Leeds tech and design house make several new appointments

A Leeds-based tech and design house has appointed two new employees and three contractors to support their continuing business growth.

LightStart, formed in 2016 by Simon Edwards and Dan Akers, build digital products including mobile apps, web apps and the underlying platforms that drive them. The core team has 45 years of experience building and launching digital products.

Approaching client processes analysis first, LightStart’s client base now includes 20 businesses from digital start-ups through to £60M turnover businesses in just fifteen months. To support this, Nicolle Moore and Andrew Morgan have been employed to grow their core team to seven, alongside an additional three contractors.

Having recently graduated from the University of Leeds with a master’s in management consulting, Nicolle Moore joins as junior business analyst. Using her stakeholder management skill, she helps facilitate analysis workshops, capturing the requirements of LightStarts’ clients who approach the business with an idea in order to progress it to the next phase of design and development.

Andrew Morgan has been appointed as principal developer, an expert full stack .net developer of eight years specialising in large scale web applications.

Geoff Webber-Cross, Chris Ainsley and John Carroll have also joined the development team as project-based contractors, bringing their different skillsets to the live projects in production.

LightStart’s strategy is to build a bespoke team to fit the individual requirements for a project, rather than build the project around the internal skillset, the combined skills have, therefore, bolstered the development team to help deliver the current client projects at the highest quality.

Co-founder of LightStart, Dan Akers commented:

“Simon and I are really proud that in less than two years LightStart has experienced rapid growth. This is testament to our approach to do things a little differently and create a digital design house, rather than a traditional agency. Furthermore, we have been able to source some of the local area’s leading talent by adhering to our strong values which dictate that employees enjoy their work over a four-day working week for a full-time salary.”

In the next five years LightStart plan to create five more hubs to provide free unique digital-lead events to business communities across the UK. To support this plan, LightStart is seeking investment and is looking to continue the expansion of their team by recruiting for a digital (sales) analyst, project manager and another Full-Stack .net Developer.


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About LightStart

LightStart, the digital design house, was founded by Simon Edwards and Dan Akers in mid-2016. The start-up tech firm builds digital products for its clients including mobile apps, web apps and the underlying platforms that drive them. The core team has 45 years of experience building and launching digital products. LightStart are a thought-leader at the forefront of the digital community in Yorkshire and ensure this through its client projects, its labs projects and by running events for the local tech and business community. In 9 months, the company has grown its client base to include 12 businesses from digital start-ups through to £60M turnover businesses. Uniquely, LightStart run free innovative events with an annual calendar of over 50 events, all of which are free to attend. As well as building digital products for clients, LightStart has created LightStart LABS to build its own ideas and get them to market.