JULY MEMBER OF THE MONTH: PUBLICATE
As another month rolls round it’s time to crown July’s Member of the Month! Say hello to Chris Bradley, founder of Publicate as we find out about what he’s been up to and his advice for new businesses.

Hi Chris, thank you so much for having a chat with us today! Could you start by telling us a little bit about your work?
I’m the founder of Publicate, which is a curation publishing platform that businesses can use it to create email newsletters and web round ups from content they find online. The way that it came about was I noticed that businesses, especially small and medium size, find it really difficult to create enough content for their marketing but they all spend a lot of time consuming content online. I wanted a way that they could take the content that they were reading every day and turn it into new content, which is where the idea for Publicate came from.
Publicate is used by small and medium businesses and they use it to send out a lot of their email newsletters and create content for resource hubs. We also have some agencies that use it, for example creative agencies, and they use it with big brands to send out their internal updates. This might be interesting news, trends and marketing information that their customers would be interested in. The main problem that Publicate solves for businesses is that it saves them a lot of time with creating content. Whilst other software may take two to three hours to create a newsletter, with Publicate it only takes ten minutes.
We’re also quite a spread out team. It’s me here [in Liverpool], my co-founder Ian lives in Devon, we have a designer in Poland and then we have another developer in Canada. I did it like that on purpose because I didn’t want to be fixed to one location!
We definitely have enjoyed having a go at using Publicate here at Launch! What kind of stuff have you been up to recently?
So we’ve just done a round of user testing, so seeing where there are problems with the interface. We wanted to find out when people sign up where it gets confusing, and now we’re going to be making some changes to the product too to improve those areas. Up until now we had been focusing on getting the product right, but now we’re going to be doing some marketing.
I understand that you’ve been doing some travelling recently, was that with Publicate?
Well, I also consult with companies to help them to apply lean and agile principles to their organisation, so that’s separate to Publicate. I work with large businesses like Tetropack, Clarins, Booking.com, Price Waterhouse Cooper, basically really big enterprises and go work with their product teams to help them be more customer centric. I help them understand customer’s needs and translate those needs into features and functionality, and then how to actually build the software as a team.
Congratulations on being our July Member of the Month! What are some of your favourite things about being here at Launch22?
The facility is really nice, it’s a great sense of community and there’s loads of things going on like Curry Thursday and pingpong of course!
Curry and pingpong, what more do you want? Finally Chris, if you had to give someone who is starting a business advice, what would it be?
Focus on your customers. Also read books, because a lot of startups that I’ve been consulting with, even though the information is out there they start with an idea not a problem. They think everybody is going to care about that problem, but in reality people do only care about their own problems.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is people leading with an idea rather than actually understanding the customer and their problem and then thinking about what the actual solution is.
Find out more about Publicate here: https://publicate.it
Want to find out more about Launch22? Get in touch with us at: Liverpool@launch22.co.uk
Tori Erskine
