I Spent 25 Years Failing So You Don't Have To

TL;DR:

• For 25 years I tried to start a business while holding down a job, and every attempt hit the same walls: time, capital, fixed costs and, lately, code.
• AI made writing code fast, but putting a real business app live is still hard engineering, and the popular tools are built for developers.
• 9horsemen exists so people with real expertise can start without capital, without code and without quitting their job. Gallop is the first piece.

If you’re reading this at your desk, quietly switching between a spreadsheet and an idea you’ve had in a notebook for months, I know exactly who you are.

I was you. For a quarter of a century.

The dream of building something of your own doesn’t go away. It sits in the back of your mind on the morning commute, in pointless meetings, and late at night once the kids are asleep. But between rent, loan repayments, school fees and keeping a household running, walking away from a steady salary to “take a leap of faith” isn’t brave. It’s reckless.

Over the last 25 years I tried almost every kind of business you can think of, and I hit every wall there is.

2005: HealthBits (the manufacturing trap)

My first venture came from a good place: helping people eat better. I bought two commercial milling machines to make and deliver fresh, healthy flour and baked goods.

Reality caught up fast. Sourcing grain, running machinery, meeting hygiene standards and packaging products is physical, process-heavy work. Doing all of that alongside a full-time job was impossible. I ran out of hours in the day.

2007: Blue Giraffe (the agency trap)

Next came a marketing and branding agency. I signed a corporate client and hired two people. The money was real, and so was the cage.

When the client opened a new store, I had to be there. When they launched a product, they needed me on site. When materials had to be sourced, that meant flying to manufacturing hubs overseas. The revenue was solid, but the business needed all of me, all of the time. It was far too volatile to justify giving up a salary.

2010: Telecom towers (the capital trap)

During the telecom boom I saw a clear structural opportunity: leasing land and infrastructure for mobile network towers. Companies like Indus Towers and GTL went on to prove the model.

The barrier was money. Land leases and heavy infrastructure needed millions in up-front risk capital. I had no family wealth and no investors. The idea died on the drawing board because ordinary people can’t carry that kind of risk.

2020: The neighbourhood store (the inventory trap)

So I stripped out the complexity and went back to basics: a neighbourhood grocery and convenience store. People always need to eat. How could everyday essentials fail?

Easily. Physical retail is fixed costs every week: rent, commercial power, spoilage and shrink. Some days almost nobody came in. On the days they did, the average spend was a dollar or two, on margins of cents. I was paying out of my own pocket every week to keep the lights on. Within twelve months, I closed the doors.

The cubicle years

By then the pattern was clear. Sometimes the wall was capital. Sometimes it was time. Sometimes it was simply that a family relied on me, and I couldn’t gamble with their stability.

So I stayed in my corporate career. I paid the bills, the mortgage and the retirement savings, and did the work in front of me, while the headlines celebrated overnight founders and venture-backed unicorns. For a long time I thought the fire had gone out.

2025: The false dawn of AI

When generative AI went mainstream, the old itch came back. In 2025 I registered 9horsemen.com.

I started with something I thought would go viral: an automated meme generator. It ran on free cloud tiers, a $20 AI subscription and a cheap domain, so unlike the store it wasn’t burning cash. But the idea was wrong. Normal people don’t need daily memes, only a handful of creators ever stopped by, and there was no business behind it.

2026: The vibe-coding reality check

By 2026, AI tools had grown up. Writing scripts, algorithms and analysis models took minutes instead of weeks. It felt like a superpower.

Then came the cold shower. Running code on your laptop is nothing like running a secure, reliable app on the internet. Putting an app live, adding sign-in, connecting payments, keeping each business’s data separate and making it work on a phone wasn’t an AI miracle. It was hard, full-stack engineering.

That was the breakthrough.

The “build an app over a weekend” videos leave out who’s doing the building. Most of them are experienced developers, or people with serious technical help. The tools they praise were built by developers, for developers. When an accountant, a plumber, a personal trainer or a salon owner opens one of them, the first thing they see is a terminal window and a database schema.

What 9horsemen exists to do

So I rebuilt 9horsemen around one person: someone with real expertise in their trade, an idea or a small business, and no time or interest in writing software.

We don’t build speculative enterprise platforms. We build clean, reliable tools for real businesses.

Gallop turns a description of your business into a working website, online booking, customer records and a business app on your phone, in a few minutes. You run it like a normal person, with buttons and forms, not code or endless prompts.

If your business needs something Gallop can’t do yet and it would help other businesses too, tell us. We’d rather build it into Gallop for everyone than quote you for custom work.

Gallop is the first piece. Next, we want to help with the steps either side of it: testing whether an idea has customers before you build it, and getting your business in front of people once it’s running.

You don’t have to mortgage your house. You don’t have to quit your job tomorrow. You don’t have to spend your evenings learning JavaScript. Building with Gallop is free, and when you’re ready there’s one plan, priced for your country, with no contract. Put your idea in front of real customers, take your first booking, and see what you’re capable of.

I spent two and a half decades taking the hits so you don’t have to.

Welcome to 9horsemen. Let’s get to work.