Weekend one: shipping an incubator in public
Hogan Incubator asks founders to do one uncomfortable thing: ship real work in public, every week, on the record. It would be a strange thing to ask if we weren't doing it ourselves. So here's weekend one, filed like anyone else's.
what shipped
The honesty pass. Every number on the site now carries its source and its check date, and the claims got smaller so they could be true — the credits line now reads £6,000+ you can claim yourself, because that's what a bootstrapped team can actually land in week one, not the bigger figure that only unlocks after you raise. The legal entity is named in the footer. The catch column exists on purpose.
The Metronome. The weekly rhythm is now real software: teams file every Sunday by 17:00 through a filing page, everything lands on a public ledger, one no-questions-asked pause per cohort is enforced in code, and two silent weeks is an exit — also enforced in code, every Sunday evening, automatically.
The Design Studio. An AI guide at /studio that takes half an idea and hands back a two-week build plan. It introduces itself as a guide, not a gatekeeper — it doesn't score anyone and it can't get you in. It will also tell you, honestly, if your problem isn't an incubator problem.
A film, a resource centre, and this log. A ten-second opening shot on the front page, the honest map of founder money with its own Q&A guide, and the page you're reading.
what it costs
About £150 a year plus $10 a month of database. Free hosting tiers, free-tier AI, a domain, and time. That's the whole point: the money side of starting up is more claimable and less mystical than it looks, and the stack this site runs on is the same £0 stack in our playbook.
what honestly isn't done
Cohort 01 has no start date yet — the ledger is empty and says so rather than pretending. The community door isn't open yet. And there are no named mentors on the site, because we won't name people who haven't said yes. All three are the actual work of the coming weeks, and they'll be filed here when they ship — or noted here if they slip.
— Ged