SmplCo

22/04/2026

🤘 DAY TWO of the SmplCo 1000 Mile Conference Tour!

Mike Millar is strolling into the capital in the sun - thanks striking Tube drivers! - to SCALE London.

This week members of our team are speaking conferences Monday - Thursday, with a distance between them of over 1,000 miles.

Today MIke is hosting a roundtable at Scale called 'Attention is the new gold' on how to get your brand to stand out in the most distracted time in human history.

Tomorrow he gets to put on his my Britney Spears-style mic and chair the conference, while Andreas Melvær heads to the Innovation Dock Impact Awards & Summit to talk about AI-assisted product design.

Exciting times. 🔥

20/04/2026

🔥 Our team are speaking at events this week that span 1000 MILES. So, if you want to our avoid our team this week, we're sorry, because that's basically impossible.

Andreas Melvær & Mike Millar will be at:

🎨 UX/UI conference Yggdrasilkonferansen - where we're talking AI (...and gnus 🫎)
🏗️ London's leading scale-up event, SCALE London Summit & Expo - where we're talking brand awareness and successful fundraising
🏆 The Impact Awards by Innovation Dock - where it will be all about AI-assisted product design

17/04/2026

Here's a challenge for all our non-Scandi friends... can you say 'Yggdrasilkonferansen'? Frankly it doesn't matter if you can; what matters is Norway's leading digital UX and UI event has invited Andreas Melvær to speak and he's heading there with a speech that will make your head spin more than any 7 syllable Norsk word.

He is, naturally, preparing a talk that appears to be a blend of:

🫎 the bar we also own, Gnu Bar
🤖 product building with AI
⁉️ imposter syndrome

In an effort to control this crazy mix and avoid making a fool of himself on stage, Andreas has also built a cheeky interactive test for people to play with and get distracted from the potential mess on stage.

Obviously, it exists in Andreas' own Stavanger dialect, as well as in Scouse, which is basically the UK’s closest cousin to 'siddisdialekt'.

Please test it.
Please send feedback.
Please help us make this thing a little less stupid before Monday.

Built with AI, obviously.

Next week will be a rollercoaster with our team presenting at Yggdrasilkonferansen, SCALE London and Impact Summit by Innovation Dock.

So we'll see you all somewhere. It's basically unavoidable.

A provocative personality quiz for designers. Find your archetype.

17/04/2026

In what I can only describe as a temporary neurological event affecting judgement, inhibition, and whatever part of the frontal lobe is supposed to stop people from making reckless programming decisions, the organisers of Yggdrasilkonferans have invited Andreas to speak.

So now he is, naturally, preparing a talk that appears to be an only partially controlled blend of Gnu Bar, product building with AI, imposter syndrome, and public self-humiliation.

In an effort to avoid making a complete fool of himself on stage, he has also built a small cheeky interactive test for people to play with and get distracted from the mess on stage.

It exists in Stavanger dialect.
It also exists in Scouse, which is basically the UK’s closest cousin to siddisdialekt according to him.


Please test it.
Please send feedback.
Please help us make this thing a little less stupid before Monday.

Built with AI, obviously.

Next week will be a rollercoaster with our team presenting at Yggdrasilkonferansen, SCALE London and Impact Summit by Innovation Dock.

A provocative personality quiz for designers. Find your archetype.

16/04/2026

🇳🇴 Just one week until one of the biggest dates in the Norwegian tech calendar... the Innovation Dock Impact Awards 2026!

This is SmplCo's third year of being a partner at these awards, which celebrates the Norway's epic entrepreneurs.

🤖 Our head honcho, Andreas Melvær, will share his considerable expertise (and commanding height) at the Tech Bar, where he'll be handing out free advice on the latest AI tools and trends that are revolutionising digital product development.

So go and say hi!

The event is packed full of great stuff for digital innovators, including:

🏆 The Impact Million investment pitch competition
📈 Multiple stages with great speakers (including Andreas, of course)
🚀 Speed networking
⭐ ... and lots more

If you are looking for a place to meet founders, investors, key industry players, and people shaping what is next, this is where you need to be.

🎟️Grab your tickets at https://www.impactsummit.no/tickets

15/04/2026

🚨 1️⃣ WEEK TO GO... until one of the most ludicrously generous offers ever made - FREE ENTRY to SCALE London - materialises. Who's coming?

