About Firstfile

It started with a pile of letters

Every new UK company is announced to the world. Its name and address go on a free public register, and the post starts almost at once. On one accountancy forum, people have complained for years that a new company gets at least six letters from accountants.

Here's the part I couldn't stop thinking about. Plenty of those letters never reach a founder at all. They land on the desk of another accountant, who set the company up from their own office. Or they land in a mailroom, in a building that's home to thousands of other companies.

So I took one real week of the register and counted.

16,186new companies, 21 to 27 September 2026

709registered at one London address in those seven days

82,584active companies already at that address

That's more than 100 new companies a day at a single address. There's nothing wrong with that. Formation agents and virtual offices do a useful job. But it showed me the real problem: a list of new companies isn't a list of new businesses. Every week, more than a third of the names on the register are shells, holding companies and bulk registrations that will never buy anything from a local firm.

The data was free. The work wasn't.

Anyone can read the register. The hard part is what comes next. You have to work out which companies are real, what each one actually does, whether that website is theirs or a similar name's, and what you could say that's worth their time. For a small practice, that's the morning gone, every morning.

Until very recently, nobody could pay a person to do that for 15,000 companies a week and still charge £19 a month. Now they don't have to. Clear rules strike out the noise. Then AI models do the legwork on what's left, reading each company and its website, and writing a reason to get in touch.

Three days from test to live

I tested the idea on real data on 21 October 2026. Sign-ups opened three days later.

Firstfile is built and run by one person, here in the UK, on scheduled jobs and AI. That isn't a stage we're trying to grow out of. It's the point. There's no sales team to pay for and no big office, so a one-person practice can afford the same data as a national firm.

We're new, and we'll say so

You won't find a wall of logos here, or glowing quotes from customers. We're too new for that, and we won't make them up. What you will find is every figure with its source and date, a free 7-day trial, and the New Business Index, our count of the whole register, published every week for anyone to check.

Kirk
Founder, Firstfile