Entrepreneur How to Start an Online Business

Lucy Tobin is a newspaper business journalist and writes a weekly feature on entrepreneurs in the Evening Standard. She has commentated on entrepreneurship in Britain on TV including BBC 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, she’s held full-time journalistic positions at The Times, The Evening Standard (where she currently works) and The Daily Express, and has written 500+ articles for other newspapers including The Guardian, Independent, Sunday Times Magazine, Daily Telegraph, Boston Globe, Toronto Star, plus magazines like Prima, The Lady and Grazia.
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 – and A Guide to Uni Life (Trotman, 2009) –a student's guide to university. She marketed both these books with lead-length articles in The Guardian, Sunday Times, Evening Standard, and other articles in the Daily 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

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