🤝 We are delighted to be partner of SCALE London EXPO & SUMMIT 2026. And to prove it we're giving away LOADS of free - and super practical - stuff to help start-ups and scale-ups on their journeys.

Scale London is a really great community for UK start-ups and scale-ups ... and it's FREE to attend. Bonkers, we know.

🪑 At the event our own Michael Millar - that's him below - will be chairing Day 2 of the Summit and compering the Pitch to Investors.

The indefatigable fellow will also be hosting a roundtable on how to stand out in a relentlessly noisy digital world, called 'Attention is the New Gold'. (And giving away EVEN MORE free stuff).

You can sign up for that here and get a FREE SMPLCO PITCH PREP PACK, stuffed full of great advice on how to standout from the crown when pitching: https://lnkd.in/eGMQBD49

So, come and meet the SmplCo team in person at SCALE EXPO & SUMMIT 2026 - where the UK's scale-up community comes together to connect, build and grow.

🎟️ We say it again ...SCALE EXPO is FREE to attend if you register in advance (£95 on the door):

👉 https://bit.ly/4r920G2
📅 22–23 April 2026
📍Business Design Centre, London

09/04/2026

🪓 GIANT KILLING! We didn't need (and couldn't afford) the huge SaaS platforms most companies run internal processes on. So we built our own. In days. Bespoke CRM? Done. Prospecting tool? Yup. Email automation? Darn tootin'.

We explained how and why we did it in depth here: https://smpl.as/blog/build-your-own-digital-ecosystem

The article includes a FREE guide on how to do it yourself.

But why would you want to? Simple, really. You get something that:

🫵 is a delight to use
🫵 fits your workflows and processes
🫵 saves you tonnes of money

The lesson is pretty simple: a lot of companies buy far more software than they actually need. They are renting complexity when they could be building exactly what they need.

They pay for giant systems, then end up using 10% of them.

What has changed is that custom internal tools are no longer some huge, expensive, slow-moving thing. They are becoming realistic to build, fast, and good.

Stop assuming off-the-shelf SaaS is always the smart option.

Sometimes the smarter move is to build a small, focused tool that fits your workflow properly, gives your team a better experience, and does not punish you with rising costs as you grow.

Want to know more? Our Giant Killer-in-Chief, Andreas Melvær will happily tell you his story if you drop him a line ([email protected]).

02/04/2026

🐣Happy Easter everyone! We hope you get some time off from being so relentlessly innovative, energetic and awesome, and put your energies into relaxing & eating too much chocolate.

🥰Team SmplCo

30/03/2026

🚀 300(+) founders can't be wrong... That's how many turned up to our Barclays Eagle Labs webinar on 'Fundraising in 2026'. Now the whole thing is available to everyone online - and we've even written a summary of it for all of you that are just too darned busy and important to watch.

🏃‍♂️‍➡️ Read the SUMMARY here: https://smpl.as/blog/successful-fundraising-2026
🤓 WATCH the whole thing here: https://youtu.be/jJzeJmunyUg

BUT WAIT...there's more! Unbelievable, we know!

💰 We've also made our *Pitch Prep Pack* available for FREE. Download your guide to nailing your investor pitch here: https://smpl.as/pitch-prep

A massive shout out to everyone involved in the webinar, particularly the epic Neil Wood, our own Michael Millar (FRSA), article writer Andreas Melvær, event compere Lilly Chatwin, and unsung hero of the day, James Frost. And last, but not least, huge kudos to Pitch Prep Pack designer, Jingjing Li.

GO TEAM!
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Who are investors backing and why? Find out how you can best position your business to win funding in a tough market.Investors are backing fewer companies – ...

24/03/2026

🤯 0/10!! 🤯
We audited the SmplCo site to see if AI Chats could find it. The chance? Zero. Nada. Zilch. And that was just the start of it...

Good AEO - the AI version of SEO for Google (and Bing, obviously) - is crucial to a business like ours where our customers are tech savvy and using AI chat to find answers & solutions.

Multiple things were wrong. So, we fixed the problems and our overall score for the site went from 4.5, to 9.6. (And there was much rejoicing 🥳 ).

You can read how we made ourselves attractive to AI search and how you can do it too, in the short article below.

👋 Give us a shout if you want any advice on AI optimisation. We're always happy to natter. (In fact, give Andreas Melvær our AI supremo a shout here, or on [email protected]).

AEO is the new SEO. Here's exactly how we optimised our website for AI search — and the 5 tips you can steal today.