Part two as Dan Cluderay, the owner and founder of Approved Food goes down memory lane to talk about how it all started…
You know in the movie Jaws when he first sees the shark and says ‘We are gonna need a bigger boat’ it was a lot like that when things took off.
The story of where we went within three months was incredible.
We did have a lot of problems in the early days because people Amazon-style on everything that they do online. We were three or four months down the libe and I was writing the software as we were going along, buying things and packing orders.
Towards the end of December that year various people had been contacting me. Martin Lewis’ staff were saying they thought we’d go really well in their MoneySavingExpert mailshot which was circulated to millions of people.
I remember thinking that it would just floor the business. We were struggling already and a mailshot to that many new customers could have killed us. We got to the end of the year and someone from the Financial Times had picked up on the stories on the MoneySavingExpert site and contacted me. I was backing out because I was worried I couldn’t handle the trade. We just didn’t have the people or the systems.
In the end they said that they were going to do the story anyway so I might as well contribute so I remember thinking in for a penny in for a pound.
In the first few days of 2009 I travelled to Hull, picked up a Financial Times after never reading the paper in my life, I just knew it was a different colour. I set up my market stall and settled down to see our story was on the front page. I kind of knew then it was going to be a busy weekend.
On the way home we spoke to three or four different journalists about our story. It was out now.
MoneySavingExpert.com then contacted us and said that everyone else was doing the story so they might as well put is in the mailshot. They gave me the heads up that Martin was going on to Lorraine’s couch in the morning and talking about us and it all just exploded.
That really was the point where I thought We are going to need a bigger boat.
MoneySavingExpert had told us to ensure we had beefed up our servers to cope with demand as they’d taken down Virgin Trains website for three days the week before. I was thinking that I paid about £1.50 a week for my server, I don’t think it’s going to stand up to this mailshot. And it didn’t.
There was no way I could have planned for what happened, which was an absolute storm of continuous hits. There was interest from television, radio and from all over the place. We had Japanese news teams, CNN, Germany, Russia, lots of people picking up on this crazy guy selling out-of-date stuff.
Everyone had different angles. In England they said that we were a site offering value for money and savings in a period of economic recession. From that respect it was perfect timing.
