Five questions for… Richard Godfrey, co-founder of Rocketmakers

published 29 June 2018

What does your business do?

Rocketmakers helps start-ups to design and build their first product, and helps much larger companies with projects where they need to behave like a start-up in order to be successful.

What has been your company's greatest achievement so far?

Achieving the Queen's Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category in 2018, for our work with the English Institute of Sport app and medical records system, was incredible recognition. The system helps to keep the 1,500 or so top UK athletes as healthy as possible, and gets them back to training as quickly as possible when they have suffered an injury.

What has been your biggest challenge?

Working with start-ups has many challenges, but none more so than helping them to find the funding to get going and then to expand quickly when they have a working product. Given that the main advantage for many start-ups is the speed with which they can take an idea to market, it is hugely frustrating when we see the potential but can't get going fast enough.

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What are your plans for hitting your targets this year?

We're moving to new offices in Bath which will enable us to attract the best talent in the southwest, working with more impressive companies who need our help, and even raising an investment fund ourselves to help with the early-stage finance issues we've been seeing.

What's the one piece of advice you'd give fellow entrepreneurs?

Focus on building a business, rather than a product. For many entrepreneurs, the exciting bit is creating a new product, but the true value comes in reaching an audience that will pay for it. We see lots of great ideas that never fulfil their potential because they run out of money or don't find the audience quickly enough.