I found the product by chance really, I had a need for the product and I noticed that the websites of the competition were poor, in terms of usability, clarity, and functionality. It was clear that they were taking their users for granted, no innovation, no need to do anything different. i.e. perfect for me to disrupt.

I worked on building the website (the apps came about a year later using Cordova so I could utilise my HTML/JS skills) in evenings and weekends for about 4 months. Not all of that was development, some of it was speaking with third parties I needed to get the product working.

The first paying customer got a full refund, because, of course, it didnt work properly, but the most valuable lesson I learnt was just to deploy something and fix it ad-hoc, NOT wait for it to be perfect/feature complete.

I had low expectations, and I didn't quit my day job, so it was low pressure "lets see what happens"

Spending time making the website SEO friendly meant I didn't have to spend a penny in advertising for the first year as all of our traffic was organic. It wasn't until the annual revenues were around £400,000 that I started to spend ANY money on advertising.