The Challenge
What Below The Crime Was Facing
The founder was a data journalist who had spent years manually correlating crime statistics from public datasets for investigative pieces. The hypothesis was simple: if this tool saved her 10 hours per investigation, it would save every data journalist who used it the same 10 hours. The challenge was building something that journalists — not developers — could use without documentation, and funding the MVP without a traditional revenue model.
The Solution
What We Built
We scoped the MVP around one editorial workflow: upload a postcode list, get a correlated crime dataset with trend lines, download a report-ready summary. No map visualisations, no real-time data, no custom filters. The output had to be publication-ready without further formatting. We shipped in 7 weeks and tested with 15 journalists from three newsrooms before public release.
Results