Why I built this
I'm Rosie. I started a queer LEGO business, found there was almost nothing in the way of affordable, joined-up support for someone in my position, and eventually worked out that the missing thing was buildable. I have a technical background. So I built it.
The bit that made me angry
Running a small creative business is mostly fine until you hit the administrative layer. Then you discover that the support that exists is either expensive, fragmented, or aimed at somebody much bigger than you.
There's grant funding — but it's allocated by council area, announced through channels you'd have to already know about, and you find out you were eligible after the deadline. There are accountants, but not at a price that makes sense on a few thousand pounds of turnover. There are website builders that cost more per month than some weeks make. Every piece assumes you can afford to have somebody else handle it.
What I kept running into wasn't a lack of goodwill. Councils genuinely want to support their creative economy. Funders genuinely want their money spent. The problem is more boring than that: nobody knows who we are.
Why nobody knows
If you trade under your own name and have never registered a company, you don't appear in Companies House. You may not appear anywhere else either. So when a council writes a cultural strategy, or a funder designs a programme, they're working from data that structurally excludes the people who need it most — the smallest, newest, least connected.
You can't fund a population you can't count. That's the actual gap, and it's a data problem, which happens to be the thing I know how to solve.
What I actually do
I'm a software engineer. I build the pipelines that pull together public records — the ICO's register, Companies House, the ONS postcode data — work out which of them are creative businesses, and attribute each one to the council area it works in. That last part is the whole trick: funding is geographic, so knowing where someone works tells you what they can apply for.
It's the same work I'd do in a job, pointed at a problem I've personally been on the wrong end of.
What I'm trying to be careful about
Building a directory of people who didn't ask to be in one is not a neutral act, and I'd rather say that out loud than pretend otherwise.
So: every listing shows exactly where each detail came from and when. I don't publish street addresses, because a lot of us work from home. I don't publish a contact detail unless you published it yourself. Removal is one click, takes effect immediately, needs no explanation, and I keep just enough to make sure you don't get added back next time the data refreshes. I'm registered with the ICO, I've written a legitimate interests assessment and a data protection impact assessment, and I'll send them to anyone who asks.
I don't sell contact lists. I don't send cold email. If any of that changes, I'll say so on this page rather than quietly in a policy update.
How this pays for itself
Being listed is free and will stay free. The money comes from things people actually want: a simple website on your own domain for £9 a month, help with income records for tax, and referral commission when someone signs up for insurance or banking through a link here. Councils and funders can buy aggregate statistics — counts and trends, never individual records.
I'd rather be upfront that this is a business than pretend it's a charity and have you wonder what the catch is.
Where it's up to
Early. It's live across the Southampton area and the surrounding SO postcodes, built and run by one person. The data has gaps and some of the automatic classification will be wrong — if I've described your business incorrectly, claim your listing and fix it, or tell me and I'll sort it.
If you make things for a living around here, I'd genuinely like to hear what would actually help. That's not a marketing line — I built this from one person's experience of the problem, and one person's experience isn't enough.
Makers Map is operated by Data Torturing Solutions, ICO registration ZC218139 - Tier 1, expires 8 August 2027. Privacy notice.