Seven failed attempts, one boxing gym, then SHWDWN's first £100,000
Joshua Chumber spent seven years building companies that went nowhere. The idea that stuck came from a badly built ticket page at a small boxing show.
Joshua Chumber started his first company at 17 and another at 19. Neither scaled, and nor did the ones that followed.
After seven years of building, he says he had reached the point of believing none of it would work.
Until he was 24 he was working full-time and living with his parents. He then quit the job, left home and moved to London, where he knew nobody.
The first months were lonely. He had no friends in the city and little going on outside work.
So he joined a local boxing gym. He vomited in his first three sessions and kept turning up.
What appealed, on his account, was that the sport does not tolerate performance. "You can pretend to be busy. You can pretend to be successful," he says. Once the bell goes, the work is either done or it is not.
The gym also produced people. He met his trainer there, and the trainer later became his co-founder.
SHWDWN came out of a small irritation. Chumber went to buy a ticket for an event his trainer had recommended and found the existing ticketing site barely worked.
At the same time he had heard promoters talking about wanting to stream their shows, and fighters wanting families abroad to watch them fight. Smaller events had no straightforward way to do it.
He built SHWDWN over a weekend. His trainer arranged a meeting with the promoter whose website he had been complaining about, and the two agreed to work together.
The company says it is signing promoters regularly, that fighters are using the platform to sell and track their own tickets, and that promoters are running events through it.
On its own figures, SHWDWN is on track to process more than £100,000 for promoters by the end of the year, roughly six months after its first live event. That number has not been published anywhere a reader can check it.
The useful part for anyone stuck on their eighth idea is the sequence. Chumber did not go looking for a boxing company; he went looking for something he was bad at, spent two years in the room, and found the problem from the inside.
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