"Courage is in shorter supply than capital."
Nowhere is that more painfully true than in the world of NHS software.
Everyone in this space seems to have a backer. Or a pilot. Or a shiny “strategic partnership” that gets name-dropped on LinkedIn but vanishes the moment you ask for specifics. Their websites are slick, their pitch decks are bulletproof, and their language is coated in buzzwords.
But what almost nobody actually has is a real, working product. One that’s live, today, in real surgeries, one that saves exhausted staff time they don’t have, one that prevents avoidable harm and drives better outcomes and one that - crucially - turns a profit.
Most NHS tech isn’t built to solve problems people on the fronlines face everyday. It’s built to sound impressive. You can see it from a mile off. Products get crafted for "panels" and pitch events, where founders grin in front of logo walls stacked with meaningless partnerships, proudly claiming to be “transforming care” despite having never touched a single patient. They’re always on the cusp of something. Just about to launch. Just about to sign a deal. Just about to "disrupt".
And when they inevitably struggle to gain traction, they’ll tell you that “the NHS is a difficult buyer,” as if the problem is with the system, not with the fact they haven’t built anything the system actually needs.
BookYourGP wasn’t built in a boardroom - it was built in the quiet chaos of a real surgery. There was no investment round. No seed capital. No magical grant from NHS England. We didn’t wait to be discovered, selected, or anointed. We rolled up our sleeves and started with a single spreadsheet in a single practice. And then we got to work.
We wrote our own code (badly at first, then better), because nobody else was going to do it for us. We tested it under pressure, in real workflows, with real staff trying to keep their heads above water. We handled our own DCB0129 (clinical safety) compliance because we knew no one else would take it seriously enough. We survived the absence of any meaningful documentation with legacy systems. We debugged timeouts and wrangled with logic. And we kept going, but not because someone funded us, but because surgeries used what we built and asked for more.
Now, BookYourGP is running in surgeries across the country. Recalls are triggered automatically, tailored to the practice. SNOMED codes are uploaded directly into clinical systems every single day. Clinicians are finally freed from unnecessary admin. And yes, the business is profitable. Not because we “won” an innovation award. But because practices pay for what we deliver.
Because it’s brutally hard.
You need to understand primary care deeply and not just how it looks in theory, but how it behaves under pressure, with 12,000 patients, 8 clinicians, and a team that’s constantly one resignation away from collapse.
You need to write code that actually works, but also understand SNOMED CT, recall schedules, clinical audit standards, and when to organise a urea and electrolytes instead of a urine ACR.
You need to navigate the tangled maze of IG, DPIAs, safety cases, and governance sign-off, often without anyone helping you interpret the rules. You need to operate in the vacuum where no one gives you permission and keep building anyway.
And most of all, you need to survive long enough to go live.
Most can’t. Most won’t. They’ll raise money, hire a design agency, and build a pretty dashboard that looks good in a demo but dies in the wild. But real validation doesn’t come from a steering group. It comes when a practice manager, burned out and under-resourced, chooses to trust your software with the care of 12,000 patients.
BookYourGP is not a pilot. It’s not a prototype. It’s not a sandbox or a vision board or a half-baked MVP with a vague roadmap and a consultancy behind it. It’s a fully integrated clinical coordination engine, built from scratch by a team who are still in clinic every week and who understand the cost of a missed recall. It’s used daily, without ceremony, by the surgeries who need it most. It works in chaos. It thrives in mess. And it keeps getting better.
The NHS is full of good people with good intentions. It’s also full of consultants, “transformation teams,” and committees that can spend six months approving a button colour.
Almost nobody ships something without convening a panel. Almost nobody takes direct responsibility for clinical risk without trying to offload it. Almost nobody starts simple and iterates, because they’d rather dream up something complex and delay it forever.
We learned early on that courage isn’t just a trait - it’s a moat.
When your competitors are paralysed by compliance anxiety, allergic to execution, and terrified of criticism, having the guts to build something that works becomes your competitive edge.
We don’t have a board of investors to keep happy. We don’t have a burn rate lighting a fire under product decisions. We don’t have to promise AI, dashboards, or “population health insights” in Q3 of next year to justify our existence.
We have software that works, today. We have GPs and practice managers who trust us, use us, and recommend us. We have our own capital, our own momentum, and our own roadmap.
And most importantly, we have the one thing our competitors can never fake: we owe everything to the people who actually use our product and nothing to anyone else.
BookYourGP was never meant to be a startup. It was a lifeline and a necessity born out of frustration, created by a GP who simply couldn’t wait for someone else to fix the mess.
Now it’s live across the country, powering care behind the scenes. And we’re just getting started.
We didn’t raise funding. We raised standards.