F+L Venture Studio
We Invest in
and Build
B2B SaaS Companies
Our proven approach provides the teams and tools that non-technical founders need to launch new companies and digitise industries.

Enabling REAL

BUSINESSES to

grow with TECH

WHO we

Work with

Domain experts

Domain Experts

You are a humble (yet confident!) commercially-savvy Founder with extensive experience and network within your chosen business domain.

Non-Conformists

Non-Conformists

You don’t settle for the status-quo. You see things don’t work as they are today and are passionate about improving them.

Problem Solvers

Problem Solvers

You are obsessed with the problem your business is solving and are willing to try many different ideas to tackle it.

plus

We love working with businesses that serve underserved customer bases in niche markets – they enable rather than disrupt a current market.

Problem Solvers

Early MVP

Your MVP is live, you have users paying for your product and you have a strong pipeline of opportunities to scale that revenue but you cannot do it without a tech team. As a non-technical Founder you know you need product and tech support to help validate and build the next stage of your business.

Problem Solvers

Offline-to-Online

Your business is generating revenue and has found product market fit within a niche. To date you have used a great team of people and lots of spreadsheets and other tools to deliver value to your customers. You know technology will enable your business to scale and as a non-technical Founder you are excited to work with an experienced team to validate and build and launch this tech to your team and users.

We become your in-house team and provide your early stage funding round, working with you and your team as a long-term partner over the lifecycle of your business.

We are the

enabler

in your journey

Domain experts

Pre-Seed Investment

Our in-house and external network of investors work with our team to provide guidance, advise and, for pre-seed Founders, also investment. They work with our Founders and Product Managers to ensure the product, investment and business strategy align.

Non-Conformists

Team of Experts

You will work closely with a cross-functional team with experience that spans multiple industries, technology types and customer personas. We identify your business goals and use our experience to help you move one step forward each day.

Problem Solvers

Resources and Network

You don’t have to navigate the entrepreneurial path alone; our Founders’ Circle is formed to provide a place where like-minded founders can exchange a wealth of knowledge and experience.

Our comprehensive ecosystem of investment, strategy, design and tech empowers you to turn your vision into a game-changing reality. We work as your in-house team to keep moving your business forward the right way to create a stable, scalable business.

What our

Founders say

We don’t just see them as the partner who created and launched our MVP but we see them as a partner for the technology in the long term. In terms of their software support and knowledge, it has been  second to none.

James Ward, Managing Director

What our

Founders say

Our partnership with Founder and Lightning has been extremely valuable. From the rapid MVP build, to challenging assumptions and later, the ability to scale the business at short notice. F+L have become deeply involved in our business offering support across the technology landscape and beyond.

Toby Kernon, Founder

how we

help you grow

9 out of 10 startups fail but 90% of ours succeed – Our unique proposition gives your business the best chance to thrive.

Domain experts

Spend Less, Learn More

When you’re launching the first version of your product, you want to be proud of it right? Wrong. By building in stealth mode and hiding your product away from your users until ‘Launch Day’ you’re losing the ability to learn and placing massive bets on the value your product will offer - often with that bet being slightly incorrect causing you to re-build features already live.

plus

We do not build in stealth mode. Speaking to users at every stage of the design process, from understanding them as people to showing them prototypes and getting feedback early we reduce the overall cost and time of development by catching mistakes early. We ensure that every line of code written will add value to your users and therefore your business.

Non-Conformists

Fearless Feedback

When you’re starting to scale your business and build more tech it’s easy to assume you know what to build, how it should look and function. Often Founders choose to work with agencies and teams who do not challenge their assumptions. Quickly you can find yourself surrounded by people who are more focussed on making you happy instead of ensuring your product delivers the value your users need.

plus

At Founder + Lightning our expert teams use their years of experience to turn your experience and assumptions into a clear Product Strategy. We ask questions. We challenge. We make your users the centre of everything we do and understand how to align your business strategy to what they need.

Problem Solvers

You’re in Control

It’s common for non-tech founders to feel like they aren’t in control when building a tech business. We see this when Founders come to us after working with a dev agency on a fixed scope project without doing proper validation (and it going wrong), not knowing who from the dev agency is working on the product and when or trusting a CTO or tech co-founder who you don’t know v well to build a product (and the right product)

plus

To counter this, we work closely with our non-tech founder partners to help them feel in control of their business. We work together; making decisions on what to build next based on the right data. Our teams work with total transparency, using Slack, daily stand-ups and bi-weekly check-ins to ensure we are all working towards achieving the next goals for your business.

F+L Capital is looking to invest into non-technical Founders who are at the early stages of building a B2B SaaS company. If you have a scrappy MVP with some initial tractions that you now need to scale, we’d love to hear from you.

Helping

Founders

from Idea

to EXIT

We bring a huge amount of value to the table at all stages of the evolution of the ventures we help to launch.

30

Companies built

£164M

Total Value of Our Portfolio Companies

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FAQ

An MVP is the smallest version of your product or of a feature that allows you to validate the value it brings to your users. Although asking users to pay for this is an amazing way to validate, it often isn't sold to customers. Instead used to to bring a small group of beta users onboard, collect, feedback and prioritise improvements!

A V1 is typically the sellable version of your product. Before you get to V1 you probably will have launched, iterated on and potentially pivoted your MVP until you have a valuable product that a small number of customers are now paying for. Once you’re at this point you can start putting more spend into marketing and selling your V1 product to optimise your CPA and customer LTV.

In everyday life, buying products and services is often a clear cut process. You know what is being offered, you know how much it will cost and the exchange can be made relatively simply. However building software products should be (and is!) treated differently. We provide our Founders with an expert, agile development team that allows them to; stay agile, be more likely to get the product your customers need, collect feedback earlier and spend less - protecting your runway!

The Founders we work with love speaking to their users, so probably you do too! This is incredibly important evidence to have when starting to build and launch your tech product, and these users will often be your first customers. To help, we recommend noting down a few things users are saying about what their pain points are and how they are solving these problems currently. Additionally if there is market evidence that supports the hypothesis your business is built around it is great evidence to share with our team!

You own your tech. While we are working together, our development team will create new accounts with the services that support your platform and the chosen architecture - Heroku, Mixpanel and Webflow are good examples of these services. This means the team can use their experience to set everything up correctly, work efficiently together and then easily transfer ownership if/when our team scales down and your in-house team scales up! We also create new accounts so you can benefit from our startup discounts.
Helping you from idea to launch to scale

Keen to find out more? Get in touch!
We'd love to chat to you.

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