Catch of the Decade

INTRODUCTION

How do two immigrant brothers with no money, limited industry knowledge, amateur technical skills and strong accents (that hasn't changed much …) build some of Australia's most successful digital businesses with a combined exit valued at more than $1 billion?

It's a good question. We get asked it a lot, which is why we wrote this book.

You won't know our names and you probably won't recognise our faces, but you'll almost certainly know some of the brands we built, sold and/or merged for more than $1 billion after just 13 years in business.

Here are just a few of them:

• Catchoftheday: Australia's most popular shopping site
• EatNow/Menulog: an app that revolutionised the food delivery business
• Scoopon: a major disruptor in the services and entertainment sector
• Luxury Escapes: a travel deal site that made luxury travel affordable for all.

How did we build these brands, and, more importantly, how did we sell them for such a huge amount? Not by watching midday TV, working a nine‐to‐five job or borrowing money from a rich uncle to ‘give things a go’. We built these brands with our bare hands, doing everything ourselves (surrounded by great people, of course) and doing it the hard way.

But what does ‘doing it the hard way’ even mean?

It means:

• getting up at dawn in the freezing cold to set up a market stall in Wantirna (in suburban Melbourne) to sell imperfect clothes, while all our mates were sleeping off their hangovers from the night before
• driving around the industrial ...