Blood On The Snow

How hard can it be to make money from an internet start-up? Very, says Gordon Guthrie, who's failed twice before and is working on his third start-up -- Hypernumbers.com.

He explains the mistakes he's made - and how he hopes he's finally got it right.

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It's been a long journey to the launch of our new product. The most recent leg has seen four of us sitting in a tiny basement office in Edinburgh, working hard.

But it began back in the mid-90s when I got a job in the bank.

There I first met Stephen, our business guy.

I was already a user - I had been on the internet (pre-web days) since about 1985, when I was a student. When the banks went online in a big way in 1999, I ended up being the Chief Technical Architect at Intelligent Finance (click If.com) and Stephen ended up being Director of Research and Development. We spent £60m on IT and took just over 10% of the UK mortgage market in 18 months.

We knew that we weren’t the best and that the action was mostly happening in the States. We also knew that we were just "a bank on the internet" but that a proper "internet bank" was going to come along and probably from the States.

That proved to be click paypal.com, which had 400,000 users at the time. We realised that they were smart folk, but not intrinsically smarter than us - and that folk like us could start a company and have a go at being world beaters.

That was kind of it. We were going to have to have a shot.

We left our comfortable jobs on 4 September 2001 to have another go at re-inventing internet banking.

A week later the funding market collapsed.

That moved us on to effort number two. I built a social network on top of SMS in 2005/2006 - kind of like twitter-before-twitter - but unlike twitter, we were wildly unsuccessful.

I hired Dale, our UX (user experience) guy then, when he was still an undergraduate. We have been working together for nearly five years now.

Finally, effort number three is click hypernumbers.

Like the previous attempts, we are trying to build on, and learn from, successful American businesses.

Spreadsheets like Excel make the desktop programmable by ordinary peoples. We want to make the web programmable by them - using a similar interface.

And like all our previous start-ups we want to be world beaters, we want to serve users in every country and every language.

One of our previous colleagues was an Edinburgh-based Russian guy with a Dutch passport. When he left, we replaced him with an English-Canadian who grew up in Scotland - Tom - the fourth member of the current team.

We interviewed people from all over the world for that job - Germany, Sweden, Wales, Canada, Nigeria, China, the lot.

During this journey, the number of folk in start-ups and the internet sector has grown and grown. At the time of our first start-up there were simply none.

When we did click vixo.com the scene was just an idea, but now I know 15 start-ups in Scotland, and 15 more in London and another 15 in the Valley and dozens on various web communities.

It is good to see the Scottish scene in particular really taking off.