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One sentence describing your idea. Type it on the homepage and you get a free Founder Brief in about thirty seconds, with no account and no card. The brief names the problem, the customer, the shape of the business and a kill test, the thing that would prove the idea wrong.

Your brief is saved and the other twelve sections build around it. A full build usually takes 15 to 25 minutes. The build runs on our servers, so you can move around the site, look at other ideas, lock your phone or close the app and it carries on. It pauses once, after the first three sections, to offer the interview, and emails you when it is waiting on you. Open the idea at any time to watch it happen or to pick up from wherever it has got to.

They come in four groups. Foundation: Founder Brief and Brand Studio. Market: Market Size & Timing, Competitors, Your Customers, and Position & Go-to-market. Build: MVP Planner, Licences & Insurance, Launch Roadmap, AI Opportunities and Financial Projections. Documents: Pitch Deck and Business Plan. Each one reads the sections before it, which is why they hold together rather than repeating each other.

No. After the first three sections build you are offered about three minutes of quick questions about your customer, your edge and how you would make money, or a longer conversation if you prefer. You can type or talk. Skip it and everything still builds; answer it and the later sections use what you told us instead of guessing. It is the only pause in the build.

The one private place all your ideas live, free and unlimited. Capture a half-thought in a few words, by typing or by voice, add notes, folders, tags and colour labels, and leave it as a spark. The All, Building, Ready and Archived views, a health score and a stage badge show which ideas are moving. Any Vault note becomes a full plan in one click when you are ready. Your Vault is never visible to anyone else.

Every field. Edit it directly and your version is kept; each section keeps a version history so an edit is never a one-way door. On the Founder plan you can also regenerate a section with your own instructions, or rewrite a single field without touching the rest.

A build pauses on purpose once: after the first three sections, to offer the interview. Open the idea and the card tells you what to do. If a section genuinely failed, it says so and offers to build it again. Anything you edit afterwards marks the sections built on it as outdated, and one tap rebuilds those in the background.

The build queue. Tap the progress strip in the Builder, the building indicator in the sidebar, or the Build queue button on the Vault when something is running. It lists every idea you have building: what is being written right now and roughly how long it has left, what comes next, anything waiting on you, anything that failed, and anything that has gone out of date because you edited a section it was built on. Pause any idea after its current section, continue it, retry a failure or update the out-of-date sections from there, without opening the idea.

A pack needs enough finished sections to be worth downloading. The button names what is missing when you hover or tap it. Finish or regenerate those sections and it unlocks.

It works out what your specific business has to have in place before it can trade in the UK: licences, registrations, insurance, certifications, data protection and the tax deadlines. Each one names the body you apply to, how long it takes to come through, what it costs and what happens if you trade without it, plus the first concrete thing to do about it. It puts the longest wait at the top, because that is the item that actually decides how soon you can open. It also names two or three things founders in your sector commonly buy and do not need. It is research to act on, not legal advice, so check each item against the official page before you commit money to it.

Yes, automatically. The fees and premiums from Licences & Insurance are merged into your startup costs as named lines rather than being estimated a second time, so the two sections can never disagree about what a licence costs. Change a figure there and your model updates without regenerating anything. Change one in the model instead and your figure is kept: the line is marked as yours and the next rebuild of the licences section leaves it alone. You can also leave a cost out entirely and put it back later.

Treat them as a well-reasoned starting point, not a citation. Market Size & Timing, Competitors, MVP Planner and AI Opportunities each start with a web research pass that gathers sourced, dated notes before the section is written, and Market Size & Timing shows its workings for each layer so you can see how it got to a number. It is written to be corrected. Before you put a figure in front of an investor or a bank, check the estimate against a source you can name.

Yes. The Ask button follows you around the Builder, your packs, the checklist, the funding page and the red team. It reads the sections you have built and answers from them, so "can I afford to hire in March" comes back with your own break-even month rather than general advice. Every answer shows which sections it read, as links you can open and check. Where your plan does not hold the answer it says so and names the one thing that would fix it, rather than inventing a figure. It is a Founder feature with 100 questions a month, and it is not a solicitor, accountant or financial adviser.

