Sewage to Startup: A UK Playbook for Real Growth

Most founders waste months polishing a solution nobody has asked for. Claire Trant did the opposite: she stayed glued to a problem that was painfully obvious during COVID—society was always reacting too late.

Her advantage came from an unglamorous place. Wastewater. People shed viruses and bacteria before they feel ill, which means sewage can act as a community-wide early warning system. The business story (Untap Health) is fascinating on its own, but it’s also a useful case study for the UK solopreneur business growth crowd: start with a real pain, prove it in the messiest possible environment, and only then worry about scaling your marketing.

What follows is the “why it worked” breakdown—plus practical ways to apply the same thinking to your own one-person business growth through content, social media, and automation.

The strongest startup ideas start with unfair proximity to a real problem

The simplest predictor of a viable business idea is not brilliance—it’s proximity. Claire wasn’t hunting for a startup concept. She was already working in wastewater engineering when the pandemic exposed a glaring gap: public health systems were using lagging indicators (reported symptoms, tests, hospital admissions) when they needed leading indicators.

Here’s the standout insight: wastewater is a leading indicator because viral shedding often happens days before symptoms. That time gap can be the difference between a contained cluster and a disruptive outbreak in places like care homes, schools, offices, and farms.

For a UK founder or solopreneur, the lesson is blunt:

• If you want a business that sells, spend more time where the pain is felt than where pitch decks are made.
• Your “unfair advantage” is often your previous job, your niche expertise, or access to a specific environment.

A practical test: “Would anyone pay to know this earlier?”

If you’re building a product or service, pressure-test your idea with a single question:

If I could give you this information (or result) 7 days earlier, what would it be worth?

In Untap Health’s case, earlier outbreak detection translates into fewer infections, less sick leave, less operational chaos, and better protection for vulnerable people. Those are budget lines, not “nice-to-haves.”

If your offer can’t translate into time saved, risk reduced, or revenue gained, your marketing will always feel like pushing a boulder uphill.

Automation wins when the manual process already proves value

A lot of early-stage founders (especially first-time ones) try to “innovate” by adding technology first. Untap Health’s approach is much more commercially sensible: the value of wastewater surveillance already existed—it was just slow, manual, and centralised.

Claire’s lightbulb moment wasn’t “let’s invent a new science.” It was:

• Wastewater testing works.
• It’s too manual and too slow for everyday sites.
• If you automate on-site testing, you make it usable by real organisations.

This distinction matters for startup marketing in the UK because it changes your go-to-market message. You’re not selling a moonshot. You’re selling a faster, easier version of something customers already accept.

Your solopreneur version: productise what’s already being bought

If you’re running a one-person business, you can borrow this model without building hardware or biotech.

Look for services that are:

1. Already being purchased (proof of demand)
2. Painful to run manually (time sinks, spreadsheets, handoffs)
3. Repetitive enough to standardise (so you can scale)

Then create an “automated” or productised version using simple tools:

• Client onboarding automation (forms + scheduling + templated proposals)
• Reporting automation (dashboards, templated monthly updates)
• Content repurposing workflows (one long post → social threads → email)

That’s UK solopreneur business growth in practice: not hiring a big team, but removing bottlenecks so your output increases without your hours increasing.

Early case studies beat big launches (especially for niche B2B)

Untap Health’s first case study wasn’t a glossy PR stunt. It was an office with immunocompromised leadership due to cancer—people who had a real, personal stake in early detection.

That detail is a marketing lesson: the best early customers aren’t the biggest. They’re the most sensitive to the problem.

When the prototype detected higher-risk days and the organisation could adjust (work from home, shift meetings online), the data matched lived reality. That’s the moment founders should chase.

What to copy: a “proof loop” that creates trust fast

If you want leads, you need proof. If you want proof, you need a tight loop:

1. Pick a high-stakes niche (the people who feel it most)
2. Run a small pilot with a clear success metric
3. Document outcomes in plain English
4. Turn it into marketing assets

For solopreneurs using online marketing, your “pilot” can be a short engagement:

• A 2-week audit
• A one-month content sprint
• A limited-scope automation setup

Your metric needs to be concrete. Examples:

• Reduced manual reporting time from 6 hours/month to 1 hour/month
• Increased qualified inbound enquiries from 2/month to 6/month
• Cut no-show rate from 18% to 7% with better reminders

Even if your sample size is small, specific numbers are more believable than generic praise.

