How UK Startups Turn Weird Insights into Real Growth

By 2025, wastewater monitoring stopped being a quirky pandemic footnote and became a credible way to spot outbreaks early—often before people feel ill. That’s not a punchline; it’s a product opportunity.

Claire Trant’s journey building Untap Health (an automated, on-site wastewater testing company now operating across the UK) is a sharp case study for anyone building a startup from the ground up—especially if you’re a solo founder or early-stage team trying to grow with limited time, limited cash, and a problem that’s bigger than your first product.

This post is part of our UK Solopreneur Business Growth series, so I’m going to treat this as more than an origin story. We’ll pull out the commercial mechanics: how a non-traditional founder identified a gap, proved demand with a practical pilot, and built a scalable offer in a mission-driven niche—then translate those moves into marketing and growth actions you can use.

Start with the problem, not the pitch

The fastest way to waste a year is to fall in love with your solution.

Claire didn’t start with “I want to found a company.” She started with a frustration many of us remember: during COVID, decision-makers were reacting late—case counts rising, new restrictions, too-late warnings. From her background in wastewater engineering, she knew a less obvious truth: people shed viruses and bacteria in sewage before symptoms show up. That means wastewater can act as an early warning signal.

That framing matters for founders because it’s the difference between:

• A cool technology (“we automated wastewater sampling”)
• A painful, expensive operational problem (“outbreaks shut sites down, cause staff shortages, and put vulnerable people at risk”)

If you’re building a one-person business, this is your advantage: you can be relentlessly close to the problem. You don’t need a fancy campaign. You need a sharp problem statement that a buyer recognises as urgent.

A practical way to write your “problem statement”

Try this template and don’t overcomplicate it:

When (a specific situation happens), our customers struggle with (a measurable pain), because (the underlying constraint), which leads to (a cost/risk).

For Untap Health, it looks like:

When infectious disease starts circulating in a closed community, organisations struggle to spot it early because symptoms lag behind transmission, which leads to avoidable outbreaks and costly disruption.

That’s what makes a niche business marketable. Not the novelty—the clarity.

The “lightbulb moment” is usually a distribution moment

Most people think the breakthrough is technical. In this story, the key shift is about who gets to use the tool.

During COVID, wastewater detection existed, but it was slow, manual, and mainly used in big centralised surveillance efforts. The lightbulb wasn’t “wastewater can detect viruses.” It was:

What if local sites could run it easily, on-site, and act on it quickly?

That is a distribution insight disguised as product development. You’re not just improving accuracy; you’re changing the operating model:

• from lab-based and specialist-led
• to automated and deployable in everyday settings (care homes, schools, offices, farms)

For UK startups, especially in B2B, this is where growth often comes from: making something usable by the people who feel the pain most often, not just the experts.

Solopreneur translation: remove “expert steps”

If you want a scalable offer as a solo founder, look for anything in your customer journey that requires:

• specialised knowledge
• custom set-up each time
• manual reporting
• complicated handoffs

Your marketing can’t outwork operational friction forever. The cleanest growth strategy is simplifying the path from interest to outcome.

Use your first pilot to prove value, not popularity

Untap Health’s first case study wasn’t designed to impress a broad audience. It was designed to protect real people.

The early prototype was tested in an office where members of the leadership team were immunocompromised due to cancer. They needed to know when risk on-site was rising so they could adjust schedules—work from home, shift meetings online, reduce exposure.

Two things make this pilot commercially smart:

1. High stakes: the value of early warning is obvious when vulnerability is high.
2. Clear actions: detection isn’t the product; the decisions it enables are.

When the data matched reality, it was proof the idea worked outside theory.

What your pilot should include (even if you’re not in health)

A pilot that drives leads needs three ingredients:

1. A specific customer type (not “SMBs”, but “multi-site nurseries” or “warehouse operators with seasonal absence spikes”).
2. A measurable baseline (what “bad” looks like today—time lost, money lost, risk exposure).
3. A decision loop (what they will do differently when your signal shows up).

If you’re doing content marketing for a niche B2B startup, pilots become your best assets:

• one good pilot = 10 pieces of credible content
• one vague pilot = a nice story that nobody buys

The messy middle is a feature, not a failure

Most companies get this wrong: they interpret slow progress as a sign they chose the wrong idea.

Wastewater testing isn’t like building an app. Samples are unpredictable. Environmental conditions vary. Biology is messy. Turning a manual, lab-based process into something automated and on-site is hard work with plenty of false starts.

This matters for UK solopreneur business growth because the internet tends to reward neat narratives: build → launch → scale. Real businesses—especially in science, hardware, or regulated spaces—look more like: build → learn → rebuild → narrow → prove → repeat.

