Ask Me Anything: Insights from the First Three Sessions

Have you ever been stuck on a problem when building only another founder would understand? Or wondering if the decisions you’re making are the right ones? Or maybe you’re sitting on an idea and curious about what it’s really like to build a startup. 

Those questions are the idea behind Ask Me Anything (AMA), our live event hosted on Slack for early-stage founders. Every month founders get direct access to an experienced operator from the CodeBase network, who takes to slack to answer questions from the community. The format is intentionally relaxed and accessible with no agenda, instead just an open conversation with a founder who has built and scaled before. Community members can submit questions in advance or ask them live on the day, in a way that fits around them and meets them where they are. 

Access and proximity of this kind is what CodeBase is built on. Often the most valuable support for founders isn’t the kind that can be read in a book, it's the advice and honesty from people who have already navigated the journey you’re on. AMA is one example of how CodeBase creates that access.

Since launching, we’ve had some of the most candid conversations about startup building that the CodeBase network has to offer. Here’s a look at the hosts and the insights from our first three editions: 

Insights from Andrew McGinley: 

The first AMA kicked off with Andrew McGinley, who co-founded and led Care Sourcer for over a decade, a healthtech platform that matched people to adult social care across the UK, before exiting to KareHero in 2023. He’s now building Hosel, a second-hand golf marketplace, alongside his role as an Entrepreneur in Residence at CodeBase.

One of the standout questions in Andrew’s session came when a founder asked how to get risk-averse B2B partners to commit to an early-stage LOI. Andrew’s suggestion was giving the partners a reason to move. Whether that’s early influence over your product roadmap, a genuine competitive advantage for the right customer or a commercial incentive that rewards them for taking the risk early, the goal is to make saying yes easier than saying no.

Insights from Richard Lennox:

Next up was Richard Lennox, COO of CodeBase, who brought his experience scaling Skyscanner and Current Health to the community. Richard previously served as a senior director at Skyscanner and as COO at Current Health ahead of its $400 million exit to Best Buy in 2021. 

Richard’s session tackled some of the harder questions founders tend to face, including one that comes up often but rarely gets a straight answer: what does product-market fit actually look like?

For Richard, product-market fit is not a binary state. It shifts with context and the external environment matters as much as the product itself. He pointed to Current Health as an example. They had strong signals, good pilots but it wasn’t until the pandemic that the market recognised what they had built was essential. He also pushed the founders to think beyond the product itself, if your customer can’t pay for it, the fit isn’t there yet, regardless of how good the tech is.

Insights from Claudia Freigang: 

Our third AMA was hosted by Claudia Freigang, an auditory neuroscientist turned medtech founder who secured £2.5 million in investment and grant funding building Hearing Diagnostics from idea to clinical readiness. She now supports medtech, healthtech, and biotech founders as an Entrepreneur in Residence at CodeBase.

One of the key questions that came up during Claudia’s session was how do you keep moving when the funding isn’t there yet? Claudia was honest about her own experience, explaining that even after a successful Innovate UK grant, Hearing Diagnostics spent close to a year without follow-on funding before Scottish Enterprise SMART R&D allowed them to build a prototype and secure their first cheque from Archangels.

Her advice to founders is to de-risk your R&D where you can, explore co-development partnerships, and before anything else, talk to your customers to confirm the problem is real and who would pay to solve it.

Up next:

These are operators who have raised, lost, pivoted, and come out the other side, sharing the things that don’t usually make it to the standard playbook and that’s what makes AMA so valuable. Join the CodeBase Community on Slack and be part of the next conversation here. 

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