Interview with Ellie Coyte

Ellie Coyte was born in Newport, Wales, in 1989.  She says of her childhood: “I feel blessed all the time with my childhood, because I had a strong foundation in my family, very strong relationships with friends and wider family as well.  I have an older brother. It was great. Really positive.”

Ellie’s mother was keen for the children to learn Welsh, so both Ellie and her brother attended Welsh speaking schools in Newport. She says: “Mum was very keen for us to learn Welsh as a first language which we got to do through school, which was great.  My dad always helped me with things like running and maths.”

She says of her school days: “I enjoyed school, it was more of a social place for me than it was an academic one. At that point I wasn’t really very academically minded, but I was lucky because I didn’t struggle with anything, I just didn’t really have as much of an interest.  I liked the more creative subjects like art, design and woodworking.”

The family had a home computer which Ellie used to access MSN and playing a few games on. She says: “It didn’t really inspire an interest in tech at that time.”

 Ellie chose to leave school at sixteen to go to college to study fine arts for two years. She then started working towards A levels in sociology and human biology with the aim of becoming an occupational therapist. However a move to Bournemouth interrupted her studies and shifted her focus. She started working at an English language school in Bournemouth, and spent time in Spain teaching English at a school.

Ellie started an international hospitality management degree at Cardiff Metropolitan University in 2015. The course also involved a year’s internship working at Infinitely Xara in Malta. She explains: “I worked in a place called Xara Palace. I was very lucky to do a year’s placement with four different settings, so I worked in the kitchen, finance, reception, and a few other areas.”

While completing her degree and networking to find help as to how she might create a tech solution for international students coming to the UK to learn a language, Ellie discovered the Alacrity Foundation. It was an idea that she had first had when she was teaching English in Bournemouth.

She explains: “In the summer before my final year of university, I was networking and I stumbled across the Wesley Clover Foundation and Alacrity Foundation. When I left university, I’d forgotten about Alacrity entirely as I’d been doing my final year of study which was a project on my business idea. So, I took a job in HSBC as a caseworker in Bristol. I really enjoyed but it wasn’t a long-term job.”

It was while she was working at HSBC that Ellie spotted a tweet from Alacrity advertising a few places left for that year’s course (2019-2020). Ellie says: “It felt like the stars aligned. I left the job not knowing if I was going to get on the course, I had to go for the interview and I got in as a business lead.”

 During the first few weeks, the cohort did a coding boot camp, Ellie says: “I got my first look at how code works, the logic behind it and that was great. There was a 70/30 split in the cohort of people with technical skills versus those with business skills. I went as a business lead, and so during that two to three weeks it was a really nice experience because the technical people were very supportive.  There were a number of technically-minded people there who were learning things they already knew basically, who were just there to help us, which was great, it was good bonding.  After that we moved more into the business side. We started receiving challenges from different businesses facilitated through Alacrity. We would try and come up with ideas to fix those challenges using software. It was a process of going into different teams to try and think of the best way to build a demand-led solution with this project partner.  You think of an idea, you pitch it to the partner and then if they like the idea then you co-create it with them and you have your first customer, in theory, then you can go out to wider market. It was a big learning curve and it was about 15 months in total.” In the middle of the course, the cohort switched to remote working due to the outbreak of the pandemic.

Asked about the source of her entrepreneurial streak, Ellie says: “When I was younger I don’t think I had it at all.  My mum used to say that I used to live in the Ellie bubble.  I was quite creative, but quite isolated in that way. I was a bit creative, but had never really thought about doing something more with that. I think that changed when I was working in hospitality.

“I was very good at my job in hospitality.  … I felt like I was moving towards a management role and I wasn’t getting there, nobody was progressing me but they were progressing other people and I couldn’t understand why. So I asked to be an event organiser and I organised a quiz that went really well and I realised that I could have an idea, I could run with it, it would go down really, really well.  I saw a change in what I could do, which then led me to teach English, which gave me some more ideas.  Eventually, I decided that if people aren’t going to listen to my ideas when I think I have a good idea, then maybe I should just do it myself.”

