SentLive began as a casual conversation between two British expats, back in 2015, and slowly grew to become a UK limited company. The two founders (and joint owners and directors) are Steve James and Neil Heron. They retain complete control of the company, and there is no giant corporation behind us. Below is a chart of our journey so far.
The First Spark
A discussion between Steve, Neil and another friend who was working on an expat health tracking system sows the first seed
The Idea
Following news that the expat health tracker project had gone nowhere, Steve and Neil discuss alternative ideas revolving around safety
The Concept
Steve and Neil put together draft concepts of a safety check system
The First Domain Name
The globalsafetycheck.com domain name is acquired, both to enable some setting up and testing of the concept to be undertaken and as a working title and name
The Research
Extensive research was ongoing into every aspect of the idea, including whether anyone else was offering anything similar, and still trying to both hone the potential system and come up with a name
The Name
A name is found! The pair agree on Sentlive and sentlive.com is purchased. The name is an (almost) anagram of their names, but more importantly encapsulates the heart of the concept
The Logo
Several DIY efforts at a logo are attempted until a designer friend creates one for us that is perfect
The Company
Sentlive Limited is established in the UK
The Developers
A company is hired to develop a website, and Android /iOS apps based on everything we had researched to date
The Frustration
After over two years of delays, issues and expense, we ended the relationship with the developers, who still had failed to deliver working apps
The Rescue
We found freelance developers to clear up the mess made by the previous company, and appeared to have finally got a working system
The Crowdfunding
With our original budget for the project now gone because of the delays, we put together a Kickstarter fund raising effort to hopefully fund a marketing push when we finally launched the service
The Disappointment
Sadly, but almost inevitably because of the ongoing pandemic lockdowns, our efforts to raise funds came to nothing, so we had to plan the launch without any funds to spend on advertising
The First Launch
Once we had approval from the Apple and Google stores for our app, we were ready to go and off we went!
The Choice
Within the first few months it became clear that we weren’t getting anywhere without advertising, as we had foreseen, and to make things worse, the ‘fixed’ system showed signs that it wasn’t working correctly; we had to make a choice, and decided to pull the apps and shutter the website while we re-evaluated.
The Decision
After assessing everything, the decision was made that everything the ‘professional’ developers had done was not fit for purpose, and Steve would try to start from scratch on a completely new system, based on the original concept
The Breakthrough
After a crash course of on the job training in all aspects of website design and coding, Steve was able to reveal the new system, close to what is available today; but now he wanted several months of testing before it was released to the public
The Results
The testing process was difficult, mostly because it was hard to recruit people. But it was completed, and any bugs that arose were dealt with, and a second launch date was set.
The Final Launch
Sentlive was launched again on 12th January 2023.
A Retirement
Our first domain name, globalsafetycheck.com was officially put out to pasture.
