The founder and managing director of Redhotcurry.com on turning a hobby into a business

Lopa Patel hatched a winning idea as she and her friends sat around a dinner table discussing their lack of cookery skills. Within a year she had launched Redhotcurry.com, which started life in 2001 as a curry recipe-sharing site for Asian women but is now Britain's leading south Asian lifestyle portal.

"A lot of Asian women, particularly those brought up here, can't cook," she explains. "You would think skills would be passed down the generations but the reality is that my social group were busy getting A-levels and going to university, and quite often our mothers were working. It just doesn't happen anymore.

"Redhotcurry.com was always meant to be about curry and nothing more than a hobby," says Patel, who at the time managed her own direct marketing services firm, DMS Direct. She was already running her husband's cricket website and decided to lump the two sites together. "It worked quite well," she says. Soon people were asking her to write about culture, entertainment, religion, food, health, fashion and beauty from a south Asian perspective. What started as a hobbyist's idea gathered momentum.

In January 2002, Redhotcurry.com was featured as Yahoo's website of the week and it grew exponentially. "In the fourth quarter of 2002 we had 63,627 page impressions per month. By the fourth quarter of 2008 this had risen to 400,000 page impressions per month," says Patel.

Three years later, an e-commerce section was added to the site, selling ethnic products such as henna cones and body paint. This, along with advertising sales, is starting to generate income. "There is a glimmer that we might make a profit this year," says Patel, who cashed in an endowment policy to finance Redhotcurry.com and has sunk £130,000 of her savings into it.

Patel completed funding rounds in the first year, but she says this happened before the explosion of social media and nobody wanted to put money into an Asian diaspora website then. "I may never get my investment back, but the emotional satisfaction that Redhotcurry has given me could not be rivalled."

She wants to expand the portal to include a wider set of Asian communities. "People want me to start doing outreach sort of work, which is an odd position to be in because when does a business become a campaigning organisation?" Patel believes that Asian people are under-represented. "They want their stories told, but they also want something done about it. So I'm thinking about what I can add to this."

The businesswoman says her proudest moment was being awarded an MBE this year for services to digital media, the championing of entrepreneurship and for supporting the South Asian community here. If she could do it all over again, Patel says she would have tried to change her "hobbyist" mindset earlier and put a lot more money into the site rather than trying to fund it in a piecemeal fashion.

"This would have given it a more business-focused approach earlier and it might have then turned a profit much quicker. Hindsight is a wonderful thing," she says.