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How we built a business out of recession — chapter 5
The story of CitNOW*
This is the fifth chapter about CitNOW, the company started from a kitchen table in Winnersh, Berkshire. If you’d like to read from the beginning, here’s a link to chpt 1. Each chapter is roughly a 5-minute read and is an early draft of a book.
CitNOW was founded by Andrew Howells and Donna Barradale in 2005, although the company was only registered in 2008. In February 2018, we sold the company to Tenzing, a UK private equity company. It has been sold again since.
Unlike many software start-ups, we appeared to be at a significant disadvantage. Of all the US success stories I’ve ever read (no one seems to write about British ones), the founders always seem to be gifted software programmers who met in college. Aside from investing their time writing rich, functional software for a yet-to-be-discovered killer app, they maintain a healthy life balance with outdoor passions for mountain biking and snowboarding. Monthly expenses are kept firmly in check until version one is finally released, bringing investors flocking. I bet their teeth were all straight, too.
I was neither gifted nor a programmer, teeth not too bad for an Englishman, so every tiny development, every step towards a minimum viable product, a term later learnt, had to be written by someone outside…
