The problem co-funding solves
A senior-led rebuild of a mid-market SaaS tool — job scheduling, CRM, project management, HR onboarding — costs between £35,000 and £60,000 in engineering and product time. That number stops most SMBs immediately. The comparison to a monthly SaaS bill looks unfavourable on a short time horizon, even when the five-year maths clearly favours the build. Co-funding reframes the calculation. Instead of one company absorbing the full build cost, a cohort of approximately five companies — each facing the same tool, the same per-seat bill, the same frustration with features they do not use — each contribute a founding share. The individual cost drops to £7,000–£12,000. At that level the crossover with the SaaS bill typically arrives before the end of year one.
Who are the founding five?
Founding cohort members share a core use case, not necessarily a vertical. The requirement is that five companies all need approximately the same features from the same category of tool — field-service management, recruitment tracking, client onboarding, internal ticketing, and so on. They do not have to be in the same industry. A facilities-management contractor and a lift-maintenance firm might both need the same job-scheduling and invoice workflow, even though one considers itself property services and the other engineering. They do not compete: a founding-five cohort is not a consortium of rivals. The shared system serves each company's private data on its own isolated instance; co-founders never see each other's data.
What founders get that late joiners don't
Founding-five members negotiate terms that later customers cannot access. The annual fee is locked for ten years — no price increases regardless of how the market moves or how many users you add. Founders also have direct input on the roadmap: the first release is built around the workflows the founding cohort actually uses, not a hypothetical average user. Most distinctively, founders receive a 5% revenue share on the licence fee of every new customer who joins the platform after go-live. That share continues until the founding member has received back 50% of their original build contribution. On a cohort of fifteen new customers paying £3,000 per year each, five founders each earn back approximately £2,250 per year — meaning a £8,000 build contribution is roughly half-repaid in under four years.
How late joiners work
After go-live, the platform is open to additional companies — late joiners — who pay an entry fee plus the standard annual licence. The entry fee compensates the founding cohort for having taken the early risk and done the design work. Late joiners get the same isolated-instance model, the same flat fee structure, and the same ongoing maintenance and hosting. They do not get the locked ten-year price (their fee is reviewed every two to three years), and they do not receive the revenue share. They also do not get to shape the roadmap retroactively: they inherit the version the founding five built. The platform continues to evolve — Rollout IT ships improvements that benefit all instances — but the core design reflects the founding cohort's priorities.
The cohort formation process
Founding-five members do not have to find each other. Rollout IT matches them from the existing lead pipeline — companies that have already expressed interest in replacing the same category of tool. The process works as follows: a company books a scoping call and describes the tool they want to replace; Rollout IT maps the features, produces a build estimate, and identifies how many other leads have expressed interest in the same tool. Once sufficient founding interest exists (typically four to six companies), Rollout IT facilitates a cohort formation call where terms are agreed. From that point, the build starts. The matching process typically takes four to eight weeks. Companies do not share commercial information with each other; Rollout IT holds the relationships separately.
The numbers
A concrete example makes the model tangible. Suppose the tool is a field-service management platform. Estimated build cost: £40,000. Founding cohort: five companies. Each founder contributes £8,000 and pays £3,000 per year thereafter. After go-live, fifteen new companies join as late joiners over three years, each paying £3,000 per year. The 5% revenue share per founder on those fifteen customers: 5% x £3,000 x 15 = £2,250 per year. After roughly three-and-a-half years, each founding member has received back £7,875 — close to their full build contribution. Meanwhile their annual SaaS bill for the equivalent tool would have compounded to well above £3,000 by the same point. The founding-five model is not charity: it is a structured early-adopter incentive that benefits everyone who moves first.