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Fram Gommendy: So, JT, how
did it all start?
Jethro: The first conception
was August 2010. Originally there was myself and
another guy from Abergavenny and he’d seen some people doing
some tennis videos online and that was where the idea came
from, and we said well can’t we do something in squash and
we decided to give it a go. We started thinking about it and
then there was a year of faffing around.
When we started it was just a case of sticking up on
YouTube and seeing where it took us I think. I didn’t
really know what I was expecting and I certainly didn’t know
that much about speaking to a camera, didn’t really know
anything about editing. It was kind of me and a laptop just
putting some stuff out there and seeing what happened
really.
FG: How did Peter
Nicol come and join then?
 Jethro:
Because of my sponsorship with Prince and Pete was managing
my sponsorship I asked him if he would be up for getting
involved, and that was it really.
So he did some videos at Canary Wharf and me and Jon looked
at each other and said, "oh god he really knows what he’s
talking about and we should try and get him involved."
So then we offered him a percentage of the company and from
there I ended up falling out with my old business partner
and it didn’t look like it was going to get off the ground
but eventually we managed to put that behind us and he
handed his shares to Peter.
In January 2012, I then
said, come on lets do this and with a little inheritance
from my Granddad I decided to go for it, we built the
website on a budget. July 2nd 2012 was the actual launch
date, so it’s just over 3 years.
FG: In your opinion,
what are the reasons for your success?
Jethro:
I think out and out it was the desire to make it work, plus
a huge amount of time and effort into it. Connections, in
reality have really opened up doors, so the fact that Peter
is involved is obviously great. He’s got lots of friendships
with lots of different squash players, so getting people
like Thierry Lincou and John White, that instantly
gave us credibility.
But then the social media side of things,
what we’ve done on Facebook, giving away free videos
and other content has probably given us the foundation upon
which everything else has been built upon.
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