Steve Schofield founded Beach.io in 2015 as a vehicle for launching tools and offering tech services to early-stage startups and scaleups. But the origins of Beach go deeper than your typical SaaS startup story.
For Steve, building products wasn’t just about solving problems, it was about rebuilding from personal loss. After watching his father’s small business collapse, Steve took the lessons from that rock-bottom period and turned them into his entrepreneurial foundation.
Steve at times compares his journey to blacksmithing: entrepreneurship as the forge, adversity as the anvil, and himself as the smith – shaping tools through pressure, fire, and resilience. That perspective continues to shape the way he runs his business today, helping SaaS companies launch plugin platforms and marketplaces through the Beach’s flagship product, Forge.
Inheriting the Fire, Not the Blueprint
Steve’s earliest experience with entrepreneurship was watching the family business unravel from the inside. His father was a small business owner in a rapidly changing industry, one where lithographic printing was being replaced by digital alternatives almost overnight.
As the business faltered, so did his father’s spirits. “My dad took it to heart because he was a tradesman, not a businessman,” Steve says.
Fresh out of college at the young age of 21, Steve found himself helping his father close down a once-thriving company. “As I got closer to the business, my father was escaping it – through alcohol,” he says.
Steve took the reins and dealt with the reality of the situation. He had to pick through the pieces, laying off lifelong family friends and navigating insolvency meetings. “The business was at rock bottom and I had to shepherd it through its darkest time. This was my first real job, a baptism of fire. It was personal, messy, and emotional. But also the greatest teacher I ever had,” Steve recalls.
“Watching my father’s refusal to adapt left me with a deep resolve not to repeat that mistake. It laid the foundation for my identity as an entrepreneur – and as a person. It’s why I live and breathe innovation.”
Career 1.0: From Survival to Sales
After his father’s business collapsed, Steve embarked on the traditional career path, leveraging his newfound connections to land a job at another printing company. In the years that followed, Steve moved to a bigger company, with biggerprojects, and bigger customers. “I call this Career 1.0 because it was the classic college-grad climb. With every new job, my role kept growing,” he says.
Steve then transitioned from the print industry to physical retail. In this new role, he was handed a scrappy database of phone numbers, a revenue target of £3 million, and no real plan beyond “go figure it out.” So, he did. He zeroed in on brands he actually cared about and hustled to land big accounts.
One of Steve’s wins led to building out Adidas’ global retail concept, which meant orchestrating supply chains in China, overseeing production and installation, and ensuring the whole operation ran smoothly from pitch to payment. It was a crash course in sales, logistics, and high-stakes problem solving – an early glimpse into Steve’s knack for turning chaos into systems.
“I was running a five-million-a-year account as an international account director at 25,” he says.
But everything changed when Steve’s father was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer, and sadly passed at only 51 years old. Rather than run from that pain, Steve faced it head-on. Steve swore off destructive escapism and channeled his energy into adventure sports. This was the catalyst for his Career 2.0.
Career 2.0: From Thrills to Tech
Alongside his full-time job, Steve began cold-pitching local adventure companies with an unusual offer at the time: try their activities for free – skydiving, sailing, snowboarding – and in exchange, he’d create marketing content for them.
“I did all this stuff for free and it was fun, but it was also my attempt to process all the s*** that was going on with my dad at the time,” Steve says.
He built a blog to review these adventure experiences, offering high-quality photos and SEO-optimized content. This website was Steve’s first hands-on dive into building tech, and it sparked something deeper. He’d found a new medium to build and create.
At the height of his (traditional) job success, sitting in a Chinese factory overseeing a huge retail build, Steve felt nothing. “I just didn’t care anymore. Retail is so shallow, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just to sell some more T-shirts. I started wondering if I could turn my blog into something that could cover the bills. That’s when I pivoted to Career 2.0,” he says.
Steve had about six months’ worth of cash runway to survive – which he ended up spending in four. He single-handedly turned his personal blog into a niche social network for adventurers and thrill-seekers, amassing 30,000 members. But even with those numbers, it hadn’t turned into a profitable business yet.
He hustled to pitch his niche adventure social network to investors, just as the 2008 financial crisis hit. It was a bad time to raise capital – especially as a naive founder – however, investors took notice of Steve’s practical approach to problem-solving and his ability to translate complex tech concepts into simple language.
Instead of investing in Steve’s company, they offered him work. Steve knew first-hand what happens when you stay the same while the world around you changes, so he jumped on the promising opportunity.
