Small Business Book Award Winner 2013, Small Business Book Awards

The secrets of the UK's biggest online entrepreneurs revealed

Thinking of starting a business? Already have a business online and looking to take it to the next level? The wonderful world wide web has made creating a start-up that much easier. Thousands of people are out there reaping the rewards the web can bring. If you want to join them, you've come to the right place.

Profiling today's foremost web entrepreneurs, Lucy Tobin - who meets successful business founders every week writing an enterprise column forThe Evening Standard takes us through their start-up stories and maps out exactly what's made them so successful. Youll hear first hand from the bright sparks behind some of the UK's top online businesses. With interviews, practical advice and insights, you'll learn how they did it, what they recommend, and how you can do it too.

Lucy Tobin is a newspaper business journalist and writes a weekly feature on entrepreneurs in theEvening Standard. She has commentated on entrepreneurship in Britain on TV includingBBC News,Show me the Money and on radio including BBC Radio 5 Live and Talk Sport. She has also done several TV appearances on BBC Breakfast.
Since graduating with a First from Oxford in 2008, shes held full-time journalistic positions atThe Times,The Evening Standard (where she currently works) andThe Daily Express, and has written 500+ articles for other newspapers includingThe Guardian,Independent,Sunday Times Magazine,Daily Telegraph,Boston Globe,Toronto Star, plus magazines likePrima,The Lady andGrazia.
She is the author of two previous books,Pimp Your Vocab (Portico, 2009) a parent's guide to the slang words kids don't want you to know andA Guide to Uni Life (Trotman, 2009) a student's guide to university. She marketed both these books with lead-length articles inThe Guardian, Sunday Times,Evening Standard, and other articles in theDaily Mail, The Sun, and Independent. She also had tag-lines referencing the books in articles in Grazia and talked about them in TV appearances on BBC Breakfast, a vast number of BBC local radio stations, LBC radio, plus foreign radio stations in the US, South Africa and Spain.

Acknowledgements vii

About the Author ix

Introduction 1

Part One: The Story Behind 9

1. Wonga 11

2. Moonpig 21

3. Mumsnet 29

4. JustGiving 37

5. Zoopla 47

6. GoCompare 55

7. Groupon / MyCityDeal 63

8. SpareRoom 71

9. Made.com 81

10. Moo.com 89

11. Enternships 97

Part Two: Advice 105

12. The Lightbulb Moment 107

13. The Idea: Checking it Out 113

14. Setting up a Business 121

15. Creating a Website 151

16. Getting Your Site Known: Marketing 175

17. Expansion and Exit 189

Resources 197