Brand Studio generates one from your business name and your chosen colours. Ask for a square mark or a wide lockup with the name beside it, regenerate with a tweak in your own words, and the one you pick appears on your idea card, in your Business Pack and on your Founder Snapshot.

A scored judgement on the idea as it stands: build it, reposition it, or it is too crowded. Once the market sections and Financial Projections exist it scores four things out of 100, market opportunity, differentiation, execution feasibility and financial viability, and names the strongest signal, the biggest concern and three cheap tests that would change the call. It is a Founder feature, private to you, and never appears on a public snapshot.

No, it is the product doing its job. A tool that tells every founder their idea is brilliant is worth nothing. Read the reasons it gives: often one or two are fixable, and repositioning is the usual answer rather than abandoning the idea entirely.

Five sceptics attack your plan: the sceptical investor, the bank manager, the customer you want, the competitor and the operator. Each objection is written in that person's voice and grounded in your plan rather than in general, and then checked back against it and marked answered, partly answered or unanswered, with the evidence quoted. Everything unanswered arrives with the specific work that would settle it, so an objection becomes a job rather than a worry. It reads what genuinely held up first, then the one thing to fix, because a red team that finds nothing good is not being sceptical, it is being lazy. It has its own page, Red team in the menu, where you choose which idea to attack, filter the objections by who is asking and how well the plan stood up, and send every unanswered objection's work to your launch checklist in one press. It needs your Founder Brief, Your Customers, Competitors and Position & Go-to-market, and it is a Founder feature.

The place a plan turns into work with a date on it. It pulls your Launch Roadmap's thirty, sixty and ninety day milestones, your quick wins, everything the red team said would settle an objection, and your Licences & Insurance items with their own lead-time dates into one list you can tick off, dated from the day you start. Set a date on anything, note what happened, mark what does not apply, and add whatever the plan never thought of, up to 250 items. There is one date at the top called "Counting from": move it when things slip and every suggested date moves with it, leaving alone any you set yourself. It is free on every plan.

No. Regenerating a section never resets a tick, a note, a status or a date. Syncing only ever adds what is new, and the page tells you how many new items are waiting before you press anything. That guarantee matters more to us than a tidy list: a checklist that loses your progress is worse than no checklist at all.

It starts with the question nobody selling funding has any reason to ask: whether you should raise at all. It reads the funding gap and the break-even month out of your own Financial Projections, and if you break even quickly and the gap is small it will tell you plainly that giving away equity would be the most expensive money you ever take. Then six short questions narrow a maintained list of fifteen UK routes, from funding it from sales, a Start Up Loan and the King's Trust through SEIS and EIS, angel investment, Innovate UK grants, R&D tax relief, both kinds of crowdfunding, bank loans, asset and invoice finance and local growth hub grants to friends and family. Each is marked open to you, worth checking or not this one, with free money first and equity last. Every route says how much, how long, what you need to have ready and the one thing to do next, and anything ruled out is shown with the reason, because the reason is often something you can change. Reading it is free; writing the funding strategy into your plan is a Founder feature.

No, and deliberately not. The eligibility limits involved have legal force, the SEIS lifetime cap, the Start Up Loan ceiling, the trading-age cut-offs, and a model that is approximately right about those would send someone off for three months chasing something they cannot have. The routes are a maintained list. Each one shows the date it was last checked and links to its official page, so you can see how fresh it is rather than having to take our word for it. Check the figures there before you rely on them.

What a raise actually costs, including the part most founders miss: the option pool is carved out of the valuation before the investor comes in, so it comes out of your share rather than theirs. Put in what you are raising and at what valuation and it shows the percentage you keep, the points you give up, what each point is being sold for, and what the same money would have cost as a five-year loan instead. Seeing those two side by side is usually the moment the decision becomes obvious.

A separate tool for a deck, plan, one-pager or memo you already have. Upload the PDF, name the reader it is going to (an angel, a VC, a bank or lender, a grant assessor, an accelerator, a partner or your own board) and you get the read they would give it: send it, nearly there or not yet, with a score out of 100, what they think in the first thirty seconds, a scorecard, page notes, the questions they will ask, what is missing, priority fixes, rewrites and a seven-day plan. PDF only, up to 12 reviews in any 30 days, private to you. It does not need an idea built in Business Launchpad. Founder feature.

