My life: Brett Harding of lovestruck.com

I grew up quite comfortably, in Surrey, in the southeast of England. I went to a public school - one of the few co-ed ones, thankfully, so I got to meet girls - and played a lot of sport and video games. I loved computers and games machines and used to write my own adventure games on a BBC Micro [computer] when I was about nine. I probably spent too much time on that but I suppose it made me quite tech-oriented. I went to Nottingham University to study business and wrote my dissertation on the "Impact of the Internet on Consumer Goods Marketing". That was in 1996, so it was very early days for the internet but I was already thinking about what could be done.

In the late 1990s, I worked as a trainee at advertising agencies. I moved into digital and worked on launching sites for Molton Brown, Swarovski and others, then went into direct marketing. I came up with the idea for a dating website while consulting for Barclays in marketing in Canary Wharf, in London. I was astounded by the amount of professional people all working in one small area. I thought, "Let's network this whole place up." I devised a website called Lunch Date London, based on the idea of meeting people who work near you for coffee or lunch dates. It was one of the first hyper-local dating sites, the locality being central London, and it resonated quite well. I got it off the ground with about £30,000 (HK$370,000) of my own money and we were literally bombarding people outside tube stations with flyers. We started to build quite a big base and I thought, "Surely this thing's going to go viral now, so I can switch off the marketing and be a millionaire in three months' time." Then it dawned on me - this was going to be a long hard exercise in marketing. As soon as I stopped marketing, the traffic started to atrophy.