My story, the long version

Before Affiliate Window

I grew up in Derbyshire, lived in Nottingham and then Manchester, and later moved down to London. I’ve been self-employed since I was 18. Before Affiliate Window, my business partner Andy Totten and I ran LatestEvents, a concert travel company and tour operator. We took thousands of fans by bus to concerts in Paris, Amsterdam and Cologne. The job was to give people a brilliant day out, and that idea has stuck with me in everything I’ve done since.

Here’s one you won’t find online. I was one of the three or four people behind The Stone Roses at Spike Island in 1990. The day before tickets went on sale, I sat up all night writing a new price on every single ticket with a marker pen. It didn’t make it into Made of Stone, the Stone Roses film by Shane Meadows, a friend from my Nottingham days. So consider this the director’s cut. (Shane, get in touch, mate. The last time I saw you was at the Brit Awards and we were both too drunk to remember to swap numbers.)

Affiliate Window (Awin)

In 1998 and 1999 I spent four months at home writing the original Affiliate Window platform myself in PHP and MySQL. The name came about by chance. I couldn’t find a domain I liked, I had double glazing being fitted that week, and while I was typing “affiliate” the word “window” came to mind. (Some companies are named after Greek gods. Mine was named after double glazing.) I built the website, launched the platform in 1999 and handled the early sales to small and mid-sized merchants. Andy and I funded the business ourselves with no outside investment, and it was profitable from 2002.

I grew Affiliate Window, now Awin, into one of the largest affiliate networks in Europe. By 2009 the business, then owned by our company Digital Window Ltd, worked with more than 850 advertisers and 80,000 publishers, including Dixons Store Group, Nike and Vodafone, with annual sales above €40 million.

In August 2009 Axel Springer and PubliGroupe bought a 50.1% majority stake. Andy and I kept the remaining 49.9%, and I continued as chief executive. The deal was covered by Campaign, Horizont and the German business press, and announced in Axel Springer’s own press release, which named Andy and me as the two founders.

In March 2010 I led our acquisition of the buy.at affiliate network from AOL, which I described at the time as a milestone for the business. The deal, also reported by Crain’s New York Business, gave us a combined presence in the UK, the US and Scandinavia. I led the integration, which ended with the buy.at brand folding into Affiliate Window as the US platform launched in 2012.

By the time I left in 2012 the team had grown to more than 200 people. Mark Walters took over as CEO with Adam Ross as COO, and Adam Ross is now CEO of Awin, one of the world’s largest affiliate networks.

Recognition

• a4u Awards, Publisher Choice of Network and the network innovation award, won in 2007 and three years in a row to 2009.
• Sunday Times Tech Track 100, ranked three years running, rising from 35th in 2007 to 18th in 2008.
• Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For, listed as Affiliate Window.

Zoo Management

In 2010 I founded Zoo Management to manage The Australian Pink Floyd Show. Working with promoters Neil Warnock and Steve Homer, I took the show from small venues to arenas and more than 100 shows a year around the world, including The O2 in London. Zoo Management produced the concert film The Australian Pink Floyd Show: Live from the Hammersmith Apollo, filmed in July 2011 and broadcast on PBS in the US. I also managed The South.

FanCircles

In 2015 I founded GigRev, now FanCircles, to give artists their own branded superfan apps where they own their fan data. In 2018 our Seedrs campaign beat its £250,000 target by nearly £50,000, and I spoke about the business with Music Week, BusinessCloud and the Music Biz Weekly podcast.

In 2019 we worked with IE:Music on Robbie Williams’ Roundhouse show. By 2021, as FanCircles, the platform had more than 500,000 users and over 40 acts, including Paloma Faith, The Levellers and Ed Harcourt, and The Alarm made more than £20,000 in subscriptions from their FanCircles app.

In 2024 FanCircles raised $2 million from angel investors, covered by Digital Music News and Music Ally. Clients have included UB40, Culture Club, Wolf Alice and Wet Wet Wet. Through FanCircles we also built the Most Haunted app, and in 2025 I talked to Net Influencer about why followers are not the same as fans.

Superfan apps were where FanCircles started, and they’re still at its heart. In 2026 we added a second product, FanCircles PushPass. It takes what we learned about keeping fans close and gives it to brands, putting them on their customers’ lock screens through Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.

Investing, advice and board roles

Since 2012 I have invested in companies across digital advertising, technology and beyond. I was an early investor in SuperAwesome, the kid-safe digital media company acquired by Epic Games in 2020, and I have backed a number of other early-stage businesses in advertising, media and health technology. I have raised funding for my own businesses. I also advise startup and growth companies and have sat on the boards of other businesses. If you’d like that kind of help, here’s how I work with founders.

Zoobu

I set up Zoobu Limited in 2012 to bring this experience together. Zoobu runs its own network of affiliate content sites and manages affiliate programmes for brands, so it works on both sides of the channel. Zoobu also owns a portfolio of hundreds of high-value .com domain names.