Ellie’s original idea was to connect students with the language learning institution via an app which could be translated into multiple languages. She adds: “They’d be able to raise concerns that they have about their hosts, the accommodation, etc, they have a point of contact, because through my experience it felt like that for a lot of people there is a language barrier, there is a culture shock, and they weren’t being supported well enough. So it was a simple app that was just going to help communication between the school and the students.”

She explains why she did not carry it forward: adding “The only reason I stopped was that it was too hard on my own. I didn’t have the technical skills, I didn’t have the lived experience within business, I still had a lot to learn even though I felt like I knew a lot at the time, so I couldn’t do it on my own. So when the opportunity to go into Alacrity arose where they give you a stipend every month, provide mentors, put you into teams and give you real problems and real business partners to work with, it sounded like a dream.”

Due to the pandemic, Ellie’s team’s project couldn’t go ahead, as such, instead of leaving the project with an  an idea and a project partner with whom to develop their solution, Ellie’s team graduated with an international partnership to resell a Canadian communication tool to social care homes in the UK.  Ellie explains: “The idea behind that partnership was we’d be able to generate revenue with a product that’s already known and loved over in Canada and North America, and we’d be able to speak to people about their challenges, to be able to find our own project partner and create our own IP through the Alacrity model, but with an existing business generating revenue.

“We spent 2021, speaking to people in health and in social care to try and figure out what was most in need of and what were we best placed to build a solution for.  It wasn’t until the end of last year that we met with a social care agency in Cardiff who very simply outlined a clear problem to us that we felt like we could build something around.” The team then met with a Health Board who provided additional insight into issues which aligned with those of the social care agency in Cardiff.  Ellie adds: “That research, a lot of trial and error with speaking to different people, led us to the project we are working on now. We now have people who are excited to innovate with us, so we can finally do what we were meant to do at Alacrity.

With the research under their belt, Ellie and her team from Alacrity have set up Haelu, of which she is Chief Operating Officer, the group has a team of five employees plus a board. They are now developing their tool alongside their reselling of the Canadian social care product.

Ellie explains: “The vision for our innovation is to empower social care workers without clinical training who provide care and support to people in the community to be able to record signs and symptoms relating to health that will trigger automatic alerts to the relevant health professional who can respond with earlier interventions, reduce unplanned hospital admissions, protect patient health, keep people living happier and healthier at home for longer.”

To achieve this vision will take time and the project has been broken down into stages. Ellie adds: “What we’re delivering in 2023 will be a way for healthcare support workers to record their visits with patients within the community and be able to raise concerns more manually to their service managers who will then be able to refer onwards to other health professionals. Instead of making a quick phone call and sending a rushed email, they’ll have a bank of trends and data. The first version’s very manual communication process that really draws on the opportunity to get a non-clinical person to be able to record things that if a clinical person looks at,they can identify an intervention may be needed to prevent deterioration.

“The good thing about where we’ve landed at the moment with the healthcare support workers and the reablement team is that they already have this process.  …. It’s quite a long and drawn-out, and so the first step is digitising that process. The actualisation of the vision for our tool won’t come to light for a good few years to come yet and will be in continual development because that’s the nature of the tool.”

The team have funding from three investor organisations and are in the process of going through a further funding round, which Ellie says “will be instrumental for us having time to develop the tool and to expand our team to ensure that we can do that.”

The team are also looking to expand the number of employees with a new junior developer and a fulltime CTO.

Speaking about the potential of the app for the future, Ellie says: “The aim is to help people get earlier healthcare and for social care to be able to meet people’s needs earlier so they can live happier and healthier.

“One of my little goals, and I don’t know if this will ever happen, but I would love it if one day the tool and the value being derived from people using the tool meant that social care workers could have better pay and receive greater widespread respect for the role, because they already do all these things, we’re just want to facilitate that within the app. That would be a dream come true if we could help towards that, it would be amazing.”

 Asked why a solution to the issue hasn’t been found earlier, Ellie replies: “There are loads of barriers, some are cultural differences between health and social, there are  data governance rules, isolated and disconnected systems, data in lots of different places, so all of those things become a barrier for us.

