Shopatweet

Lloyd’s Story

Dan approached me right at the beginning and all he had was a concept, but he couldn’t visualise it. As soon as Dan explained Shopatweet to me I thought this could be really good. Dan’s optimism and passion really struck me, but what I particularly liked about the concept of Shopatweet was that it’s got the social networking aspect but also the shopping market. I’ve always felt you can go on shopping websites and see testimonials of how good a product is but you don’t know if they’re real or not, but with Shopatweet you would have comments from people you know. So it is exactly what it says on the tin – social network meets shopping!

He obviously didn’t have any money to do this with and I knew he would need every penny to get it off the ground so I said – I’ll come on board and work for you for nothing, but if this thing goes big, just remember me! I just thought I can see this working and I’m willing to take a risk with this. In the end, Dan offered me shares in the company. So we designed what we envisaged the site to be like, spending a good 3-4 hours in the evening tweaking the designs. We wanted the site to be just a nice, clean looking website, nothing too busy, nothing too cluttered, somewhere that someone with no technical ability could go on and they could basically set themselves up. One thing Shopatweet will offer as well is a design service if you need a logo or you need a website done, and I will head up that side of it as well.

Scott’s Story

Scott joined HSBC straight out of University on an entry level programme and worked his way up
to I.T. managerial grade, where he was part of a global team that looked after the HSBC security system. However, Scott had always had a burning ambition to be his own boss and eventually decided to strike out on his own and set up his own website design company “Cubed Pixel.”
When Scott saw Shopatweet on Peopleperhour.com he immediately thought it was a massive concept. But on closer inspection of the template design he realised it still needed a lot of work. For one thing, Shopatweet had been designed with an MD5 encryption. “Because of my
background, I knew that MD5 had been left for dead in the 90’s. It was cracked and exposed and not a technology they should be using. In the end we pushed the boat out and went for “Blowfish” which is a very secure method of encrypting and has never been cracked. It’s also scale-able which we liked, so the bigger the system the better encryption can get and the harder it is to crack because it will do “rounds” of security, right down to the very first registration of basic name and email address.

After receiving an initial sum of £2000 to put together the security and help with the design, Scott has since agreed to work for equity in the company. Scott said: “I wouldn’t be interested in equity share if I didn’t believe this was going to work. I believe this is the next step on from Facebook, or Pinterest or Ebay.’