In 2008 my sister and I were approached by a private investor who had a number of ideas for web businesses. Together with my father, we formed a limited company and Apollo’s Pet Kingdom was to be our first offering.

The first site was a massive learning experience; I took part in the entire process, from setting up the company and accounts, leading board meetings, creating concepts, design and development through to publicity.

Looking back now it’s easy to see we were a little naïve with the first version of the site and experienced what is commonly known as “mission creep”. We allowed our excitement and enthusiasm for the project to overtake practicality and continually reinvented what the site was about, packing it with ever more complicated features.

By the time of it’s public début, we had designed and built a comedy spoof news site with an integrated social network complete with twitter clone, video sharing and e-commerce(!).

Despite decent early traffic, and a niche of enthusiastic fans (our friends and family!) we soon realised it was impossible for us to maintain and turn a profit so, after a great many lessons learnt, we launched a much more compact and successful site a few months later.