These investors had money in struggling companies and they wanted Steve to turn things around. Steve became the bridge between the investor, a founder, and developers – and got a look under the hood of dozens of startups as their temporary CTO. With Steve’s focus shifting, he passed on the adventure business to his brother.
Learning to Speak Product
After a painful early experience relying too heavily on a technical partner, Steve taught himself how to code. This entailed waking up at three AM to study, work with mentors, and build projects across different stacks (for two years!). This gave him a much deeper understanding of product development in startups and the craft of building things.
And while Steve played the public-facing role for other startups as CTO, he started building his own tech and experimenting behind the scenes. He took on passion projects building developer tools or, as he calls it, “making tech for other makers.”
Along the way, Steve formed lasting relationships (like with the founders of Mural, more on that later) and experimented with prototypes that would lead to future opportunities. One side gig – a quick-launch website tool for indie devs he’d quietly acquired after being a customer for years – would eventually grow into his future company’s flagship product, Forge.
Though not formally trained as a developer, Steve vowed never to be the “non-technical founder” again. Now, he doesn’t view coding as a binary skill (i.e. “Can you code? Yes or no”), but as another language to communicate in. To this founder, being technical means being able to judge what kind of code is appropriate for the stage of the product and the audience it’s serving.
He says, “I see prototypes as tangible expressions of ideas, starting points that allow teams and stakeholders to feel and test a concept before investing in full development.” His ability to bridge strategy, design, architecture, and code made him effective at guiding early-stage ideas from zero to one.
The Platform That Outgrew Its First Home
In 2020, Steve reconnected with the founders of Mural (a digital collaboration platform for people who want to communicate visually with sticky notes), who brought him on to help scale their platform during a critical period of growth. Steve went on to become the head of ventures, driving the next-gen investment for the company.
At Mural, Steve saw the need for better internal tools to support innovation, something to prototype and test ideas fast. There was a major overlap between Mural’s needs and what Steve had been quietly building with Forge – a platform that was becoming a complete backend platform as a service for building websites, apps, and plugins.
“We could reduce a multiyear, multimillion dollar investment by orders of magnitude and had the working plugin system in production in two months”, says Steve.
With the founder’s support, Steve brought in Forge to power Mural’s internal innovation engine, proving its value in a real-world environment. Once a side gig, Forge became a mission-critical tool for Mural, scaling Beach to $1.7 million in ARR while Mural grew from 80 employees to more than 1000 and over $100m ARR, and a $2 billion valuation in 2022.
But that close relationship also led to tension, as some inside Mural began to act as if they owned Forge. “It got to the point where there was some entitlement about what Forge is and what it can do. I could have easily been absorbed into that, but instead, it made me realize that true growth meant pivoting again and moving beyond a single client,” he says.
“I wanted Forge to be a solution-oriented platform that helps SaaS companies get up and running and extract value almost immediately,” Steve says. He ensured Forge would not only survive but evolve into a broader, scalable product. This meant reinvesting profits, restructuring the business, and preparing the platform for a larger market.
Fast-forward to now, Forge is in its growth phase, actively onboarding new customers and diversifying its offerings. The platform serves multiple use cases. One, it’s a product discovery tool for R&D teams to test rapidly. Two, it’s an internal developer platform that simplifies infrastructure access. Three, and most importantly, it’s a full ecosystem builder that helps companies manage plugin marketplaces with everything needed for governance and compliance.
Plugging Into The Future
Having witnessed firsthand how his father’s business became obsolete, Steve is driven to help companies stay ahead of the curve.
“Building an ecosystem is the blueprint to becoming a category leader. With generative AI and low-code tools making coding more accessible, the opportunities are immense—but you’ll still hit roadblocks if you’re not truly versed in the technology,” Steve says.
Forge gives teams the building blocks, like SDKs and design systems, so they can use generative tools more effectively. It also lets subject matter experts – customers and community members – tackle niche problems the core team doesn’t have time for.
Forge acts as the infrastructure that lets SaaS and commerce platforms safely open their products to outside developers – so they can build faster, innovate more, and grow exponentially without adding extra strain on their teams. With this approach, Steve wants to scale Forge to $5 million in ARR within two years – without giving up ownership or taking outside investment.
Steve’s journey has been shaped by a refusal to settle. His relentless drive for innovation has been key to his success, ensuring his ventures avoid the same fate as his father’s. Forge reflects not just Steve’s product vision, but his personal evolution as an entrepreneur.
