Our Story — BuzzHubs

The Birth of BuzzHubs

It's April 2020 and a global pandemic is causing devastation all over the world as hospitals struggle to cope with a new virus called Covid-19. With no vaccine and countries scrambling for treatment options, government work from home directives force businesses to abandon the old school office and set up home working en masse.

So while some industries got hammered with the wrong end of the stick, many office based companies carried on more or less as normal. It was no real surprise that many people loved this new found flexibility and benefited from less stress, more money in their pockets and time saved commuting. I'll hold my hand up first and say "I'm one". I personally benefited from spending more time at home and having a more flexible working day. Did I work less and achieve less, no, but I had more time in the day and dived head first into flexible working. At this point, my youngest son was 4 and a real "Mummy's boy". No such thing as a goodnight kiss for Daddy as he just wanted his Mummy. Fast forward a few months and he wouldn't accept anyone other than Daddy putting him to bed. His "your face is too spiky" excuse which sounded straight out of a "That's not my Daddy" book was consigned to history and we became best buddies. I did and still do things I had incredibly never done before, simple stuff like pick the kids up from school and take them to the park, play football with them in the garden at 3.30pm on a Monday or go for an ice cream on a Friday afternoon. Flexible working opened the door to a lifestyle which had previously been off limits.

Gary, our Developer Guru, emigrated to the Rockies so he could live his passion and snowboard several months of the year. He fully embraced a work anywhere approach and delivers on his goals flexibly around his family and hobbies. If you love snowboarding and you can live in the Rockies then why the **** not?

Square Pegs in Round Holes?

But while this was great personally, there were some cracks appearing in the business culture, motivation and engagement. Sure we embraced all the tools of the day from video calling to project management to instant messaging, and they do 100% help. But they were not built for remote first business, and it did feel like papering over the cracks as we were running a remote first business as if it was an office based one. Like square pegs in round holes, businesses and its technology were not designed primarily for remote working and trying to recreate an office set up digitally is doomed for failure.

So faced with an obstacle, some usually astute business leaders immediately yearned to get their staff back in the office and "shake some hands", as if this will magically solve all their problems. It wouldn't, and more importantly, it would miss a once in a lifetime opportunity to create something new, and something a whole lot better.

Performance over Presence, Real Time Recognition and Trust through Transparency

So with all this in mind, BuzzHubs was born. Firstly with an unshakeable belief that it would help our existing business, but always with equal belief that it can help many other businesses too. We wanted to give thousands more businesses the confidence to offer home working so all their employees could benefit from a better work/life balance, all the while increasing business performance at the same time.

This is what BuzzHubs delivers, it gives the best of both worlds where the business itself and their people win. We didn't achieve this by trying to recreate the out-dated office. We achieved this by rewriting what work looks like, by providing the platform to tear up workplace geography and give diversity and inclusion an environment to thrive.

Work and culture built on performance over presence, real time recognition and trust through transparency. Work with us and watch how BuzzHubs can help send your people's desire to succeed through the roof and deliver a level of performance you never thought possible.

Make it happen and make a better working world.

Remote Work? I've Been Doing This for Twenty Years.

I've been a software developer for thirty years. And for at least half of that, working remotely has simply been part of the job. The tools, the discipline, the async communication — it was second nature long before anyone had heard of Covid-19. So when the pandemic hit and the world suddenly had to figure out remote work overnight, I'll be honest: from a purely technical standpoint, not much changed for me.

But when Martin started talking through the specific problems he was seeing on the sales side — the loss of buzz, the visibility gaps, managers feeling disconnected from their teams — I recognised the issues immediately. I'd seen versions of them myself. Remote work done well is genuinely brilliant. Remote work done badly, with tools that were never designed for it, is a slow grind that chips away at culture and performance without anyone quite knowing why. That conversation was the moment I knew we had something worth building.

Not Another Corporate Dashboard

Like any software project, BuzzHubs had its share of the usual challenges — integrating with CRMs and telephony systems, building robust notification pipelines, making sure the data we pulled in was accurate and real-time. That's the plumbing, and it matters. But the part that genuinely excited me as a developer was the interface itself.

A sales floor has energy. There's noise and momentum and the collective drive of a team pushing toward a shared goal. Recreating that feeling digitally — without it feeling flat, corporate, or like yet another reporting tool — was the real design challenge. We wanted people to open BuzzHubs and feel something. We deliberately moved away from the grey, grid-heavy dashboards that dominate this space and built something that actually feels alive.

AI That Actually Does Something Useful

Right now, a lot of the conversation in tech is about AI — and most of it involves bolting a chatbot onto something that didn't need one. That's not what we're doing. Our focus is on using AI in a way that's genuinely purposeful: analysing what's happening on the sales floor in real time and surfacing actionable steps that help people perform better, not just dashboards that tell you what already happened.

There's a meaningful difference between AI that generates reports and AI that helps a sales manager make a better decision in the next five minutes. We're building toward the latter. It's the most interesting engineering problem I've worked on in my career, and we're just getting started.

Built by people who felt the problem first.