I am starting a company.
I am writing about it from inception for three reasons:
- For the team to have the story of our genesis.
- To share learnings from mistakes I’ve made in the past (that I hope not to repeat) and learnings from new mistakes I will surely make.
- To crowdsource ideas.
How did I get here?
Age 15 – Games catalogue
I developed a catalogue of games using Microsoft Basic. The plan was to share the catalogue on floppy disk at school and sell the games. I got as far as coding the catalogue.
Annual sales: Zero.
Age 18 – Dance school database
I needed a Microsoft Access project for my A Level Computer Science coursework and my mum and her business partner needed help managing class registers and parent invoices for their dance school. So my project became a dance school database. After A Levels mum paid for improvements and updates.
Annual sales: £££ (admittedly from my mum)!
Age 21 – Affiliate websites
As a one-man band web developer, I created a number of websites that monetised web traffic with affiliate ads. The most notable was a search engine that had millions of visits.
Annual sales: ££,£££.
Age 26 – Clear Books (2008 – 2017)
Both my mum’s dance school and my affiliate website business needed annual accounts and tax filed. As a qualified accountant who could code, I built a cloud accounting software and called it Clear Books. This was my first “proper company” with employees, an office and many learnings. I am still a shareholder and Clear Books continues to serve thousands of small businesses today.
Annual sales: £,£££,£££.
Age 35 – Countingup (2017 – 2023)
For a number of years I believed that running the very smallest companies could be much, much simpler and more automated if banking and accounting were combined. In 2017, with innovation rife in fintech, I built Countingup to create a business current account with built-in accounting software. I am still a shareholder and Countingup continues to serve tens of thousands of sole traders and process billions of pounds in payments.
Annual sales: ££,£££,£££.
Age 42 – Chapter 1
For the first time in my career I had a break in 2023. I told my wife I was retired and she told me I wasn’t. She was right. I was always going to start something bigger and better than before.
I had time to read and think about the way a company should be built. Much of my thinking is inspired from experience but also some excellent books:
- In Search of Excellence
- Good to Great
- High Performance Management
And some good ones – to name a handful:
- The Lean Startup
- Built To Last
- Surrounded by Idiots
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
- The Manual: A Philosopher’s Guide to Life
- Invent and Wander
- Elon Musk
- Tao of Charlie Munger
- Start With Why
And now it begins.
Chapter 1.