It All Started in a Caravan on the West Coast of Scotland

Zondle dissolved in 2018 :(

My wife was pregnant with our first child.

Wayne, my colleague from years back, got in touch with an idea:

What if we created a platform where teachers could write questions and set them to students in games?

That conversation became Zondle.

We were nomadic in those early years. I coded in the south of France, Mauritius, the Outer Hebrides, Cornwall, Devon. Rental accommodation and caravans. Following work, following cheaper living, following the belief that this thing we were building mattered.

When our first daughter was born, we were back on the Northwest coast of Scotland with a couple of caravans on a campsite. I had a tiny office caravan with a single PC and a small desk light. I'd wake at 2am or 3am, code until evening, then spend time with my family.

From that caravan, we grew Zondle to roughly 2 million users worldwide. I was the only person technically building anything. Managing the service, customer support, social media, all the day-to-day outward-facing functions whilst Wayne and others focused on pedagogy and partnerships.

One of the lessons we learned: you can't give something like this away for free and expect to pay the bills. We tried. The service grew. The costs grew faster. That's a mistake I won't make again.

When Zondle collapsed, I lost my house. I lost my health. I lost my mental health for a while. My father died. My mother started developing dementia. Those aren't dramatic statements. They're just what happens when something you've built everything around falls apart, whilst life keeps happening.

But I had three beautiful children and a wife, who depended on me. So I stood back up, created oodlü out of the dust and ruins of what had been, did services work to pay the bills and started again. As I built oodlü I applied everything we'd learned from Zondle. A completely fresh start was probably what the software needed, even if it stung. We started charging for access earlier, though nowhere near enough to make it sustainable. For years, I funded the servers from my personal finances as the product grew. We still haven't taken a penny out of the company for ourselves.

We moved to Edinburgh at the start of COVID. The children needed more opportunities. Better schools. More activities. The space to grow up with options we couldn't give them, whilst living nomadically. But we also moved because my mother’s dementia had developed dramatically and she was dropping off a cliff mentally. She needed care we couldn't provide from the sparsely populated north west coast. Our nearest town was 70 miles away and the west coast services, whilst wonderful, were as sparse as the population. We moved her into a care home the day lockdown started. We only just made it.

During COVID, Ian, a colleague from years ago, got in touch, suggesting we build an open-world platform for virtual events. We built Worldspace, which now forms the backbone of our 3D open-world infrastructure. Ian is now an equal shareholder of oodlü alongside Wayne and me. The technical foundation we'd been missing.

Fourteen years of this. Zondle was incorporated in 2012. That's 14 years of learning what works and what doesn't. Getting the scars that come with building something difficult. Finding the armour you need to keep going when everything suggests you should stop.

So the question is:

Why do I do it?

The answer is simple.

Because I can and because it will make a difference.

I once said to my father that I either wanted to do something very small or very big, nothing in the middle. The very small has been my services work, the consulting and development that has kept my family afloat these years.

The something very big is oodlü. It's my vocation. The thing I must do.

I've not failed until I stop. I believe this is important work. It's worth it.

Occasionally, I get a message from a teacher or parent saying how oodlü has helped their students. Small words of encouragement go a long way when you're getting up at 3 am to move the project forward before the day starts. Often, these messages come from teachers working with children with special needs. That makes it all the more rewarding.

The journey from that caravan on the West Coast of Scotland to where we are now hasn't been linear. It's been messy. Expensive. Personally costly in ways that aren't always visible from the outside. It’s broken me and exhausted me.

And to all those who were understandably frustrated in the dying years of zondle, I am sorry that I let you down.

Hopefully, I can make it up to you again now.

But we're still here. Still building. Still refining what we learned from Zondle into something that could genuinely help children develop in safer environments than what currently exists.

Fourteen years teaches you things. About what matters. About what's sustainable. About the difference between building for growth and building for impact. About the cost of trying to do both.

We're not the same people who started this in 2012.

We're not building the same thing.

oodlü worlds is a world away from where we started.

But the question that drove us then still drives us now:

Can we create something that genuinely helps children learn and develop in ways that respect both their need for engagement and their need for protection?

The caravan is long gone. The servers still need to be paid for. The technical challenges are far more complex. But the core question hasn't changed.

And neither has the commitment to finding an answer.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Find us on the social channels linked at the top of the page.