0 8 I T HE H A M P TONI A N
ADNAN EBRAHIM OH (2008)
Minding His Business Named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2020, founder of CarThrottle (the Top Gear for the Facebook generation), which he recently sold for an undisclosed sum, and co-founder and CEO of MindLabs, dubbed the Peloton for the mind, Adnan is a seasoned tech entrepreneur. We decided to take a look at the man behind the buzz, to find out more about his path to success. So where did Adnan’s entrepreneurialism come from? His family encouraged him without even knowing it. His father was a dentist and Adnan helped him with his book-keeping, whilst his mother ran a jewellery business. “I was brought up around an independent way of thinking and encouraged to challenge the status quo.” During his time at Hampton, Adnan began selling fashionable (at the time!) wristbands to his fellow classmates and then started to see the real potential of the internet. He realised that on eBay they were selling for ten times more than face value. “I created my first auctions and started shipping these wristbands out of my house. I would get my mum to run down to the shops and buy as many as she could.” After seeing reasonable returns from the wristband sales, Adnan moved onto selling iPods, but the venture was unsuccessful and he lost money. “I got stung quite badly. I lost a couple of thousand pounds... it turned out to be a fake seller. At the time, I made a vow that only an inexperienced guy would make: I would never spend money to make money, so that’s why I moved into the world of websites.” After a day at school, Adnan would go home and get straight online, creating all manner of websites, forums and applications. “I was a chronic tinkerer on the internet, it was my playground!”. At 16, Adnan got into blogging and set up Blogtrepreneur, a blog explaining how internet marketing worked.
Blogging turned out to be more lucrative, when he started selling advertising space on the site. Adnan could see he had the makings of a successful online business idea when the pennies became “ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred... to a couple of thousand dollars a month”. There came a point, before his 18th birthday, when he realised he wasn’t spending as much time on the blog as he needed to. “Most of my time was spent completing university applications, so when I got home from school, I’d publish an article, tweak some designs and try to sell some advertising, but only working on it a couple of hours a day wasn’t enough”. He sold the business at 18, having kept it under wraps from his parents until he needed the requisite legal papers signing. “I had this second life online and I didn’t want people to find out about it. I didn’t want people to think, ‘Why is he blogging when he’s coming home from school, what a loser.” CarThrottle was started in 2009, after Adnan realised there was no online platform for people like him: young, millennial car enthusiasts. He set it up from his bedroom while he was studying economics at University College London. Using the cash from his previous venture, he started writing about his passion. “I would watch Top Gear religiously.
Every Sunday night we’d sit down in front of the TV and watch it as a family.” Before he knew it his clips from car launches, filmed with a handheld camera from PC World, were getting a 1000-hits, and later up to 100,000 a month. It wasn’t all plain sailing though: “The first year was really hard. My commute was from my bed to my desk. When you’re on your own it’s an isolating experience.” There was also peer pressure as most of his university friends went into banking after they graduated. Dubbed ‘Buzzfeed for cars’, the site quickly evolved into a vibrant community serving millions of users called CTzens – who followed the brand on apps and social media. Adnan remembers when the word “million” started to emerge on his spreadsheet. “The million-number started to come quite quickly, in 2013, 2014, both in terms of the valuation of our business, in terms of hitting our first million pounds in revenue, hitting our first million subscribers on YouTube, having our first million fans on Facebook... we were really gathering pace.”