My story so far

I wrote my first line of code when I was nine, some HTML for a Call of Duty modding website I wanted to build. My uncle, who's a web developer, taught me how to write my first H1 tag. I remember watching the text appear on screen and thinking this was the coolest thing in the world. That feeling never really went away.

At age twelve, I got my first PC parts for Christmas. We didn't have a lot of money growing up, but my mum and dad always worked incredibly hard and wanted better for us. They saw I was interested in computers and must have saved for months to make it happen. I know I wouldn't be the person I am today without them. I spent an entire weekend piecing it together on my bedroom floor. When I pressed the power button, nothing happened. We took it to a local repair shop and the guy told us the motherboard was fried. I was gutted, but something didn't sit right.

I kept researching and found the answer myself. I had mounted the motherboard directly to the case without any risers, shorting everything out. I added them, pressed power again, and it booted perfectly. That was probably the moment I learned that experts can be wrong and that the answer is usually out there if you keep looking.

Around this time, YouTube was exploding and multi-channel networks were paying affiliates to recruit creators. I was twelve, running what I called a business from my bedroom in Liverpool. I would scroll through Socialblade for hours, find small channels who met the criteria, and send them handwritten DMs one by one. Thousands of them. It was tedious and probably a bit obsessive, but I was learning that if you wanted something to happen online, you had to make it happen yourself.

A year later I made my first real money on the internet. I figured out that fail compilations were getting millions of views, so I started downloading them, loading them into Sony Vegas Pro, and re-editing the clips in a different order. Some of those videos hit two or three million views. I made about three thousand dollars before I turned fourteen. It felt like discovering a cheat code to life.

I actually liked school for the most part. I enjoyed learning new things, always have. What I couldn't stand was exams. Sitting in a hall regurgitating information onto paper never made sense to me. I'm a practical person. I learn by doing, and I think that's been true for everything else in my life too. At sixteen I left and got an apprenticeship in IT. It was stable work and I was grateful for it, but I kept thinking about doing my own thing again.

Two years later I got fired. Turns out starting a web design business on the side, and checking your business email from your work computer, isn't the smartest move. Looking back, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.

With nothing to fall back on I went all in. That year I spent my weeks travelling from Liverpool to Birmingham, staying with my girlfriend (now fiancée, and soon to be wife). She was in her first year of uni, and I was building websites for anyone who would pay me. I taught myself everything through Stack Overflow, documentation and tutorials at two in the morning. Every project taught me something new, even the ones that went nowhere.

At nineteen I got my first professional job in web development. Over the next few years I worked at a couple of different web agencies, building mostly Shopify websites during the day and working on my own apps at night and on weekends. This is where I met some of my closest friends.

The whole time I had this restless feeling that I wanted to create something of my own, to work for myself somehow. I just didn't know what that looked like yet. So I tried everything. I ordered forty kilograms of shredded memory foam to our small apartment, convinced I could sell handmade pillows online. I tried dropshipping dog beds and made five thousand dollars in a weekend from Facebook ads. Then the refund requests started pouring in. Wrong colours. Forty day shipping times. I spent the next month apologising to strangers and watching that profit disappear.

Then I started building apps, sharing progress online, and found my way into the build in public community. Something clicked. This felt different. These were my people, others who were shipping things and figuring it out as they went.

In 2020, I built and sold my first app in a $100k acquihire deal. It was during the GPT-3 beta when you had to get permission from one of the OpenAI devs just to output a response longer than a thousand tokens. Fun times. That deal gave me the confidence to keep going, to keep building in public and shipping products. Some worked, most didn't, but each one taught me something.

All of that brought me here, to Cap.

Cap is the open source screen recording and sharing app that works across every platform, and I'm working on it full-time as a solo founder.

Most screen recorders treat you like a problem to be solved. They want your email before you can do anything. They watermark your videos until you pay. They make exporting a five-step process. I wanted to build the opposite. Open the app, hit record, export the video or share the link. No hoops. Just a tool that respects your time and gets out of the way.

I've never been good at waiting until something is "perfect". I'd rather put it out there and see how people use it. That's how I've always learned best. Not in theory, but in practice, with real feedback from real people.

Outside of work, I'm getting married in 2026. My fiancée runs her own business too, which means we both have flexible schedules and get to travel regularly. We also have a French Bulldog named Xara who has never once acknowledged that we pay the mortgage. She runs the house. We just live in it.

Cap grew a lot in 2025. Not just the numbers, but the shape of it. I understand what it is now, and what it could be. 2026 is about building on that. There's a lot I want to ship.

Most days I still feel like that kid on his bedroom floor, pressing the power button and waiting to see if it works. The difference is now I know that if it doesn't, I'll figure it out. The answer is usually out there if you keep looking.