When the Holiday Watchdog founders sold up to Expedia, their travel site was one of the most well known in the UK. Now they aim to turn a second enterprise, Sunshine.co.uk, into a £100m operation

Chris Brown I was working at lastminute.com and decided to set up my own review website from scratch. I joined a forum for affiliate marketers and met Chris in a chat room. My opening line was along the lines of "hello, your name's Chris, too". It was like an internet-dating story. He looked at my website, and said: "You've got a great idea there."

Chris Clarkson I was from a technical background and had been developing websites. Chris and I started swapping ideas and I suggested his site might work as a database-driven website.

CB It was [a case of] "I'll show you mine, and you show me yours". People at that time were quite secretive about what their websites did. He was more technically advanced, had been learning longer than I had, and said: "I've got some spare time. I'll rebuild it for you."

CC We ended up working together on it. Holiday Watchdog grew from there. We launched the website at the beginning of December 2003, and in January 2004 we made our first £1,400. Every month, it got bigger and bigger.

CB By April 2004 we set it up as a company, having only ever met each other once. We were making about £20,000 a month profit, pretty much doing nothing. We sold advertising space on the site, and generated traffic ourselves with the reviews. We wondered how long it would take TripAdvisor [owned by Expedia] to come knocking at the door. It was three and a half years.

CC We always had in the back of our minds that it would be nice to sell it one day. We were based in our bedrooms [originally] in our spare time, so we had flights of fancy. It's always nice when it comes true. It was a lot of hard work at the start. We were social hermits for a good couple of years. It was the satisfaction of getting it to make a bit of money.

CB We set up Sunshine.co.uk in the May before we sold Holiday Watchdog. It's an online travel agency, so we don't have any sales staff. We took what we learnt from running a holiday review site, search engine optimisation (SEO) and what people want, and put that into an online travel website.

CC I think we set up Sunshine because we were a bit bored at that point. We'd been doing Holiday Watchdog for three or four years, and it came up at the right time. We were looking for something else to do.

CB Title Tags [an investment company] has also evolved. We had a friend who had a great idea for a website, and was passionate about it, but lacked the skill or ability to get it running online. Chris and I had the technical knowledge, and could do the SEO ourselves, so for a share of the business, we said we would provide everything-get him started and give him a wage for a year so he could concentrate on that. We have funded two businesses: findthefairways.com and debtwatchdog.com.

CC We want the people that we work with to be passionate about their business. That's the main thing, because that's how we work. We did get a lot of applications where people just seemed very interested in getting some money. I find it strange that they were doing a start-up and paying themselves salaries of £30,000 to £60,000. I was thinking, "where's your sacrifice"? We're not looking for people who want money just to make money.

CB We got quite a flurry of people who all wanted large sums of cash for Web-based start-ups. From our experience, you don't need any money to set up a website. It's just a bit of elbow grease. We set up Holiday Watchdog with £30. Sunshine was set up with nothing, apart from our time.

CC We'll always veer towards dotcom businesses, because that's where our experience is. I run the marketing and content side of Sunshine and Chris runs the office and the customer service stuff. What I do, and what the development guys do, can be done at home [Glasgow]. I wouldn't swap with them [Chris and the customer service staff] for the world.

CB I enjoy running the travel business. It's put me back in touch with people I used to work with. We've controlled its growth, and we've kept staff to a bare minimum. We should finish this financial year on around £24m turnover. We aim to get it over £100m before we even look at selling it.

CC There's no short-cut. It's always hard work. There really is no get-rich-quick scheme.