Rotageek Founder: Your First Idea Is Probably Wrong
•February 20, 2026
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Why It Matters
The advice highlights a pragmatic path to sustainable growth, urging founders to prioritize market validation and customer value over vanity metrics, which can reduce failure risk in the tech startup ecosystem.
Key Takeaways
- •First idea often wrong; focus on paying problem.
- •Retail market needed hospital rostering solution first.
- •Raise less capital; constraints spark creativity.
- •Prioritize customer value over investor‑centric metrics.
- •Share full context; transparency drives better decisions.
Pulse Analysis
Founders frequently cling to their original concept, assuming it will eventually find a market fit. McCullough’s experience with Rotageek illustrates why early validation against paying customers matters more than internal conviction. By listening to retail buyers who urgently needed scheduling software, the company pivoted from a healthcare‑centric vision to a market where budgets and pain points aligned. This market‑driven adjustment not only secured revenue but also preserved the core insight that staff scheduling was fundamentally broken, proving that flexibility can coexist with a strong founding hypothesis.
A common pitfall for emerging startups is optimizing for investor‑friendly metrics—monthly recurring revenue, logo count, or net‑revenue retention—at the expense of genuine customer outcomes. McCullough argues that when users derive real value, the numbers follow organically, creating a healthier, renewal‑driven growth engine. By keeping product development and roadmap discussions anchored in customer success, founders avoid building a façade that looks impressive on slide decks but collapses during renewal cycles. This customer‑first mindset also informs fundraising strategy: raising only what is necessary forces disciplined spending and innovative problem‑solving, reducing dilution and preserving founder control.
Leadership style plays a pivotal role in translating strategy into execution. McCullough champions a culture of context over cheerleading, openly sharing commercial targets, pipeline health, and competitive threats. This transparency empowers employees to make autonomous decisions aligned with the company’s stakes, fostering accountability and agility. Looking beyond Rotageek, McCullough spotlights AI‑driven drug discovery as a transformative technology, noting how platforms like AlphaFold compress pre‑clinical timelines dramatically. Such forward‑looking insights signal that founders who stay attuned to emerging tech trends can position their ventures at the intersection of market need and breakthrough innovation, driving long‑term relevance.
Rotageek founder: Your first idea is probably wrong
Chris McCullough is the co-founder and executive director of product at Rotageek, a workforce management software provider that allows for streamlined and digital staff scheduling.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, McCullogh discusses professional resilience, why conviction to solve real problems is more important than quick wins and why you should be building for your customers, not your investors.
What advice would you give to a first-time founder?
Your first idea is probably wrong, and that’s fine. What matters is whether you’re solving a real problem for people who will pay to have it solved. I started Rotageek with a conviction that hospital rostering was broken and it was.
But the people with the budget and urgency to fix it were in retail, not healthcare. The skill is staying close enough to the problem to recognise when the market is telling you to adjust, without abandoning the core insight that got you started. Also, raise less money than you think you need, because constraints force creativity. And get a co-founder you can argue with.
What’s a common mistake that you see founders make?
Building for investors instead of customers. I have sat in board meetings where the conversation was entirely about metrics that would look good in the next raise, MRR growth, logo count, NRR, with zero discussion of whether customers were actually getting value from the product. If your customers are succeeding, the metrics follow.
If you are optimising metrics directly, you end up with a company that looks great on a slide deck and falls apart at renewal.
How do you motivate your team?
Context, not cheerleading. People do their best work when they understand why something matters, not when they are told it matters. I used to share more information than most CEOs would: commercial targets, pipeline health, competitive threats, strategic bets.
If someone understands the stakes, they make better decisions without being told what to do. I also think the worst thing you can do is pretend everything is fine when it isn’t. Teams can handle hard truths. What they can’t handle is finding out you knew and didn’t tell them.
What’s a fact about yourself that people might find surprising?
I have a PhD in cancer genetics. Before Rotageek, I spent sixteen years in the NHS – eight of those as an emergency medicine physician at some of London’s busiest hospitals, including University College Hospital and St Mary’s, which is one of the UK’s largest trauma centres.
People assume I have always been in tech. I have not. I’ve managed cardiac arrests, gunshots, objects in places they shouldn’t be and worked 52-hour shifts. It gives you a perspective on life and an ability to cut through the noise and focus on the underlying problem.
Excluding your sector, which nascent technology holds the most promise?
AI-driven drug discovery. The ability to model protein structures, simulate drug interactions, and identify candidate molecules in days rather than years is going to save millions of lives. DeepMind’s AlphaFold was the starting gun.
We’re now seeing companies compress the pre-clinical pipeline from five years to eighteen months. That’s not incremental improvement, it’s a category shift in how medicine is developed.
The post Rotageek founder: Your first idea is probably wrong appeared first on UKTN.
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