Kristina Rutherford has navigated a diverse career path ranging from strategic NHS operations to marketing consultancy, and more recently, building an AI-powered marketing platform. An adept self-taught coder, Kristina is proving that a non-technical background is no barrier to entrepreneurial success.

Over the past decade, Kristina has worked across various organisations in the NHS, managing multi-million-pound services and spearheading improvement initiatives across South Yorkshire.

Whilst the roles weren’t an obvious fit for her marketing background, Kristina was able to use her skills effectively, and it gave her useful insight and experience for her future venture. She explains,

“I loved the breadth of the roles as it really was like running a business within the organisation, and no two days were the same.”

Alongside her NHS career, Kristina worked on various marketing projects in a consultancy capacity, including blogs and supporting small businesses with their marketing efforts. It was in this vein that her founder journey took off.

Kristina was in a workshop with small business owners, all faced with the common struggle of balancing business operations with effective marketing. Taking this as her inspiration, she began to conceptualise an AI-driven solution to streamline content creation. Her initial success with an evergreen social media package laid the foundations for what would evolve into a more comprehensive SaaS marketing platform: 3me.

Taking the leap

Kristina had already chosen to leave her 18-year career and set up as a self-employed marketing consultant before she had the idea for her SaaS solution. However, she still had some initial doubts around stepping into the role of a tech founder.

“The main worries were what if it doesn’t work? Who am I to build this? Can I do this with a young family and working around nursery pick ups and school holidays etc.  A good measure of self-doubt really”, Kristina reflects.

The mentorship and support she has received from the Cooper Project and Business Sheffield continue to transform Kristina’s attitude as she learns from others’ experience and day by day,  better understands the potential of her solution. She explains, 

“With each step forward, I’ve progressively cast-off my self-doubts and grown in confidence. I know business owners need a reliable way to market their business and I believe it’s so much harder than it needs to be. I know I can solve that for them, so I took the leap and decided to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.”

3me is designed to simplify marketing for small businesses, offering automated solutions that align with comprehensive marketing strategies. By eliminating the burden of constant content creation, with 3me Kristina empowers entrepreneurs to focus on running their business. Her mission is clear:

“I want to make good quality marketing easy for small businesses that can’t afford a team, that don’t have the time, or for those that don’t know how to do it and don’t have the time or desire to learn.”

A self-taught, agile approach

Kristina’s experience of software development and the progress she has made demonstrates her resourcefulness and ability to adapt, as she lacks any formal coding training.

Rather than putting her at a disadvantage, this approach has enabled her to be agile and progress her product more quickly. “Taking a self-learning route, I've managed to get the software to a minimum viable product without having to pay significant costs for the development,” she explains, “which is enabling me to test the market early, and change it quickly to better fit what my customers and prospective customers need. This has also allowed me to bring a small revenue stream into the business very early on.”

Reflecting on her founder experience so far, Kristina notes that she’s had mixed emotions at times but stresses the importance of having good support in place:

“It has been hard work and there have been times early on where I would question whether I have got what it takes to make my business thrive. But I’ve also taken the time to build a solid support structure around me, to keep me going when things don’t feel like they are going to plan, and the Cooper Project is a key component of that.”

Looking ahead, Kristina has three goals that she is determined to achieve during her time on our business incubation programme: to establish a robust financial strategy, build herself a network of peers and become a participant in the Sheffield digital start-up world, and get her MVP out into the world to start making a difference.

With the commitment, resourcefulness and tenacity Kristina has already shown as a founder, we have no doubt that she will achieve these goals and we are excited to see the impact she can make with her SaaS marketing platform, 3me.

You can join a waitlist for 3me at: www.3me.ai