About

How Bristol Spring got here.

Bristol Spring started as one idea and quietly became another. Here's why it exists, who's behind it, and where it's going.

Why this exists — Brad

I've been a founder since 2007. I know up close the struggle, the loneliness and the stress of building something that matters — and how much it changes things to have friends on the journey.

There are plenty of organisations that do things for founders. Friends are different. Friends are there all the time. They have your back. They share their networks, they collaborate, they care more about how you're doing than how the business is doing. They've lived in the arena, learned the hard way, and want to pass it on — at no cost, just to see amazing things built in this city.

That's Bristol Spring.

Brad Askew

Brad Askew

Founder, Bristol Spring

The city

A city of refuge, a city of hope.

Bristol has long carried those two titles, and we want the whole city to flourish — for everyone who lives in it. We're not in a race with anyone, not the accelerators, not the networks; we gladly hand people on to whoever can help them next.

And if Bristol is a city of hope, founders are exactly the people to carry it. Nobody starts something without believing tomorrow can be better than today — we're a hopeful bunch, and the city needs us to be.

Where we're going

From a community with a website to a tool-maker for the whole city.

For most of its life, Bristol Spring has been a community with a website. That is changing.

The gifts that serve our 130+ members could serve every founder in Bristol. And new AI tools mean a very small team can now build and run software that until recently would have needed a whole company. Keeping that to ourselves would be poor stewardship.

So Bristol Spring is becoming a maker of useful tools for the whole of Bristol's founder scene — a single guide to what's on, a digest of grants, a way to find a mentor or a co-founder. We want to come up with ideas that help everyone building here — and to give our best ideas away, making things with our own community but for the benefit of others.

Faith stays exactly where it has always been: in how the work is done, and in why it is given away — not worn on its surface.

Who runs this

Bristol Spring is led by Brad Askew— a Bristol founder who has taken four ventures from vision to exit, and now spends that experience on this community. He doesn't carry it alone: meet the team.

Want to talk to a human? Say hello — it goes straight to Brad.

A word before you go

We're a Christian community, openly. The door is genuinely open to everyone.

You do not need to share our faith to belong here, or to use anything we build. If you're making something in Bristol, that is the common ground, and it is enough.

Both of those things are true at once, and we have stopped treating them as a tension. Come as you are. Founder is the only ticket.

Come to a First Friday →See what we're building