Virtual Valley

Tom Hunt's entrepreneurial journey started unexpectedly at a fancy dress party in London three years before Virtual Valley. After wearing leggings to the event and receiving positive feedback, he and friends jokingly decided to start a men's leggings company. They launched with zero budget—purchasing female leggings from eBay and literally using Tipp-Ex pens to "brand" them. At their first market stall on Brick Lane in East London, they sold zero pairs out of 22 in stock. But instead of quitting, they built an e-commerce store and persisted with free social media marketing.

The leggings business grew organically: 150 pairs sold in year one, 450 in year two. A Daily Mail article about three young city workers selling men's leggings went viral with 66,000 shares, leading to a Dragon's Den appearance (the Canadian Shark Tank). While the TV exposure raised brand awareness, it didn't directly drive sales since the BBC couldn't mention their brand name. The real growth came from word-of-mouth and social media.

Meanwhile, Tom had left Accenture in early 2015 after running a side hustle outsourcing service for London startups. He'd built a team in the Philippines and was charging clients $600-$1,500/month, taking a significant markup on assistant salaries. The business worked but consumed all his time—he was spending heavily on custom service delivery rather than building scalable systems.

Midway through 2015, Tom pivoted. Instead of continuing his custom outsourcing service, he decided to build a platform called Virtual Valley to automate what he'd been doing manually. The platform would let entrepreneurs hire pre-vetted Filipino virtual assistants directly, with Virtual Valley taking a 20% commission on top of salaries (which ranged $500-$1,000/month, equivalent to $3-$6/hour). Tom handled recruitment personally, ensuring quality hires. The platform included time-tracking software, payment escrow, and replacement guarantees—addressing the core pain point he'd experienced: finding and building trust with offshore talent.

Tom recognized that hiring offshore was difficult because most people either used unvetted marketplaces like Odesk or built relationships through personal networks. Virtual Valley's value proposition was curation, trust, and transparency. He planned to launch with a bold move: publicly revealing the company's goals and financials to ride the trend of transparency popularized by Buffer and Hubspot, hoping to attract press coverage on TechCrunch and other outlets.

The leggings business taught him that remarkable stories and leveraging existing trends were keys to PR. He aimed to apply these lessons to Virtual Valley's launch.

At the time of this interview (early 2015), Virtual Valley had just launched. Tom's projections were aggressive: $7,000 MRR by February 2016 (about 10 full-time assistants) and $15,000 MRR by year-end. He estimated averaging $8,000 MRR across 2015, totaling roughly $96,000 in first-year revenue. His long-term exit goal was to sell Virtual Valley for $4 million. Tom was 26, focused on the journey rather than the destination, and confident in the market gap he'd identified.