For founder-led companies from first revenue to Series A.
We work with founder-led companies from first revenue up to Series A, bootstrapped or funded, where most decisions still go through the founder. Usually that’s a company of 5 to 60 people.
You have conviction and domain knowledge, but the product is not moving. Some of the founders we meet have no product function at all, just an offshore team with no one directing it. Some have a technical idea and nobody who has taken something from zero to revenue. Others have a product function that ships slowly, or ships the wrong things. You know the product should be AI-native, but you don’t know how to make it reliable.
Growth has outpaced the operating model. Decisions still run through you, and there is no time to change that while running the business day to day. Most of the founders we meet are also being asked about AI by their investors and their boards, and are watching competitors claim to have it worked out.
You’re raising soon. Maybe there’s no robust financial model yet, or maybe there is one, but you can’t say with evidence why the economics get better as you grow and you’re struggling to tell the story.
Sanara is led by Huw Bevan and you’ll work with him directly. Most companies would call this a fractional COO or a fractional head of product. We work with a monthly fee set by the size of the company.
Often leadership teams in startups have limited capacity to step back and think about how the business runs. We can help your team address bottlenecks and improve team functioning throughout your business.
Sometimes there’s nobody to run product or operations yet. When that’s the case, we run it as an interim head of product or operations. We take the standups, manage the engineers, own the roadmap and the release plan, and hold the function until we’ve hired someone permanent and handed over.
The minimum is three months, then we move to a monthly rolling contract.
If you need us to build the product, or write the financial model and investor materials, we scope and price that separately.
We usually begin with a four-week diagnostic at a fixed fee. We spend time in the business, talk to the team and read the numbers, then come back with a ranked plan for the next two quarters. The plan is yours whether or not we carry on. Read the six dimensions we score →
If you’re raising, we can start there instead. Fundraising has a deadline, so we run it as a project before or alongside the monthly work. We do the market and competitor analysis, build the financial model, and write the board pack and investor materials with you.
Huw raised £300k at Gyre, where he was COO and then CEO, and £750k with the CEO of Koyo Healthtech, which he co-founded. At Gateway 21 he built the financial models for FCA reporting and budgeting. Read more on the About page.
A bootstrapped AI RegTech firm serving crypto exchanges, with no product or operating model in place. We built the product from zero: an AI-driven compliance engine and portal that runs an 80-step prompt-chained workflow at 95% accuracy, doing regulatory analysis that used to need scarce junior analysts. Over two years revenue grew from £0.1m to more than £3m, at margins above 50%.
Around it we set up the operating model: finance and the models for FCA reporting, marketing, people ops and supplier management. We hired and led the product and engineering team, and introduced company-wide retrospectives and regular process improvement sessions.
The founders had spent two years building with an offshore engineering team and no product manager. The product was still far from launch, and the scope kept growing. We went through the product in depth and fixed the data-structure faults that were causing drift between the graph and NoSQL databases. Then we reset the roadmap around the features needed to launch and worked with the offshore team to get it to market. The product is now live.
A founder-led breathwork brand needed a product and had no product function. We built the full working product, then stood up and directed an engineering team to raise the design standard and ship it as a native app on iOS and Android. It now carries more than 100 video and audio sessions, playlists and live calls, with enterprise sign-in through Microsoft and Google.
Huw spent six years at Uber, launching cities and then leading rider operations and product as a general manager on the UK and Ireland leadership team. Since then he has been COO, CEO, co-founder and product director in startups, and has shipped production AI in regulated finance, healthcare and construction. When a piece of work needs a specialist, such as data or engineering, he brings in people he has worked with before. He is on LinkedIn.
If you know the business needs to change how it runs but not the first move, we’d love to speak to you and understand whether we’re the right people to help.