The software did its job. Then the real work started.

What Cathy Benwell's story tells us about the relationship between technology and people in the circular economy.

There is a version of the circular economy technology story that goes something like this: someone has a smart idea, a developer builds a platform, the platform goes live, and good things happen. Clean. Linear. Satisfying.

The actual story, as anyone who has built something in the space will tell you, is considerably more interesting than that.

The technology matters enormously. But what determines whether it actually changes anything is the quality of the human effort working alongside it, and how well the two are designed to complement each other. Season 10 of HappyPorch Radio, whose theme is "Technology Isn't Magic", is our attempt to explore that relationship honestly, through the people who are living it.

Cathy Benwell, Co-Founder of A Good Thing, gave us one of the clearest illustrations of that relationship we have heard, in our most recent episode. 

The idea that waited fifteen years

A Good Thing is a UK nonprofit platform that connects businesses with surplus physical items to the local charities that need them. The concept is straightforward: a business shares what it has to give away, local charities within a set radius are alerted, a match is made, and something that might otherwise end up in a skip ends up somewhere useful.

The idea itself had been sitting quietly for a long time before the platform existed to make it real.

"This was an idea that my husband and I had," Cathy told us. "A long time ago, probably 15 years ago, it sat in the background. Our lives were very full and busy. We had three young children. We had set up a software startup. There was definitely no time for anything else, but it sort of bubbled away there. It was something we talked about often."

It took the first COVID lockdown in March 2020 to create the window.

Cathy's husband and Co-Founder Richard, who had originally trained as a software engineer, spent that lockdown building the platform. They piloted it in the Thames Valley later that year. By the time we spoke to Cathy, A Good Thing had more than a thousand businesses signed up and a growing network of charities across the UK.

The proof of concept, though, had come earlier, at a dinner table in Maidenhead.

"He mentioned a cupboard full of laptops at work," Cathy said. "Very normal in the software industry, as you'll know, for developers to be issued with a new laptop every three years or so. So these really nice quality, not very old laptops were sitting in a cupboard that had been finished with."

She was, at the time, volunteering with a charity called Home-Start in Slough, where colleagues were working on computers that took ten minutes to start. The laptops moved from the cupboard to the charity quickly and to enormous effect. "As soon as that happened and we saw how easy it was," Cathy said, "that sort of inspired us further to make this available more widely." The platform they subsequently built is what made that ease available to anyone.

Two Founders, two kinds of indispensable

The partnership between Cathy and Richard is worth dwelling on, because it is not simply a pleasant founding story. It is a model for what circular economy ventures often need and rarely find in one place: technical capability and human relational capacity, operating in genuine partnership.

"I think it was vital," Cathy said. "I think it would never have happened without that combination of skills. He absolutely feels the same way, that he had those extremely valuable crucial skills that were actually to create the thing. He says that he wouldn't have then been able to do with it what I have been able to do through the outreach work, the big sort of charity network, the experience that I had working with charities, the ability to just keep persisting and keep going."

Our host Barry O'Kane put it directly: "The value and importance of everything else involved is always underestimated. The software in itself can't do anything. You need that human interaction." The platform Richard built was genuinely good. It worked. But for the platform to work, Cathy needed to build the trust, community, and momentum that gave it something to run on. Neither was the lesser contribution.

There is a particular quality to A Good Thing's matching process that reflects this thinking. Even now, every listing that goes live is reviewed by a person before it reaches charities. "A business logs into their account, creates an advert, attaches a photo," Cathy explained. "Before it actually goes live, it does, right now, have to come via a human. Somebody, one of us, either one of the core team or one of our volunteers, has to look at that and approve it."

That human layer will evolve as scale demands, and Cathy is clear-eyed about that. But for now it serves a real purpose: it adds quality and warmth to transactions between organisations that are, often, meeting through a screen for the first time. The technology handles the reach and the matching logic. The human attention handles the trust.

Getting the groundswell going

A two-sided marketplace like this has a particular early-stage challenge. Businesses are only genuinely interested once there are enough charities nearby to make listing worthwhile, while charities only sign up in earnest once there are enough offers to justify their time. The platform cannot resolve that tension on its own, however well it works.

"It is very much chicken and egg," Cathy said, "and it still is. What will happen now is if we are trying to grow in a particular part of the UK where we have less coverage than we would like, I will go out to businesses and charities there and try to build the network, and they will say to me, 'Oh, it sounds great, but you've not got many charities signed up here' or 'It sounds great, but doesn't look like there's anything on offer here right now.'"

