at the MAC, Belfast.
Since 2017, Catalyst says, Co-Founders has taken more than 600 people through eight cohorts and formed 134 teams, over a third of which were still working on their startup in 2022. If you are in Northern Ireland with an idea and no co-founder, it is the place to start.
What a founder’s year actually looks like.
A programme like this is a forcing function. In the space of one spring Sugar went from a holding page to a registered company with a mission, a hackathon build and a seat on a fintech panel.
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Sugar begins as an Invisible Building side project: “fresh fintech, coming soon, based out of Northern Ireland”.
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Co-Founders Hothouse weekend. David takes Sugar in and assembles a team for the programme.
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As Team Sugar we build PayMyDesk at BOLT.FUN’s Shock the Web Lightning hackathon. It is our first project with bitcoin.
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Sugar Financial Technology Ltd is incorporated in Belfast.
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sugarfintech.com goes live with the mission: the future of finance, starting with small change. We take it to Blockchain Ireland Week in Dublin.
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Catalyst announces the ten £10,000 winners. Sugar is not one of them.
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David joins “The Future of Fintech: The next big thing?” panel on Stage 1 at Digital DNA, St George’s Market, Belfast.
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Billed as “Invisible Building and Sugar Financial Technology” on Raise Ventures’ Deep Dive panel on MVP prototyping.
What it taught us
Four things we now bring to every founder we work with.
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Small is a strategy
“The future of finance” is unpitchable. “A better tip jar” fits in one sentence, and one sentence is all a judge, an investor or a customer will give you.
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Explaining it sharpens it
A studio owner is used to deciding alone. A programme makes you explain the idea to a team, to mentors and to judges, week after week. The idea is better for it.
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Show the thing
Every conversation gets easier once there is something to point at. It is why we build a prototype before we build a deck.
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Losing is information
Not winning the grant was a clear, cheap answer to an expensive question. Most startups pay far more to learn far less.
We didn’t win. We’d do it again.
Without the grant, Sugar stayed what it had started as: a project run alongside the studio. The crypto market turned that winter, and in 2023 we wound the company up and put the focus back on Invisible Building. David has written about it in his own words: designing for the future of finance, starting with small change.
What stayed is the useful part. We know what a pitch deadline feels like, what it is to bring other people into an idea that started as yours, and how much of a “new technology” problem is really a design problem. When a founder sits across the table from us now, we have sat in their chair.
If you are on a programme, about to apply to one, or staring at the gap between an idea and its first working version, have a look at our consultancy for startups and web app & MVP development. Or just get in touch.
The Sugar story
Written up from our notes and the public record, and dated to when it happened.
MVP Prototyping: Notes from the Raise Deep Dive Panel
When to use no-code, why to build on boring open technology, and why a prototype is your best pitch deck. From Raise Ventures’ Deep Dive panel.
The Future of Fintech Is Small: Notes for the Digital DNA Panel
From the Future of Fintech panel at Digital DNA 2022: why the next big thing is small payments, and why fintech’s hard problem is design.
The Future of Finance, Starting with Small Change (and Not Winning Co-Founders)
Sugar’s mission (the future of finance, starting with small change) and what Catalyst’s Co-Founders programme gave us, even without the £10k grant.
PayMyDesk: What We Built at the Shock the Web Lightning Hackathon
We built PayMyDesk, hot-desking paid for in sats, at BOLT.FUN’s Shock the Web Lightning hackathon in March 2022.
Design on Hard Mode: Notes from the Bitcoin Design Guide
The Bitcoin Design Guide went Lightning-first in February 2022. What it teaches about keys, progressive security, jargon and units.
Into the Hothouse: Taking Sugar onto Catalyst’s Co-Founders Programme
Starting Catalyst’s Co-Founders programme with Sugar, our own fintech: how the Hothouse weekend works and why a studio owner signed up.