Here’s the stance I’ll take: if your product touches the real world, your “messy middle” is where you earn defensibility.

• If it’s hard, fewer competitors stick with it.
• If it’s operationally complex, customers value reliability.
• If it’s regulated, trust becomes an advantage you can compound.

A simple operating rhythm for founders in the messy middle

I’ve found this weekly structure keeps progress real:

• One metric that matters (e.g., detection turnaround time, accuracy, cost per test, onboarding time)
• One customer conversation focused on workflow (“What would you do if you knew this 5 days earlier?”)
• One decision you’ll reverse if it doesn’t work (tiny bets beat big rewrites)

Treat iteration as the plan, not the detour.

Turning a mission-led niche into a scalable go-to-market

Untap Health is now deployed across UK sites and detects pathogens like COVID-19, influenza, and norovirus before symptoms appear. That creates a powerful value proposition: act early to prevent outbreaks, protect wellbeing, and reduce costs.

But mission alone doesn’t generate leads. For a niche, community-focused startup to grow, it needs a go-to-market that’s as practical as the product.

Positioning that sells: “early warning” beats “testing”

If you say “we do wastewater testing,” many buyers hear: lab work, complexity, procurement friction.

If you say “we provide an early warning system for infectious disease in your building,” buyers hear: fewer outbreaks, fewer sick days, fewer headlines.

That difference is positioning. It changes who leans in.

Use this checklist to sharpen yours:

• Lead with the decision you enable, not the mechanism.
• Name the sites you work in (schools, care homes, venues) to signal fit.
• State the time advantage clearly (“days before symptoms” is a powerful phrase).

Content marketing that fits a solo founder’s bandwidth

For solopreneurs, marketing works when it’s repeatable. Here’s a lean content system inspired by this case:

1. One flagship case study (problem → intervention → actions → outcome).
2. Three “use case pages” (education, healthcare, agriculture) written in plain language.
3. A monthly insight post that answers “what’s circulating?” or “what actions reduce disruption?”

You’re not trying to go viral. You’re trying to become the obvious answer for a small group of buyers.

Automation as a growth strategy (not just a product feature)

Untap Health’s key innovation is automation—taking something slow and manual and making it usable on-site.

In marketing terms, automation does the same thing: it turns one-off effort into repeatable output.

If you’re growing a one-person business, focus your automation on:

• lead capture (a simple enquiry flow)
• qualification (one form that routes to the right next step)
• follow-up (a short sequence that answers common objections)
• reporting (a dashboard or weekly summary you can actually maintain)

Don’t automate everything. Automate the parts you’re already doing repeatedly.

What founders should copy from this story (and what they shouldn’t)

You don’t need to copy the sector. Copy the moves.

What’s worth copying

1. Non-obvious insight + real urgency: sewage isn’t glamorous, but outbreaks are expensive.
2. A first customer with a clear reason to care: high stakes make value obvious.
3. An “actionable signal”: the product isn’t data; it’s earlier, better decisions.
4. Problem obsession: the solution changed repeatedly; the mission stayed stable.

What not to copy

• Waiting for a perfect product before talking to buyers.
• Calling something “innovation” when it’s not tied to an operational outcome.
• Building broad messaging too early (“for everyone” is usually “for no one”).

Snippet-worthy rule: If your customer can’t tell you what they’d do differently after seeing your result, you don’t have a product yet—you have information.

People also ask: can wastewater monitoring really help organisations?

Yes—when it’s connected to decisions. Wastewater monitoring helps organisations when it provides early signals that trigger practical actions (staffing changes, remote work, enhanced cleaning, visitor policies, targeted testing). The value comes from reducing disruption, not from the data itself.

Is this only for pandemics? No. Seasonal illness (flu, norovirus) creates predictable disruption every winter, and the UK tends to see spikes in pressure across workplaces, schools, and care settings. Early detection is useful precisely because it supports routine resilience, not just crisis response.

Can a small startup sell into regulated or complex sectors? Yes, but the go-to-market must be concrete: pilots, proof, operational fit, and clear procurement paths. Trust is built through reliability and transparency, not big claims.

Where this fits in UK solopreneur growth

This series is about how British one-person businesses grow with content, social media, and automation tools. The irony is that the most effective “marketing” in this story isn’t flashy at all: it’s turning a complicated capability into something local, usable, and decision-friendly.

If you’re building a niche business in the UK, take the hint: find the overlooked signal, then build the simplest path from that signal to an action a buyer already wants to take.

If you’re working on something that sounds odd at first glance, good. That’s often where the defensibility lives. The question is whether you can explain it in a way that makes a buyer say: “Right—so what do we do next time the risk rises?”

If you want help turning a mission-led niche into a lead-generating growth engine—positioning, case study structure, and a lean content plan—start with your first pilot and work outward.