Distinction Launches Rise, a Digital Product Studio Built Exclusively for Startup Founders
UK-based customer experience and technology consultancy Distinction has launched Rise, a dedicated built exclusively for founders and entrepreneurs. Backed by Distinction’s 25 years of design and technology experience, Rise offers startup founders access to a multidisciplinary product team – strategists, designers, engineers, behavioural scientists and go-to-market specialists – structured specifically for the way early-stage companies actually work.
Why a separate studio?
Rise was born out of a pattern that Distinction’s leadership team kept seeing. Founders with genuinely promising ideas would approach the consultancy looking for help building digital products, but Distinction’s model – geared towards mid-sized B2B professional services firms and regulated industries – wasn’t set up for the realities of startup life: scrappy budgets, shifting requirements and ideas that need validating before they need building.
Rather than continuing to refer those founders to agencies and freelancers (and hearing the war stories that followed), Distinction co-founders James and Greg Bloor decided to build something purpose fit.Â
Rise sits in the gap between traditional digital agencies, which tend to maximise initial project scope, and freelancers, where founders are betting everything on one person’s knowledge and availability.
The studio operates as a standalone brand under the Distinction umbrella, with its own positioning, team and client base, while drawing on the parent company’s deep bench of technical and strategic capability.
A team that’s been on the other side of the table
What makes Rise’s proposition distinctive (no pun intended) is the founding team’s own entrepreneurial track record. James and Greg Bloor have both started, scaled and exited businesses of their own. That firsthand experience shapes how Rise engages with founders – the conversations tend to skip past agency pleasantries and land on the commercial realities of building a product with real money at stake.
The studio’s team spans product strategy, UX and UI design, software engineering, behavioural science, branding and go-to-market planning. Rise works with first-time founders who need guidance on where to start, non-technical founders who understand their market but need a partner to translate vision into working software, and serial entrepreneurs who want a team that can match their pace and push back when it matters.
Validation before investment
Rise’s approach centres on a principle that roughly 42% of failed startups learn too late: there needs to be a genuine market need for what you’re building. According to CB Insights research, lack of market demand remains the single biggest reason startups fail, followed closely by running out of cash.
Rise addresses both risks by prioritising validation before significant investment. The studio uses a phased roadmap model rather than monolithic builds, helping founders test ideas with real users before committing serious capital. The process is rooted in Design Thinking and Agile methodology, which in practice means the team continuously checks that they’re building the right thing – not just building a thing.
Each engagement begins with a discovery call, followed by a collaborative planning phase that maps out what to build, how to validate it and what it will cost. From there, the team works in iterative cycles with visible progress each week.
AI as a delivery accelerator, not a gimmick
Rise uses artificial intelligence extensively across its delivery process, but with a specific philosophy: AI should make delivery faster and better, not just look impressive in a pitch deck. The studio employs AI for rapid prototyping, AI-supported coding, faster iterations and quality assurance, drawing on its back catalogue of previous work to maintain consistency and quality.
This matters in context. Research from private-market investment advisors suggests that around 85% of AI models and projects fail due to poor data quality or lack of relevant data. Rise’s approach is to apply AI where it genuinely reduces cost and accelerates timelines for founders, rather than treating it as a feature to sell.
Full IP ownership for founders
One of Rise’s non-negotiables is that founders retain complete ownership of everything Rise creates – code, designs and documentation. This is a direct response to a common industry problem where founders find themselves in legal battles over intellectual property. Rise’s position is that everything built belongs to the founder, without exception.
Early traction and results
Despite being a new brand, Rise has already built a track record through projects incubated within Distinction. The studio’s portfolio includes work with fintech startups Obu (an angel investment platform focused on closing the gender investment gap) and Podium (a mortgage comparison platform), as well as projects for Klarus, Pentland ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½Å®ÓÅs’ innovation team and Pan Macmillan’s Gruffalo digital experience.
Where Rise fits in the market
The UK startup ecosystem remains active, with new ventures launching daily across fintech, healthtech, SaaS and beyond. But the odds are sobering. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly one in five startups fails within its first year, and nearly half don’t make it past the five-year mark. First-time founders face particularly steep odds, with only an 18% success rate.
Rise’s bet is that many of those failures are preventable – that founders are being poorly served by development partners who either over-scope, under-resource or simply don’t understand the commercial pressures of building a product with your own money on the line. By combining Distinction’s enterprise-grade capability with a delivery model shaped around how startups actually operate, Rise aims to improve those odds for the founders it works with.
The studio is based in England, operates under Distinction Limited.Â
