My story so far

I wrote my first line of code when I was nine, some HTML for a Call of Duty modding website I wanted to build. My Uncle Dave, who's a web developer, taught me how to write my first H1. I remember watching the text appear on screen and thinking this was the coolest thing in the world. That feeling never really went away.

At age twelve, I got my first PC parts for Christmas. We didn't have a lot of money growing up, but my mum and dad always worked incredibly hard and wanted better for us. They saw I was interested in computers and must have saved for months to make it happen. I know I wouldn't be the person I am today without them. I spent an entire weekend piecing it together on my bedroom floor. When I pressed the power button, nothing happened. We took it to a local repair shop and the guy told us the motherboard was fried. I was gutted, but something didn't sit right.

I kept researching and found the answer myself. I had mounted the motherboard directly to the case without any risers, shorting everything out. I added them, pressed power again, and it booted perfectly. That was probably the moment I learned that experts can be wrong and that the answer is usually out there if you keep looking.

Around this time, YouTube was exploding and multi-channel networks were paying affiliates to recruit creators. I was twelve, running what I called a business from my bedroom in Liverpool. I would scroll through Socialblade for hours, find small channels who met the criteria, and send them handwritten DMs one by one. Thousands of them. It was tedious and probably a bit obsessive, but I was learning that if you wanted something to happen online, you had to make it happen yourself.

A year later I made my first real money on the internet. I figured out that fail compilations were getting millions of views, so I started downloading them, loading them into Sony Vegas Pro, and re-editing the clips in a different order. Some of those videos hit two or three million views. I made about three thousand dollars before I turned fourteen. It felt like discovering a cheat code to life.

I actually liked school for the most part. I enjoyed learning new things, always have. What I couldn't stand was exams. Sitting in a hall regurgitating information onto paper never made sense to me. I'm a practical person, I learn by doing, and I think that's been true for everything else in my life too. At sixteen I left and got an apprenticeship in IT. It was stable work and I was grateful for it, but I kept thinking about doing my own thing again.

Two years later I got fired. Turns out starting a web design business on the side, and checking your business email from your work computer, isn't the smartest move. Looking back, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.

With nothing to fall back on I went all in. That year I spent my weeks travelling from Liverpool to Birmingham, staying with my girlfriend (now fiancée, and soon to be wife). She was in her first year of uni, and I was building websites for anyone who would pay me. I taught myself everything through Stack Overflow, documentation and tutorials at two in the morning. Every project taught me something new, even the ones that went nowhere.

At nineteen I got my first professional job in web development. Over the next few years I worked at a couple of different web agencies, building mostly Shopify websites during the day and working on my own apps at night and on weekends. This is where I met some of my closest friends.

In 2020 I built and sold my first app in a hundred thousand dollar acquihire deal. It was during the GPT-3 beta when you had to get permission from one of the OpenAI devs just to output a response longer than a thousand tokens. Wild times. That deal gave me the confidence to keep going, to keep building in public and shipping products. Some worked, most didn't, but each one taught me something.

All of that brought me here, to Cap.

Cap is the open source screen recording and sharing app that works across every platform, and I'm working on it full-time as a solo founder. Next year it'll be the first business I build to hit a million dollars in annual recurring revenue. I believe in building in public, in being open about the process, in shipping fast and learning from real users. I believe in empathy, both in code and in life.

Outside of work, I'm just living life. Getting married in 2026, and continuing to travel regularly with my fiancée. She owns her own business too, which means we're very flexible. No doubt we'll be continue to be bossed around by our French Bulldog Xara. She thinks she runs the house. She's probably right.

I'm excited for the future and I'm grateful for the past.