The answer to that quandary was persistence and direct personal contact. Cathy would find a single offer, then contact twenty local charities one by one to share it and build interest. "It was slow and it definitely wasn't easy all the time. And there were times when it felt tiring."

What kept them going was a combination of genuine belief in the idea and, crucially, previous experience. Cathy and Richard had already been through the early-stage grind once before, with their software business. "We believed in the idea, we knew we could stick it out. We'd done that once before and seen it through."

Once the human effort had created enough critical mass, the platform's strengths became fully visible.

Growth has been rapid, and almost entirely word of mouth. The ease of the experience, which Richard had designed deliberately, meant that people who used it talked about it. "Within 10 minutes it's gone and they're picking it up tomorrow," Cathy said, describing the reaction of businesses who had been wondering what to do with something gathering dust in a warehouse for eighteen months. The technology delivers that speed and ease. The relational work built the community that made the speed and ease matter.

Asking the harder questions

One thing we admire about Cathy is her willingness to sit with the less comfortable questions about what A Good Thing is actually contributing from a circularity standpoint.

"We are conscious of the possibility that if a business knows they have this easy route to get rid of things, they can maybe be a little bit more relaxed with their procurement," she told us. "Maybe not think so carefully about how many of these do we need before we order them, because they're like, 'We've always got A Good Thing in the background where we can just pass things on when we need to.' That definitely makes us uncomfortable."

She also questioned whether items donated through A Good Thing's "charity need" function, where charities advertise what they are looking for and businesses supply it, are genuinely surplus or simply product that a business chose to give away. "That's not technically having either saved something from landfill or really been that circular."

No pat answers were offered. Barry's response was essentially: this is the right kind of question to keep asking. "None of us are the solution. It's not the right thing to avoid that or pretend that those problems and the potential downsides don't exist. But that doesn't mean not staying aligned and focused on the mission and the impacts that you are having."

Holding the mission clearly while continuing to examine it honestly is, we think, what serious circular economy work looks like.

Looking ahead

A Good Thing's ambitions are considerable. European expansion is on the roadmap, with pilots already run outside the UK. There are early steps into donating space (meeting rooms, office space, storage), and volunteering is next. Cathy described the long-term goal as becoming a one-stop shop for corporate engagement with charities.

"We don't see any reason why every business in the UK shouldn't be using this," she said. "We have seen that every business, no matter what sector they're in, somewhere in their business they have stuff that they don't need that could be making an impact somewhere else."

How about yours? You can find A Good Thing at agoodthing.org.uk. Signing up takes thirty seconds. 

What if you've got the mission but not the technical co-founder?

A Good Thing had something many circular economy Founders do not: a Co-Founder with deep technical skills who could build the platform, and a Co-Founder with the human and relational capacity to activate it. As Cathy said herself, the combination was essential. Neither alone would have been enough.

But what if you’re a Founder who has the vision, the mission, and the relational instincts, and is staring at a blank space where the technical understanding should be? Or you’ve roughed something out in an AI tool and genuinely don’t  know whether it’s trustworthy, scalable, or pointed in the right direction?

This is a situation we encounter regularly at HappyPorch, and one of the reasons we built two fixed-price offerings for circular economy Founders at exactly that moment:

Proof Sprint is for Founders with an idea, a mockup, or something generated in an AI tool who need something real to put in front of customers or a funding panel, without committing to a full build first. In two to four weeks we build a working, usable prototype and give you an honest view of your technical options for what comes next. Because we work exclusively with circular economy businesses, you do not spend half the engagement bringing us up to speed on your model.

Circular Tech Clarity is for Founders with real operations who are starting to feel the technology holding them back. Spreadsheets cracking under growth. A platform that does not quite fit how the circular model actually works. Conversations with developers that you cannot properly evaluate because the technical knowledge is not there yet. In two structured sessions, we work across your situation and give you a clear, written recommendation on what to keep, what to replace, what to build, and what it will realistically cost. 

Neither is a commitment to a longer engagement. Both are a way of getting honest, expert input at the moment you most need it, from a team that already understands why your operations do not work like a standard e-commerce business.

The interplay between technology and people in the circular economy is what this whole season of HappyPorch Radio is about. A Good Thing is a vivid example of what that relationship looks like when both sides are present and pulling in the same direction. If the technology side is the gap you need to close, we are here for you.

Book a free discovery call and we will tell you honestly whether either is the right fit.