About

I'm Cougar, and I run SoundIn from Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, where we're building an operational ecosystem for the UK night-time economy.

What I do

SoundIn builds operational software for the UK night-time economy, and Holocron is where everything starts: compliance and operations tooling for venues, already in production with paying customers. Behind it sits a wider ecosystem in development, all built on the same foundation and coming online as Holocron finds its footing.

How I got here

I spent the five years before SoundIn split across cybersecurity and AV systems, and both of those shaped how I think about building more than I realised at the time. At Capgemini and NCC Group I ran triage on live threats across hundreds of client environments, working in threat detection and XDR where the cost of a wrong call is immediate and measurable. At Hutchison Technologies I was designing and delivering AV and networking installations for clients ranging from local businesses to global retail chains, which meant learning to hold a client relationship, a technical brief, and a budget in the same hand at the same time. Both of those roles were training in working under pressure with incomplete information, and that turns out to be most of what running a software company actually is.

I started SoundIn because I kept walking into venues doing serious business on genuinely ancient software, and the operators running them deserved better tools than the industry had bothered to build for them. The night-time economy is one of the most under-served verticals in software and it rewards founders who show up on the floor, ask the right questions, and ship the thing the operator actually asked for.

What I write about

The Cairn is the closest thing I have to a diary, one thing I learned each week written long enough to be useful and short enough to fit in a coffee break. This site is where the longer pieces live, along with anything that wouldn't survive being compressed into a LinkedIn post without losing what made it worth writing in the first place. The opinions here are mine, not SoundIn's.

How to reach me

Newsletter replies always reach me and that's still the best way to start a conversation about anything substantive. LinkedIn works for work-adjacent things and X is fine for shorter notes, though cold pitch decks tend to disappear in the same folder as the lottery scratch cards.

I take on selective freelance work across full-stack product engineering, DevOps and cloud infrastructure, and security consultancy, with two years of XDR work across a wide range of client environments behind the security side. If any of that fits a problem you're carrying, the newsletter reply box is the right place to start.