“We don’t want to become just one more system and we also are not saying that we’re going to replace the systems that already exist. It’s finding that balance of making sure that the tool that you build is interoperable, futureproof but also stands alone enough that people will be willing to use two softwares when they have to until the time they can be connected.”

 The team is working towards the system being operable across the Welsh health care providers by 2027. Ellie adds: “By 2027 we’ll try and get the tool everywhere. And while it’s great for Wales, we need to make sure that we’re engaging with England, Scotland, and everywhere else pretty quickly.”

 The team has yet to name its product, Ellie adds: “We don’t have a name yet.  We’re thinking about it, but we haven’t really had time to think about it much so it’s kind of gone right down the priority list.”

Asked about her entrepreneur experience, Ellie says: “I definitely feel like I’m doing what I should be doing, which is nice.  Imposter syndrome is a big thing for sure but most days now I’m too busy to think about anything besides what needs to be done, you just get on.

“The best thing about being in this situation is that you do have room to grow. You are constantly learning, every day you’re improving on what you did yesterday.  It almost gets a little bit nerve-racking when you start thinking about the next few years to come. For example, our forecast is to have many more staff within two years’ time and when you start thinking about those things, we’ll have this many people to manage, we’ll have this many customers on board, we’ll have this many patients to worry about, that seems really far away, that seems really hard to get to. But you’ve just always got to remember that between now and then you’re going to be learning every single day.  I do feel like I’m getting to where I want to, really want to be.  I’m very happy to be trying new things and being challenged every day.  It’s hard, but it’s great.”

Asked about her motivation, Ellie adds: “My biggest motivation is always wanting to do something well that helps people. I originally wanted to be an occupational therapist because I wanted to help people, and I liked working in hospitality was because I was helping people. It might have only been helping them eat and drink, but it felt good, I felt like I was helping people every day.  That’s one of the things that I particularly like about tech. You can work very hard here in your room online with people, speaking to people, but the influence you can have and the way that you can make a big difference to a lot of people is through the tech that you build.  Of course, financial security is fantastic as well but if this company goes fantastically and if I can pull myself away from it, I’m sure I’ll have more ideas to do more things afterwards. I can’t see me stopping, even if we did well financially.”

In the long term, Ellie says she would like to reach a point where she could help mentor others who would are interested in progressing in their careers.

Asked about being a woman in an area traditionally dominated by men, Ellie says: “I think I’m very lucky not to feel that too much.” Up until university, Ellie says that she did not “feel pushed down by being a woman”. However, in conversations with her now husband, she realised it has in some ways affected her progress.  She adds: “But since being in tech for health and social care, I haven’t felt anything at all like that.  I think that’s because of the balance between tech and health, because in health and social care a lot of the project partners we’re working are women.  A lot of the input we have into this tool comes from women and I get to speak to wonderful, inspiring women every day.”

Asked if there is anything that she would do differently if she had the time over, Ellie says: “There are so many things I would do differently. If I could speak to little Ellie, I would tell her to have her eyes more open and be more curious, even when you don’t feel curious because maybe something will pique your interest.”

“This whole year has probably been my proudest achievement. We don’t often have time to stop and really celebrate the things that happen. One thing that comes to mind is that we had this idea and we pitched it to Hywel Dda and at the Wales HealthTech in 2022, and we were one of the winners which we just didn’t expect.”

Asked about advice for young people, especially those without a tech background, who might want to work in tech or become an entrepreneur, Ellie says: “The combination of the business and tech world together is magic, it is filled with people that are open to new ideas and different ways of looking at things.

“There are ways to dip your toes in or to have an interest without thinking that you need to be technically minded.  I can’t code, but as soon as you find people that you can talk to about the possibilities of tech who are also open-minded enough to sit and listen to what you’ve got to say, then you can play around with what’s possible. You don’t need to be technically-minded to do tech.

“One of the most fun things is realising that you can do almost anything with it, you’ve just got to try and figure out where the boundaries are and then try and make it fit without ruining what you’ve set out to achieve.  Tech’s very inclusive.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley