The claim that changed everything

A conversation that wouldn't leave me alone

Ola wasn't a stranger. She'd been using one of our earlier apps, and she knew I was a founder in the tech space. She didn't expect me to solve her problem, but she needed someone to vent to. Over the next twenty minutes, she described the whole thing: the accident, the claim form, the rejection letter that arrived three weeks later. "They said I had no evidence," she said. "I just have a phone. Why can't that be enough?"

I kept thinking about that conversation for weeks. Ola had a smartphone with a camera better than most dedicated dashcams from five years ago. She had GPS. She had a timestamp. But because there was no official record of what that phone had captured, it meant nothing to the insurance company. They could deny her with impunity.

That's when it became obvious. The problem wasn't that regular people lacked dashcams. The problem was that dashcams cost money, needed installation, collected dust after the first month, and still didn't solve the trust problem. How would an insurance adjuster know the video hadn't been faked or edited? We needed to build something that turned a phone into court-ready evidence.

Building for the moment nobody wants to have

We spent the first three months just thinking about one thing: integrity. Not features. Not convenience. Integrity. A video file is easy to fake. So we built Hawk around cryptographic proof. Every clip recorded gets a SHA-256 integrity hash written alongside it. If someone tries to alter a single frame, the hash breaks. It's the same kind of proof that banks use and that courts already understand.

Then we thought about the human part. You don't want to hand over all your footage to a claims adjuster. You want to hand over just the evidence that matters. So we added the Evidence Locker with biometric lock. The footage stays on your phone, protected by your face or fingerprint, until you decide to export it. We built a one-tap export that creates a ZIP file with a manifest listing every clip's hash and timestamp. You send that to your insurance company or police or directly to a small-claims court.

We didn't overthink it. No subscription required to start recording. You get ten clips a month and seven days of retention. If you want more, the Local Pro tier costs £3.99 a month or £39.99 a year. It's not about locking you in. It's about making sure that when the moment comes, the evidence is there.

The rideshare drivers showed us what we'd missed

Launch week brought a surprise. Rideshare drivers started using Hawk before we'd even finished writing the rideshare marketing copy. They were recording their trips, but they had a different problem from commuters. They needed to record cabin footage too, and they needed to switch between trips without stopping and restarting the app manually. The continuous loop was burning through battery because they were working ten-hour shifts.

Within two weeks, we'd added a cabin camera option and a shift mode. You clock in at the start of your shift, and Hawk records everything, automatically carving out individual trip clips for your records. If a passenger disputes what happened or tries to claim a missing item, you have evidence. More importantly, you have something that actually matters to police, to your rideshare platform, to a small-claims judge.

The rideshare drivers were using Hawk the way I'd imagined Ola should have been able to use a dashcam. They understood that this wasn't just about the technology. It was about proving what happened when it counted.

The features that came from real moments

Most of what Hawk does now came from someone saying, "I need..." The GPS overlay with speed and timestamp came from a user who wanted insurance companies to see they weren't speeding. The trip map replay came from someone who wanted to show their insurance adjuster exactly where the accident happened. The Siri Shortcuts integration came from a driver who asked why he couldn't just say "Hey Siri, save that last five minutes."

We added iCloud sync for Pro clips because people were nervous about keeping their evidence only on their phone. We added the police-report submission tool for iOS because getting evidence to the right officer, in the right format, at the right time, turned out to be harder than it looked.

None of these features are flashy. They're all answers to a simple question: what does someone actually need when they're trying to prove what happened?

What actually changed when we launched

Ola didn't know we were building Hawk. I didn't reach out and ask her to test it or be a case study. But I did think about her constantly while we built it. After we launched, I wondered if Hawk would have helped her. The answer is yes, but not because we'd given her a fancy piece of technology. It would have helped because we'd solved the trust problem. An insurance adjuster can look at a ZIP file with SHA-256 hashes and know that what they're seeing hasn't been edited. A police officer can timestamp it. A judge can verify it.

We didn't build Hawk because the dashcam market needed disruption. We built it because people like Ola deserve a way to prove what happened, using the device they already carry, without paying hundreds of pounds for hardware that ends up in a drawer.