In the last few posts in my Life at a Start-up series I have talked about how we want to work as a company, our hiring process and the office environment, but in this post I want to talk about the 2 products that we are building here at Buying Butler and RightIndem. On initial inspection they may look like two completely disparate products, but there is a link between the two that makes them a very attractive proposition. First I will explain what the Buying Butler platform is and then I will talk about what RightIndem is about. I will finish up by covering why these 2 products compliment each other.

Buying Butler

Buying Butler is a platform that allows a customer to make a complex purchase with the help of an expert. We are focusing on car purchases at the moment, but we can expand the platform to include any type of purchase that requires a lot of research to buy like laptops, bikes, white goods etc. The way the system works is like the following. You specify your requirements using plain language search parameters. For example you may specify that safety is more important than speed. You need plenty of boot space, or you might want a smaller faster car. The Buying Butler engine will take your requirements and using our algorithms select a series of cars that you can then refine your search with.

Once you have a good idea of what you want you can then proceed to a tendering phase where your requirements are sent out to dealers who are signed up to the platform. These could be within a certain distance boundary that you can specify. These dealers can then make offers against each other anonymously. So, for example, one dealer might say, that they can’t come down on their price but they could throw in some extra fittings. Another dealer might not have the car in the colour you originally specified but they can drop the price by £500 etc. Once you have picked an offer that you like you can then arrange a test drive and follow through with your purchase.

Working at a start-up can be challenging and is certainly a lot of work. The people we employ might be required to take on many different roles and tasks if we don’t have all the people we need, so it is important to try and create a nice working environment to work in. We want people to enjoy coming into work and we do this by providing challenging problems to work on with modern technology.

We also want to create a nice office environment and a culture to fill it.  Something we have started doing is a monthly event called Thirsty Thursday. This is where on a Thursday we stop work  a little earlier and go out for some drinks and food. These sorts of events are important as they allow us to blow off a little steam and socialize. With moving to an office in the centre of Nottingham we are really spoilt for choice for bars, pubs and restaurants.

Another monthly event we are starting up soon is Massage Mondays where we have a professional masseuse come into the office to offer massages to anyone that wants one. As well as these events we are also making the office a fun environment. We are part way for making a recreation room that has a pool table, darts board, arcade machine and a small kitchen area with a nice coffee machine. We are calling this area the park as we are getting the carpet removed and Astroturf put down instead. This created a nice area where people can go for a break to get away from the screen for a bit.

As well as good recreational facilities we are putting some effort into the decoration of the main work area and meeting rooms. We have lots of inspirational quotes from famous people on the walls and lots of white boards for people to collaborate. The meeting rooms are themed around cars. The small meeting room we call the Mini Room. This is painted in Mini racing colours and has a big decal on the wall of a classing mini car. This room also has no chairs in it, but instead there are 4 large bean bags.  They are very comfortable and I normally tend to do my phone interviews from there.

The larger meeting room is themed around Jaguar cars and even has an old dashboard and wheel in the room. Not quite sure how we are going to fit those to the wall!!

The office is starting to look very nice, but all this is meaningless if our staff don’t have the right tools to do the job. We try to provide people with great kit to work with. Every developer gets a high spec laptop. Our current build is a Lenovo Yoga 900 convertible laptop with 16gb Ram and a fast I7 processor. Designers and people who will be involved in mobile development are working on Apple Macbook Pro laptops. Each developer also gets 2 large 27in widescreen CAD monitors to work from. These are mounted to the desk with sturdy arms. Having very good monitors makes a lot of difference when you spend a lot of your day staring at them. I really don’t get why a lot of companies skimp on these essential items for developers.

To help developers stay on top of the latest technology we also provide all developers with a full Pluralsight license. This isn’t just because I am an author with Pluralsight, this is because they offer the best training platform in the industry. The best way to describe it is like Netflix for training. We have already made some technology choices for our tech stack based off of content we watched on Pluralsight.

To summarise this blog post, I really wanted to highlight the environment we have created, the events we offer and the tools and training that are available to our people. All this plus very interesting projects means our staff enjoy coming to work. We don’t want it to feel like a job, a standard 9 to 5. We want Buying Butler to be a place people enjoy coming to work with like minded people on products that solve real problems for real people.

It has been over 3 months since I last blogged about my new job at the start-up Buying Butler, but I have deliberately waiting until I have spent more time here. So much has happened in this short space of time and it is all very exciting. As a team we are expanding quite rapidly after a round of investment to build out our 2 main products, Buying Butler and RightIndem.

I will write in more detail in another blog post about what these products are, but at a high level BuyingButler is a concierge buying site, primarily focused on cars, that lets you make that complex purchase with the help of an expert. This system uses some clever AI to help make car recommendations and walks the buyer through the entire buying and tendering process with different dealers.

Our 2nd product, RightIndem, is an insurance claims management system that is initially targeting towards cars but we have plans for other industries too. This system makes the entire claims management process very transparent for both the insurance company and the claimant. This system is generating a lot of interest in the insurance and insurtech field and we are currently running pilots with some major names. There is a synergy between these 2 products but I will cover that in a separate post.

When I started in May I was the only full time developer and I have been focusing mainly on the RightIndem side of the business, but in this short space of time I have been heavily recruiting to build out our core team. At the time of writing this post I have 6 full time developers who have started or are due to start within the next few weeks and we have augmented with 3 contractors. This is quite a lot of grown in a short space of time and I can see this team getting bigger over the next 6 months.

Because of this growth we very quickly outgrew our existing office in Nottingham. With developers, design, testing, marketing and product / project management we are currently up to over 18 people so we have had to move office to central Nottingham. The new office is in a great location in the Lace Market side of town. The office is an old building that has been modernised, so we have a mix of quirky building and modern fits and finishing’s. We have been in the office for just over a month now and the place is really starting to take shape as you can see from some of the photos in this post.

In future posts in this series I want to cover lots of subjects including a more detailed looked at the products we are building, the approach we are taking to software development, our hiring process and many more.