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Concordia Merchant Taylors’ School
Design My Night
Nick Telson (1997-2002) co-founded
, the leading
nightlife website in the UK. He recalls
his time at Taylors’ and writes about life
as an entrepreneur
I started at Taylors’ in 1997 aged
13, of course excited, but also nervous
about meeting lots of new people at
such a huge school. As well as the high
academic level, at the time, Taylors’
was head and shoulders above other
schools in terms of extra-curricular
opportunities and sports facilities;
that’s what I really wanted to take
advantage of.
Unfortunately my passion was football,
not rugby! When I joined, football
was a bit of a second class citizen in
everyone’s eyes but by the time I left in
2002, I had enjoyed two years in the 1st
XI and football was more appreciated…
Hopefully, this trend has continued over
the last 13 years! Throughout my years,
I was a quiet, head-down, hard-study
student. I knew I wanted As and A*s at
GCSE and all As at A-Level so in order
to reach these targets I always put work
first, while still getting involved with
sports and activities.
Looking back now, my stint in
Community Service on Fridays was
actually one of the most important
parts of my time at Taylors’. It taught
me humility, how to interact with
different people and compassion; for
me, all important life skills…even if I
didn’t always enjoy mowing Anne’s
lawn in Northwood on a rainy Friday
afternoon. The Sixth Form was when I
really flourished. I thoroughly enjoyed
the subjects I had chosen (English
Language, Spanish, French and Politics),
was in the JCR and I started my own
football magazine, which I sold to other
students at lunch.
If my memory serves me correctly, it
was called Footy Fanatic; a small team of
us put the monthly magazine together
and worked with the Print Room staff to
put it together. This was my first go at
being an entrepreneur. It sold out every
month and we donated the money made
to a local charity.
It wasn’t until nine years after I
left Taylors’ and after Nottingham
University that I picked up from
my Footy Fanatic days and started
Andrew (best friend from university
and co-founder) and I were on a trip to
New York and were blown away with
the amazing nightlife knowledge of our
hotel concierge. After a few ice-cold
Margaritas, a business idea was born.
We decided we’d had enough of the
half-baked nightlife websites and the
constant hassle of planning a night out
in our favourite city in the world. What
London needed was a site where you
could discover and unlock the best, the
new, the wallet-friendly, and the secret
nightlife on offer. But also a website to
help plan, book online and buy tickets
so the site does all the hard work, so you
could simply enjoy a cracking night out.
We both had very successful
corporate jobs so the risks were large.
We had spent five years climbing the
ladder at our respective companies, so
jumping ship was not only a financial
risk but we also risked undoing all the
hard-work we had done to establish
ourselves in those worlds.
We both always wanted to set up our
own company but it was a definite step
into the unknown. I don’t think we were
ever scared, at the start it’s more exciting
than anything else, but as time ticks on
and the bank balance drops you do have
to be realistic. We always believed in the
idea and thought we had enough about
us, in a growing industry, to succeed.
Getting the business off the ground
came in two stages: the initial 18 months
of grunt work, physically walking
into hundreds of bars in London and
explaining the concept and trying to get
some early adopters on board. This we
managed to do.
We also read up a lot on SEO and
made sure everything on the site was
“Google friendly” so we would get picked
up. After about six months we began to
see traction from Google, which quickly