Most of what I've built exists because I needed it in a real business first.
I started in recruitment. That is where you learn, quickly and unforgivingly, that most commercial problems are people problems wearing a different coat. A pipeline that stalls, a team that churns, a manager who was promoted and never taught how to manage: these are the same problem viewed from different corners of the business.
So I stopped advising and started operating. I have run multi-million pound businesses, managed hundreds of staff across multiple sectors, and worked with everyone from entry-level hires to the C-suite. Running something is a different discipline from recommending it. You carry the payroll, the compliance, the client who is unhappy on a Friday afternoon, and the decision nobody else wants to make.
Easy Talent came out of that. Then the products came out of Easy Talent, because the same friction kept appearing and buying software to fix it kept disappointing me. If you have run the business, you know which problems are actually worth solving, and you build a narrower, more useful thing than somebody designing from the outside.
That is still how I work. I operate businesses, I build the systems they need, and a small number of times a year I go and do the same thing inside somebody else's company.