From zero to £1.5m turnover in two years on an AI pricing and operations platform we built ourselves
Secondhand gear only makes money if it is priced right at intake. I built Prism, the platform that values gear from live market prices in 15 seconds instead of 15 minutes, runs intake, inventory and listing, and sells across Shopify, eBay and Reverb from a single stock pool.
At a glance
- Client
- Audio Trader Ltd, my own venture
- Role
- Co-founder and CEO, 2023 to present
- Built
- Prism, the AI pricing and operations platform
- Channels
- Shopify, eBay and Reverb from a single stock pool
- Turnover
- Over £1.5m within two years of founding
- Profitability
- Profitable within two years of launch
- Website
- audiotrader.co.uk
The situation
The secondhand music gear market is large and fragmented. Every item is unique, condition varies, and the price you offer at intake decides whether you make money or not. Get it wrong in one direction and you lose the trade; wrong in the other and you lose the margin. I co-founded Audio Trader with two former World of Books colleagues to apply high-volume recommerce operations to music gear: buy, test, grade, list and sell at scale, with technology doing the heavy lifting rather than headcount. The constraint was capital. We had to build it lean and reach profitability without a large raise.
What I did
Built Prism. The platform behind the business. Prism researches live market prices for any piece of gear and returns a valuation in 15 seconds, using a tiered offer formula and condition multipliers so the logic is consistent across every member of staff. It then runs the inbound flow: intake, testing and grading, inventory, listing and marketplace management, with one record per item pushed to Shopify, eBay and Reverb and stock synchronised so nothing sells twice.
Launched the website. Redesigned and relaunched audiotrader.co.uk and worked closely with Seed to optimise the ecommerce experience and conversion.
Designed the operating model. Nationwide collections via courier or bespoke logistics for large lots, in-house function testing, standardised photography and listing templates, and a consignment service for partners and institutions.
Raised and structured the funding. Angel investment, EIS compliance end to end, and a technology-for-equity partnership with Brightec to build the customer trade-in app. Handled the legal and Companies House work without external counsel.
What made the difference
Pricing at intake is the whole business. Putting AI on that problem first, before anything customer-facing, meant every other part of the operation was built on stock we already knew we could sell at margin. The second thing was using equity to buy capability we could not afford in cash.
Music gear genuinely gets better with age and use. It doesn't wear out, it gains character. I've just put my money into a business built on that.