Chuffed Doesn’t Cover It, This Is What It Feels Like to Build Something That Actually Works

Hola Sugarcups,

There’s a particular kind of frustration that only happens when you’re good at your job.

You walk into a brand like Dyson, Nestlé, or even a home-grown lifestyle startup in East London and within weeks you can see exactly what’s not working. Sometimes the acquisition funnel leaks at step three, other time its the targeting being too broad, or the CAC is eating the margin, etc. So as a strategist, you fix it, the numbers move, and you move on too.

For ten years, that was me.

And I was genuinely proud of that work. Increasing acquisition by 45% for Dyson through smarter segmentation. Improving marketing ROI by 35% across Nestlé and Unilever campaigns by building proper KPI frameworks instead of just gut-feeling dashboards. Reducing cost per acquisition by 30% for a London-based lifestyle brand that had been burning budget in all the wrong places.

I knew how to find the leak and I knew how to fix it.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you about that kind of career… you become brilliant at solving problems inside systems that were never designed to work properly. And at some point, you start asking a different, much more uncomfortable question.

What if the system itself is the problem?

The Moment I Couldn’t Unsee It

It was 2023. I was working at International Business Times as Partnerships Manager, negotiating deals between AI vendors, FMCG giants, and digital publishers. I was literally sat at between what technology could do and what businesses actually needed and the gap was enormous.

But what really got under my skin was the conversations happening on the edges. The nail salon owner who had three different apps to manage bookings, take payments, and send reminders, none of which really understood her mind. Then there was a personal trainer whose “system” was a WhatsApp group and a notes app, the mobile beautician who was losing repeat clients because she had no proper way to re-engage them.

They were skilled, multi-tasking entrepreneurs, representing exactly the kind of UK micro-businesses and SMEs that prop up entire communities and they were being completely underserved by technology that was either too expensive, too complex, or designed for someone else entirely.

I’d spent years building commercial strategies for brands worth billions. And these businesses, turning over £50k – £200k a year, didn’t even have a basic operational backbone. And that is something I couldn’t unsee it.

What I Did Next (Spoiler: I Did Not Immediately Co-Found a Startup)

Here’s the realistic version of this story, because I know you’re not here for a LinkedIn-polished fairy tale. I didn’t quit my job in a blaze of entrepreneurial glory. I went home, opened a spreadsheet, mapped the problem properly, defining the actual pain points, how fragmented was the current market, what did existing tools get wrong, who was already trying to solve this and why were they falling short. The answers were clear enough to keep me up at night.

Service-based businesses in the UK including not limited to hair, beauty, fitness, wellness, trades, tutoring, were being forced to cobble together four or five different tools to do what one integrated platform should do. Bookings here, payments there, client comms somewhere else, no unified view, no analytics, and no way to understand their own customers.

Meanwhile, the tools that did exist were either designed for large enterprises (too complex, too expensive) or so stripped-back they solved only one piece of the puzzle. The gap was real and the market was huge. And nobody was filling it in a way that actually worked for a sole trader or a five-person team. So I did what product people do. I defined the problem, identified the user, and started building the solution.

That solution is Clicket.

What Clicket Actually Is (And Why It’s Different)

Clicket is an integrated SaaS operating system built specifically for UK service-based SMEs and micro-businesses.

One platform. Everything in one place – profile creation and verification, service listings, booking management, payments, and client re-engagement. No frankenstack of apps. No switching between screens and no losing customers because your follow-up system is a sticky note.

Me and my co-founder designed the entire end-to-end customer journey from scratch because that’s the only way to build something genuinely defensible against the single-function tools that dominate this space. The commercial model is built for real businesses too. A freemium entry point so there’s no barrier to getting started, paid tiers as businesses grow, and partner integrations that make the platform more powerful the longer you use it.

We’re currently live and expanding across UK sectors and regions. And we have a roadmap for international markets as this problem isn’t uniquely British.

Why I’m Telling You This Here

If you’ve been reading Raw and Toasted for a while, you know this blog sits at the crossroads of fashion, tech, and strategy. You know I don’t write fluff. You know I like data with my opinions.

Clicket is the most direct expression of everything I’ve ever written about here what it means to build something real in a market that’s ready for it. What it looks like to take 10 years of product, commercial, and marketing experience and put it towards something you actually believe in.

I’ll be writing more about the founder journey here. The honest bits, the things that don’t make it into pitch decks, the product decisions, the market learnings, the weird and specific things you only discover when you’re building for micro-businesses in the UK.

If you’re a small business owner, a founder, a marketer, or just someone who likes watching a product get built in real time, stick around.

And if you want to see what we’re building, you can find us at clicket.co.uk.

We’re just getting started.

Jasmin