Tom Dudderidge: Riding the iPod bandwagon to £25m

Salesman Tom Dudderidge started his own business selling Taiwanese i-Pod docks for cars. Four year slater his form was designing its own products, and bringing in sales of £25 a year.

In 2004 Tom Dudderidge was on a plane back to London, having just closed "the biggest deal of my career". But something wasn't right. "It wasn't that I didn't like sales. I loved it. It was just that completing contracts after a sale was such a long, drawn-out process. It was soul-destroying." Dudderidge, now 31, had carved out a career selling mobile text-messaging software to large telecoms firms. By the time the plane landed, he decided he would start his own business.

With a young family and a mortgage to pay, the newly unemployed Dudderidge needed to make his idea work. "I had just bought an iPod and thought it would change the music industry completely." The iPod music player was nothing new, but the most recent version was the first that could be used with all PCs, not just Apple's Macs. So Dudderidge and his business partner, brother Jamie, began to focus on gadgets and accessories. They scoured trade shows for a product and eventually hit on a Taiwanese manufacturer who was making an iPod dock that allowed people to listen to the device in their cars. The pair had managed to "scrape together" £23,000 from friends, family and credit cards and bought their first shipment. "We had exclusivity with the producer and there was only one other firm in the UK with a similar product." Naming their firm Disruptive, the brothers persuaded online iPod accessory vendors to sell the car dock. They also sourced other accessories, such as cables and cases.

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James McKeigue

James graduated from Keele University with a BA (Hons) in English literature and history, and has a certificate in journalism from the NCTJ. James has worked as a freelance journalist in various Latin American countries.He also had a spell at ITV, as welll as wring for Television Business International and covering the European equity markets for the Forbes.com London bureau. James has travelled extensively in emerging markets, reporting for international energy magazines such as Oil and Gas Investor, and institutional publications such as the Commonwealth Business Environment Report. He is currently the managing editor of LatAm INVESTOR, the UK's only Latin American finance magazine.