A Day in the Life of a Tech Start-Up (That Also Serves in the RAF)

There's a version of the "tech start-up" story that gets told a lot: two people quit their jobs, max out a credit card, and grind in a garage until the big break. That's not our story.

Ours starts after a full day's work in the Royal Air Force — and a schedule that, looking back, still doesn't quite seem sustainable.

Once the Tech Innovation Centre (TIC) was set up, a typical day looked like this: full day's work, home in time to high-five my wife as she headed out to her evening job until she got back around 10 or 11pm, then back into the T.I.C to keep going — sometimes until 4 or 5am — preparing a demo. A few hours later I'd be back in work for 8am, delivering that same demo to a room of aircrew at 9am.

I say that not to blow my own trumpet — genuinely, it's not something I'm comfortable doing — but because it matters to the story. If I hadn't done those nights, who would have? My wife was doing her own version of the same grind, working evenings and nights while looking after three children. Nobody was coming to build this for us. If it was going to exist, it was going to exist because we found the hours somewhere, even when there weren't really any hours left to find.

How it actually started

XRT Solutions didn't begin as a business plan. It began as curiosity — could we build something in Unreal Engine that actually helped people? We taught ourselves Unreal Engine development and 3D modelling in Blender from scratch. No design degree, no games industry background — just late nights, forum posts, and a lot of tutorials watched at 1.5x speed while trying not to wake anyone else up.

The first real idea came from the day job. As an aeronautical engineer, I could see a specific problem up close: aircrew-specific training that was hard to access, and an engineering maintenance task that ate up time it didn't need to. A VR training tool felt like an obvious fix — give people practice access without needing the physical aircraft or a qualified instructor standing over them every time, and take the load off an already stretched maintenance task. It genuinely felt like an MVP with a real, immediate use case, not just a cool piece of tech.

That first project became the backbone of everything that followed. LOTOVR — our VR app for practising Lock Out Tag Out (LOTO) procedures, the kind of high-stakes process that's dangerous to get wrong in real life but safe to fail at in VR — was built off the back of what we learned making it.

And we're honest about this: without the RAF, none of it happens. Not the technical grounding, not the first-hand view of the problem, not the opportunity to even attempt something like this. The start-up exists because of that experience and access — not despite it.

The high: pitching to the MOD

At some point, what had been an evening hobby started to feel like it might be something more. We saw a genuine opportunity to pitch the aircrew training concept as a potential asset for the MOD — a chance to take something built off the back of real, first-hand engineering experience and put it in front of the people who could actually use it at scale.

That was, without question, one of the highs. Proof that the late nights weren't just late nights — they were building toward something real, solving a problem we understood better than most because we lived it every day.

The low: it didn't land

It didn't work out. The MOD opportunity fell through, and if you've never had a project you've poured evenings and weekends into get quietly declined, it's a specific kind of deflating. Not dramatic — just quiet. A door that doesn't slam, it just doesn't open.

That's also around the time the imposter syndrome really set in. We had zero formal background in 3D art or game engine development. Every mistake felt like evidence we didn't belong in the room.

We want to be honest about the people side of this too, because integrity matters to us — it's a core RAF value, and it should carry over into how we tell this story. We had a huge amount of support from some senior leaders, peers and colleagues who backed the idea early and helped push it forward. But we also got real backlash — from some of those very same groups. Scepticism, dismissiveness, "two RAF guys building VR software in their spare time" being treated as a punchline rather than a pitch. Both things are true at once, and pretending otherwise wouldn't be honest.

Turning the rejection into a company

Here's the part we're actually proud of: we didn't stop. The MOD door closing didn't kill the idea — it just meant we had to find our own way to bring it to market instead of relying on one buyer to validate it. That's when XRT Solutions (Extended Reality Training Solutions) properly became a company rather than a side project — veteran-owned, built by people who understood the training problem from the inside.

LOTOVR is still very much part of what we do. But the skills we built chasing it — Unreal Engine pipelines, 3D asset workflows, understanding what non-technical users actually need from complex software — became the foundation for everything else we're building now: tools to make Unreal Engine and 3D asset creation more accessible to people who, like us three years ago, have zero experience but a genuine idea worth building.

Why we're telling you this

Most start-up content is a highlight reel. We wanted this page to be the opposite of that — because the highlight reel isn't what gets you through the evenings when the code doesn't compile and someone's just told you it'll never work.

If you're serving full time, or working full time in general, and you've got an idea you're building in the gaps — we see you. It's slower this way. It's harder to be taken seriously this way. But it's also how we got here, and we wouldn't do it differently.

More on what we've built and are building next — coming soon on this page.