Hi — I'm Rob.
Twenty years building software with small teams. Based in Manchester. I'm building StayUpfront so the rest of us don't need a Customer Ops department to look professional to our customers.
Why I'm building this.
A few years ago I was leading software engineering at a B2B company. One weekend our site went down for three hours and we didn't catch it — the alert never fired, and the first we knew was the customer phoning our CEO. The people who noticed weren't sure who to call, and the person they reached for wasn't available. Three hours of a customer in the dark — not because nobody cared, but because there was no shared picture of what was happening or who owned it.
When we went looking for tooling to fix it, nothing fit — the realistic option was buying several products and wiring them together ourselves. And since then I've seen the same gap at small B2B company after small B2B company: support in one tool, incidents in another, a status page nobody updated. The information always existed — it just never crossed between the surfaces where it mattered.
So I'm building the thing I kept wishing we'd had: one workspace where support, incidents, monitoring, and the customer-facing portal share the same picture, with the whole team invited by default. I'm not live yet — I'm shaping it with a small group of early users first. If this is your problem too, I'd love to have you in early.
What "stay upfront" actually means to me.
The companies customers stay loyal to aren't the ones that never break — they're the ones that tell you what's going on before you have to ask. Most companies believe that and still struggle to do it, because the update is nobody's job, in a tool nobody has open, at the worst possible moment to remember it. The fix is unglamorous: pull the information into one place and give everyone a clear view.
Where I land on the AI wave.
I was slow to come round to AI, but I use it every day now — it genuinely automates work that wasn't automatable before. What I'm against is AI-spam pointed at your customers. So StayUpfront's AI, Una, is conservative by design: it triages tickets, drafts incident updates for a human to edit, and summarises long threads — with a kill switch, nothing you've done by hand ever overridden, and anything Una sends a customer labelled as Una.
Who owns this.
StayUpfront is founder-owned, and I intend to keep it that way. I've watched too many of the tools my clients depended on get bought and slowly made worse, until the thing that made them good was gone and the price had doubled. The plan here is to build something worth staying with — and then keep it that way.
Beyond StayUpfront.
During the week I do engineering-leadership work with small B2B companies — that's at robgough.net. I ship side projects too, mainly Dictator, a dictation app, and Weighted Down, a simple food diary and weight tracker. And I try to build in public — a tool for staying upfront with customers ought to be built by someone willing to be upfront about the building.
How to reach me.
No contact form, no ticket queue — it's a small operation, and right now the person reading your email is me. I read everything, and I answer most of it.
If you want in early, the button's below. If you just want to say hello, the inbox is open.