One zip with seven files: the full Business Plan as a branded PDF with charts and sources, an editable PowerPoint pitch deck with speaker notes, an Excel financial model with a live sensitivity sheet, a one-page Founder Snapshot PDF, brand guidelines, your colour palette as hex codes, and a starter SVG wordmark.

Downloads are a Founder feature. On the free plan you can build every section and read everything on screen; the zip needs a Founder plan or an eligible trial.

Yes. The bin icon on any pack in My Packs removes it and its generated files. Your idea and its sections are untouched, you can build a fresh pack whenever you like, and anything already downloaded stays on your computer. A pack that is still building has to finish first.

Yes, there is an email option on the pack page. The email links back to your pack rather than attaching the files, so a large zip never bounces and the files stay behind your sign-in.

No. Every idea, section and interview answer is private to your account, and the rule is enforced by the database rather than by the page you are looking at. Nothing is shared until you choose to share it.

A one-page public summary of an idea, problem, solution, first customer, business model, at a link you can post anywhere. It is public only after you publish it, and you can unpublish it at any time.

Send a business-plan invitation to one email address, with view or comment access. The person has to sign in to open it, and you can revoke the invitation whenever you like.

That you joined, when, whether your access is live, and how many ideas and packs you have, as numbers. Nothing else. A community organiser has a Partner Portal that shows exactly those counts, and there is no screen in it, and no field in what the server sends it, that could carry an idea's title, description or content. That is deliberate: a code from your club should not cost you the privacy of what you write.

The security page sets out exactly how your ideas are kept private, what we can and cannot see, and the things we deliberately do not claim. The Privacy Notice covers who processes your data and where.

Three ideas with all thirteen sections each (plus an extra idea for each person who signs up from a snapshot or brief you shared, up to ten), unlimited Vault notes, the launch checklist, the funding route finder to read, public Founder Snapshots, private sharing, and on-screen editing and plain regeneration of everything you build. The Validation Verdict, the red team, Ask, Investor Review, pack downloads and regenerating with your own instructions are Founder features.

£19 a month, or £149 a year, which works out at £12.42 a month. Both give unlimited ideas, the Validation Verdict, the red team, Ask, Investor Review, every download, regeneration with your own instructions, rewriting a single field, and writing the funding strategy into your plan.

Fourteen days, once per account, with no card. When it ends you return to the free plan and every idea you built stays exactly where it is.

One for every billing period, numbered and emailed to you when it is issued, showing the list price, any discount and the total. Every invoice is also on your billing page as a branded PDF you can download whenever you need it.

From the billing page in Settings. Your access runs to the end of the period you have paid for, and your ideas stay in your Vault on the free plan afterwards.

Wix, through Base44 Payments. Your card details go to Wix directly and never reach Business Launchpad. We hold your plan, its status and its dates, and nothing else about how you pay.

Every member on a Founder plan gets a code and a link from the Referrals tab in Settings. Anyone who joins through it gets 25% off Founder for their first six months. Members of a partner community pass on 50%. The discount goes entirely to the person you invite.

No money and no discount, and the page says so plainly rather than hinting otherwise. What you do get is a list of who joined through your link and where each of them has got to. Separately, every person who signs up from a Founder Snapshot or Founder Brief you have shared earns you an extra free idea, up to ten.

Referral links are for members on a Founder plan and for partner-community members. On a trial or the free plan the page explains that, and your link appears as soon as you are on a plan.

Your billing page shows the exact date from the day you join, and we email you two weeks before, three days before, and on the day. Nothing is cut off at once: your access continues for a further week so you can take out the full-price plan in one click, or do nothing and return to the free plan with your ideas intact.

Your access is free for as long as you are a member. Enter the code HELM gives you when you sign up, and you can pass 50% off to friends outside the club.

With a one-time code sent to your email, or with your Google or Apple account. There is no password to remember or for anyone to steal, because we never store one.

The Notifications tab in Settings controls every optional email, including the nudges about unfinished ideas. Account emails about money, an invoice, or a price about to change, always send, because being told what you are charged is not optional.

Archive an idea and it leaves your Vault; delete it and its sections, interviews, comments and invitations go with it. To delete your whole account and everything attached to it, email us and we will do it. The Privacy Notice sets out the timescales.