Rotageek founder: Your first idea is probably wrong

Chris McCullough had correctly identified a broken system. Hospital rostering was a mess—inefficient, manual, and crying out for a digital solution. His co-founded company, Rotageek, had built workforce management software that could genuinely fix the problem, but the people who needed it most couldn't actually buy it.

That disconnect—between acute pain and purchasing power—nearly sank the business. McCullough's experience offers a sharp reminder that conviction, however well-founded, means nothing if you're pitching to organisations that can't move fast enough to keep your company alive.

The Wrong Customer With the Right Problem

McCullough's assessment that hospital rostering systems were broken wasn't misguided optimism. Anyone who's spent time in the NHS knows the reality: shift patterns managed on spreadsheets, rotas that fail to account for staff preferences or fatigue, and scheduling chaos that affects patient care. The problem was real, and the solution was sound.

What wasn't sound was the business model. Healthcare organisations, particularly in the UK's public sector, operate with procurement processes that can stretch for months or years. Even when the need is urgent and the solution demonstrably effective, the path from pilot to purchase order is littered with bureaucratic hurdles.

Meanwhile, a startup burns through runway with no revenue to show for its product-market fit. Retail, by contrast, moves differently. The scheduling challenges may seem less critical—getting the right number of staff on a shop floor doesn't carry the same moral weight as hospital staffing.

Retail organisations can write cheques faster, scale implementations quicker, and provide the revenue velocity that keeps a young company solvent.

McCullough eventually pivoted Rotageek towards retail customers, following the money rather than the mission. The broader pattern here should concern any founder targeting the public sector or heavily regulated industries.

The organisations with the most broken systems are often the least equipped to buy solutions quickly. That's not a criticism of those organisations—it's simply the reality of how procurement works when you're spending taxpayer money or operating within complex compliance frameworks.

Capital Efficiency in a Colder Climate

McCullough's advice to 'raise less money than you think you need' would have seemed almost perverse during the 2020-21 funding boom, when startups routinely raised eight-figure rounds on the strength of growth projections and market narratives. Constraints weren't celebrated; they were obstacles to blitzscaling.

But 2024's investment environment has made his perspective considerably more mainstream. Venture capitalists who once competed to write large cheques are conducting more rigorous due diligence and favouring companies that demonstrate capital efficiency. Profitability, once an almost quaint concern, has returned to the conversation.

What's interesting here is that McCullough isn't simply responding to market conditions with pragmatic advice. He's suggesting that constraints actually improve decision-making. When you can't afford to pursue every potential customer segment or build every requested feature, you're forced to prioritise ruthlessly.

That discipline often leads to better products and clearer positioning than startups that raise large rounds and then scatter their focus across too many opportunities. The counterargument, of course, is that some markets genuinely require substantial capital to reach scale—particularly in hardware, biotech, or infrastructure.

But for B2B software businesses like Rotageek, the advice holds considerable weight. A smaller raise means less dilution, more ownership for founders, and fewer investors expecting hockey-stick growth that may not materialise.

Building for Customers, Not Pitch Decks

Perhaps McCullough's most pointed observation is the distinction between building for customers and building for investors. The two audiences want different things. Investors want addressable market size, growth metrics, and a narrative that positions the company for the next funding round.

Customers want software that solves their immediate problem without disrupting their existing workflows. Too many founders optimise for the wrong audience. They chase features that look impressive in a funding pitch but don't address the actual friction points their users experience daily.

The organisations with the most broken systems are often the least equipped to buy solutions quickly.

Or they pursue customer segments that expand the total addressable market on paper whilst ignoring whether those customers can actually be acquired profitably. Workforce management software, the category Rotageek operates in, has become increasingly valuable since the pandemic fundamentally altered how businesses think about scheduling.

Flexible working arrangements, persistent staff shortages in sectors like hospitality and retail, and the shift away from manual systems have created genuine demand. According to Allied Market Research, the global workforce management market is projected to reach £12.5 billion by 2030, growing at 9.3% annually.

That growth reflects real business need rather than investor enthusiasm for a trendy category. Companies are buying workforce management tools because their existing processes have become untenable, not because a funding announcement created FOMO. For founders, that distinction matters enormously when deciding which problems to solve and which customers to pursue.

McCullough's recommendation to find a co-founder you can argue with speaks to the same tension. Conviction is essential for surviving the inevitable setbacks of building a company. But unchallenged conviction becomes dangerous when it prevents you from recognising market signals that contradict your assumptions.

A co-founder who pushes back forces you to interrogate whether you're persisting because the strategy is sound or simply because you're too committed to change course. The question facing founders isn't whether to have conviction—you can't build anything meaningful without it.

The question is whether you can maintain enough intellectual honesty to recognise when that conviction is leading you towards customers who can't or won't pay, regardless of how badly they need what you're selling. For McCullough, a former A&E doctor who founded a tech business, that realisation meant abandoning healthcare for retail.

For other founders, the specifics will differ. But the underlying lesson remains: following the old playbook of "build it and hope they will come" is still failure, just a more frustrating version of it.