The messy middle is where most founders quit—plan for it

Claire describes the build as “slow, messy, and full of new starts.” That’s not a motivational poster line; it’s operational truth.

Wastewater testing isn’t like building an app. Samples are unpredictable. Conditions change. Biology is complicated. When a product lives in the real world (health, manufacturing, construction, logistics), iteration isn’t just “ship an update.”

UK founders underestimate this phase because social media makes progress look linear. It isn’t.

A better way to manage the messy middle: separate product risk from market risk

Here’s a stance I’ll defend: if both your product and your market are uncertain, you’re gambling.

Instead, try to de-risk in layers:

• Market risk: Do people care enough to pay or commit time?
• Product risk: Can you reliably deliver the outcome?
• Distribution risk: Can you reach buyers repeatedly at a reasonable cost?

Untap Health had strong market signals (outbreak prevention, vulnerable populations, operational continuity). Then the hard product work was “worth it” because there was a clear payoff.

For solopreneurs, this looks like:

• Selling a manual version of your service first
• Standardising your process
• Then adding automation tools

That’s how you avoid spending three months building a clever system to support an offer nobody wants.

Marketing an impact-led startup: clarity beats polish

Untap Health now operates across UK sites and detects pathogens including COVID-19, influenza, and norovirus. The bigger vision is a real-time “health map” that shows what’s circulating before it becomes a crisis.

This type of mission can tempt founders into vague, values-heavy messaging. Don’t do it.

Impact-led marketing works when it’s specific:

• Who is protected? Care home residents, students, staff, patients
• What changes operationally? Earlier warnings, better staffing decisions, fewer disruptions
• What costs go down? Sick leave, outbreak response, reputational damage

If you’re building a socially-conscious business in the UK, your goal is to make the impact measurable enough that procurement, finance, and operations can all say “yes.”

Content that generates leads: write for the decision and the doubt

Because this post sits in a UK Solopreneur Business Growth series, let’s make it practical for your inbound funnel.

Create content that answers both:

• The decision question: “Should we do this?”
• The doubt question: “What could go wrong?”

For a health monitoring solution, doubts might include false positives, privacy concerns, reliability, and operational burden. For a solopreneur offering marketing, the doubts are usually:

• “Will this actually produce leads?”
• “How much of my time will it take?”
• “What happens if we stop?”

Build a small library of posts that tackle one doubt at a time. Then repurpose them into:

• A LinkedIn post series (one doubt per week)
• A short email sequence for new subscribers
• A downloadable “pilot checklist” as a lead magnet

People Also Ask: founders’ questions this story answers

Is wastewater monitoring actually useful outside pandemics?

Yes. The value is strongest when infectious diseases are seasonal or fast-moving (like norovirus and flu), because earlier warnings help organisations act before symptoms spread widely.

How do you market a technical product to non-technical buyers?

Lead with outcomes and operational decisions. Technical detail should support credibility, not replace the business case.

What’s the biggest startup lesson from Untap Health?

Stay obsessed with the problem, not the solution. If you keep the pain point in view, you can change the implementation without losing the plot.

What UK solopreneurs can steal from this story this week

If you want your marketing to produce leads (not just likes), take these four actions:

1. Write your “leading indicator” promise. What do you help customers see earlier than they can today—risks, leaks, missed revenue, wasted hours?
2. Run one tight pilot. Define scope, timeline, and a single success metric. Then document it.
3. Productise one messy manual step. Remove friction from onboarding, delivery, or reporting.
4. Publish proof, not opinions. Share numbers, timelines, and what changed in the customer’s day-to-day.

Those steps are boring. They also work.

Entrepreneurship doesn’t need a flashy origin story. It needs a real problem, an early proof loop, and marketing that tells the truth clearly. Untap Health started with sewage—and turned it into resilience.

If you’re building your own one-person business, what’s the “unsexy” problem in your industry that everyone complains about but nobody has fixed yet?