As a first-time founder, I think I’m meant to start these pieces with a ‘Monday morning, another 3am start…’ type opener.
Instead, it was a lazy 7am start in the gym with my kids. Two budding rugby players. A great start to any week.
But before we dive in, let me frame the week with a quick intro.
In grandiose terms, I’m COO of Voxelo, introducing a new 3D layer to the world of eCommerce.
In plain terms, we’re helping people feel more confident about buying things online.
Both are true, and holding them together is what makes this role pretty exhilarating.
Voxelo is a new type of virtual studio for ecommerce. We turn a simple product video into a 3D digital twin.
We’re three co-founders based in Manchester: CEO Vladimir Mulhem, CTO Roman Bromidge and me.
Monday
Like every day, Monday is a combination of living in the weeds, creating, fixing and maintaining, and forcing my head up to do some strategic planning.
The weeds work is all the better since Claude Cowork was released. On this sunny Monday it diagnosed and fixed an API issue across my accounts. When you’re a founding team of three doing the work of 15, having a sharp AI partner that both thinks and acts is no small thing.
With that tackled, I’m preparing for a meeting with a major retailer, one of the UK’s biggest. They’re deeply aware of the problem we’re tackling, and I love their engagement in this early partnership.
Then there’s a call with two new agency partners I met the previous week after speaking at a Shopify event, Successify, hosted by Pixel Kicks. We presented on the near future of visual commerce and it seemed to capture people’s imagination.
In between, I’ve been reviewing our virtual studio with the team. What it promises is significant: a single destination where any seller can create 3D, AR, product and lifestyle imagery from one simple product video.
Tuesday
A morning of deep work and future gazing, looking at emerging agentic commerce opportunities and speaking with two partners who may be able to assist with our R&D efforts later in the year.
We’re fortunate to have incredible regional support in tackling this problem, from accelerators and research partners to some of the biggest names in tech, but it still feels like we’re building the plane as we take off.
The afternoon is emails, admin and prep for investor conversations the next day.
Wednesday
I’m on the train to London for UK Tech Week, with the support of Manchester Digital.
Then it’s across town for an investment panel at Dawn Capital, where Innovate UK and the British Business Bank tease announcements on supporting companies like us.
These are the days where you compress months of R&D, customer testing and complexity into a few compelling minutes of conversation, or at least that’s the aim.
We’ve recently closed a significant raise, with more good news to follow, so positive sentiment in investor conversations has grown. They’re good questions to be exploring.
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Meanwhile, Vlad has been at SXSW in Austin on an Innovate UK-supported trade mission. He’s back and straight into debriefing the team. Engaging investors and partners at events like these has been a big part of what we’ve been doing in recent months.
Return trains from London are delayed. I get home at 1.30am.
Thursday
Navigating enterprise engagements as a pre-seed company is its own discipline. You need to match their rigour while moving fast.
With time made available, I lean on the team’s expertise to scope new R&D projects, and we’ve been introduced to university research partners, the kind of connections that could significantly shape how our technology evolves.
Wider partner conversations across the week have gone deeper too, stretching into profitability, data opportunities and how agencies can build a 3D and AR layer into their own service offering.
Friday
After customer updates, I start prepping for Voxelo’s next planning day, analysing our operations and go-to-market strategy and preparing a series of ‘positive provocations”’ for the team.
The diversity of any given week is huge: competitor analysis, investor meetings, product testing, customer onboarding, content creation, billing, agency and tech partnerships, and that’s before you get to the research.
Our technology, UG3D®, leverages 3D Gaussian splatting and AI, and sits at the edge of what’s feasible today. If you asked what the red thread through my week was, it would be this: how do we build something that makes Voxelo’s value simple to discover, understand and use?
We’re a young business, pre-seed, if that even matters anymore. It’s a privilege to be backed, to have customers who believe in what we’re building, and partners who are leaning into this problem with us.
And to be doing work that genuinely hasn’t been done before.
- Ben McKay is COO of Manchester-based Voxelo, which has just closed a £650k investment round.