PistonHeads

Set up at the end of 1998, PistonHeads was created to compete with traditional publishers by giving petrolheads somewhere to hang out online and get motoring news faster than the weekly mags could provide.

At the time I was working in the City designing trading systems for Lehman Brothers. The politics was getting on my goat a bit and the camel's back finally broke in August 1999. I resigned to pursue PistonHeads full time. Most people thought I was completely mad and in many respects they were right.

Initial funding totalled £1,000 and by minimising overheads I managed to live off my savings and ride out the dot com bubble bursting. A solid business took shape and I was self sufficient again after a couple of years. Each of the following years saw the site grow and get more exciting as the brand became established.

From those early days getting excited about 100 visitors a day, PistonHeads blossomed to the site it is now, receiving over 3 million unique visitors a month. A very healthy business now sits behind the site too. A lot was learned along the way about both business and the internet.

In 2006 I received a number of approaches about selling the site and in January 2007 I completed the sale to Haymarket Publishing.

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Pre PistonHeads

Before building PistonHeads I spent a number of years designing and building finance and trading systems. Prior to that I worked for a number of software houses designing and developing software for a diverse range of industries from bar coding to embedded systems.