About
Hi, I’m Tim Bland.
IdeaStack is a one-person operation. I build it, I write it, and I do the research behind every report. No content farm, no outsourced copy — just a UK small-business owner who got tired of American newsletters pretending to understand the British market.
What I actually do
I run Stolen Goat, a UK cycling apparel brand I co-founded over a decade ago. That part of my life involves VAT returns, stock forecasting, supplier negotiations, Meta ads that used to work and suddenly don’t, Shopify (for now), and the day-to-day reality of running a small business in Britain. I have made just about every mistake a bootstrapped founder can make.
Alongside that, I’m an AI-focused software engineer. I spend most days shipping products with Claude Code, Cursor, and the surrounding stack — Next.js, Supabase, Postgres, Stripe, Vercel. I’m the person who’d rather build the tool than pay for the SaaS, which is probably why this site exists.
That combination — real operator scars plus modern AI-native tooling — is the lens every IdeaStack report is written through. I care about what actually ships in the UK, not what trends on US Twitter.
Why IdeaStack exists
Every business-ideas newsletter I subscribed to had the same two problems: the ideas were listicle-thin, and the market data was American. “Start a newsletter for dentists” means nothing without UK search volumes, UK competition, UK regulations, and a realistic view of whether anyone here would actually pay for it.
So IdeaStack does the research I wish someone had done for me when I was starting out. One opportunity per week, UK-first, with real keyword data, SERP analysis, competitor intel, and a build plan that assumes you have a weekend, not a Series A.
The blog you’re reading is the working-out — the tutorials, teardowns, and walkthroughs that sit alongside the weekly reports. If any of it’s useful, the best thing you can do is sign up for the newsletter. If it’s not, tell me and I’ll fix it.
How to get hold of me
The fastest way is the newsletter reply-to: just hit reply to any IdeaStack email and it lands in my inbox. I read every message. I can’t always answer quickly, but I do read them.