We Took HootPerch to Barnsley. Here’s Where We’re At.

Building a reading app in the UK is harder than it looks — and more exciting than we expected.

We took a trip to Barnsley last week.

Not the most obvious destination for a tech startup, admittedly. But the Digital Media Centre there has been quietly building something real — a community of founders, makers and digital businesses that’s punching well above its weight of its postcode. We were there to explore The Furnace, their tech incubator programme, and to get a feel for what the ecosystem could offer.

What we came away thinking about, though, wasn’t really about Barnsley at all.

It was about HootPerch, where it’s got to, and how much further there is to go.

What We’ve Built

**HootPerch** is a reading companion app. You finish a book, you take a timed comprehension challenge, you earn an animal avatar based on how you performed — and over time, a picture builds of who you are as a reader. Not just what you’ve read, but how deeply you engaged with it.

It’s gamified, it’s AI-powered, and it’s genuinely fun. The Book Wizard recommends your next read based on mood, genre, pace, and occasion. The totem system — Frog, Giraffe, Tiger, and beyond — gives you something to chase. Milestones stack up quietly in the background until you’ve built a reading identity you’re actually proud of.

We built this in the UK. We’re registered here. And the product has always been intended for a global audience — because good reading culture doesn’t live in one place, and neither do book lovers.

What We’ve Done So Far

The app is live. That’s the first thing worth saying plainly, because plenty of ideas never get that far.

We’ve been running guerrilla marketing campaigns — getting in front of real readers in real spaces, testing messages, watching what lands. We’ve run digital ads at a meaningful scale, grown our presence across socials, and started building the kind of word-of-mouth that you can’t really buy. The product has been tested. Iterated. Made better.

The designs are polished. The onboarding works. The challenge engine is live. The email comms are warm and on-brand. The infrastructure is there.

And yet — honest answer — the adoption curve in the UK has been a challenge.

The Real Work Ahead

Here’s the thing about launching a reading app in Britain: everyone thinks they should use it, and not enough people actually do.

The UK has a massive, passionate reading culture. Book clubs everywhere. Independent bookshops thriving against the odds. School literacy programmes that desperately need better tools. Libraries working hard to stay relevant to younger audiences. Publishers and distributors are actively looking for new ways to deepen reader engagement beyond the point of sale.

HootPerch sits squarely in the middle of all of that.

We can see the shape of what this could look like — HootPerch as an enrichment tool in schools, running alongside reading curricula and giving teachers a new window into how kids are actually comprehending what they’re reading. HootPerch at the till in Waterstones or a local indie, with a QR code that turns a book purchase into an instant challenge. HootPerch integrates with a publisher’s catalogue, so that finishing a novel becomes the start of a conversation rather than the end of one.

The opportunity is genuinely there. The conversations are beginning. But there’s a gap between the conversations and the contracts, and that’s the gap we’re working to close.

Why Barnsley? Why DMC?

The honest answer is: because the infrastructure made sense.

The Digital Media Centre isn’t just a co-working space. It’s a deliberate ecosystem — spread across two buildings, packed with innovation labs, creative studios, and a genuine community of people building things. The DMC 01 site in particular carries that rare quality of a space designed not just for occupancy, but for collision — the kind of productive friction that happens when curious people are placed near each other.

What drew us specifically was The Furnace, DMC’s tech incubator programme.

Ben Hawley, Group Leader, Enterprising Barnsley — giving us a talk about what Barnsley has to offer to early stage founders & startups

The Furnace: Where Ideas Get Forged

The name is apt. The **Furnace** is DMC’s incubation programme for tech startups — open to anyone with a tech idea or innovation, at any stage.

For a six-month residency worth over £6,000 in support, the programme offers:

• A dedicated home base — free co-working space for the duration, with a real community already built around it
• Mentoring and expert networks — from legal advisors to experienced founders to investors, brought directly to you
• Access to innovation labs — the MakerLab (for prototyping and tinkering) and the CreatorLab (for audio-visual content creation)
• Funding pathways — the DMC team operates deeply within the regional funding landscape, helping startups prepare for and connect with funders
• Aftercare — the support doesn’t end at six months; the relationship continues

For HootPerch, this matters. We’re not just building an app — we’re building a brand, a behaviour shift, and a product that needs the kind of structured support and visibility that an incubator environment can accelerate. The Furnace doesn’t just give you a desk; it gives you a launchpad.

The Broader DMC Ecosystem

Beyond the Furnace, the wider DMC ecosystem holds real opportunity.

The **DMC Business Support** offering connects startups to Launchpad — Enterprising Barnsley’s programme for businesses under three years old, or with fewer than ten employees. It includes a dedicated key account manager (the kind of human relationship that actually moves things forward), workshops, growth programming, and access to the full DMC innovation infrastructure.

For a startup at our stage, that combination — mentorship, legal guidance, investor access, and a physical creative studio — is genuinely hard to replicate without spending money you don’t yet have.

Being in a Room Full of Builders

Which is part of why the Barnsley trip mattered, even if it wasn’t the headline.

There’s something useful about being in a room with other startups who are at different stages of the same fundamental problem — how do you turn something that works into something that scales? How do you get the right people to notice? How do you find the partnerships, the support structures, the funding before you’ve fully run out of runway?

The Furnace programme at DMC offers six months of structured incubation — mentoring, investor access, innovation lab space, and a proper peer community. It’s not nothing. Especially for a team that’s been heads-down in product and is now starting to look up and out.

We were among some genuinely impressive companies exploring the same opportunities. That kind of company is energising in a way that’s hard to describe if you haven’t been through the early stages of building something.

Where We Go From Here

HootPerch has legs. We know that because the people who use it love it. The retention data tells us something is working. The challenge is reach — getting in front of the audiences who would benefit most, and building the institutional relationships that would give us distribution we couldn’t generate ourselves.

That means more conversations with schools, libraries and literacy organisations. It means finding our way to the right people in publishing. It means being in more rooms — like the one in Barnsley — and making the case clearly and consistently.

The digital footprint is growing. The milestones are stacking up. And the version of HootPerch that exists today is genuinely better than the one that existed six months ago.

We’re not done yet. Not even close. But we’re building — and we’re building in the open.

HootPerch is a UK-based AI reading companion app available globally. Learn more or try it at hootperch.co. Interested in a partnership, collaboration, or investment conversation? We’d love to hear from you.