Around the 1st of September I usually reflect on my year. It’s a natural time in the UK for reflection, the end of summer, start of the new school year. This time, it’s a month late, because…
After 3 years and 1 month, it’s time to move on from The Collecting Group [TCG]. I’ve had a great experience with a fantastic team, learned a huge amount, and we’ve achieved things together that I’m genuinely proud of.
What We Built Together
Over the last three years we’ve invested heavily in building Hammerdown into a scalable, reliable, high-performance platform that underpins collectingcars.com, watchcollecting.com and what comes next. The team’s results speak for themselves:
- Platform consolidation: merged cars and watches into one unified database and user base, creating the foundation for a truly scalable platform and future verticals
- Containerised architecture: enabling on-demand scaling, reducing complexity and cost, and accelerating delivery
- Release velocity: from ~2 releases a month to 40+, a 1900% increase, accelerating time-to-value
- Reliability: no unplanned outages since October 2023, with automated recovery bringing MTTR down to under a minute
- Performance: 4x improvement in page load speeds for APAC users, now matching UK/EU markets for a consistent global experience (<200ms)
- User impact: 40% decrease in bounce rate, keeping users on site longer, viewing more listings and increasing engagement
- Standardised engineering practices across Next.js, Node.js, and PHP, making onboarding faster and delivery smoother
- AI-augmented engineering: Cursor contributing 30% of production code, boosting productivity.
- Testing transformation: from manual QA to fully automated, improving quality and reliability.
- Operational strength: adopted Datadog, strengthened security through Covert Swarm, and kept AWS costs flat despite strong growth
- Experimentation at scale: adopted Unleash feature flags and A/B testing to drive incremental gains in core KPIs and further enhance the product
- And most importantly, 6 team members promoted and a clear career framework established. A happy, motivated, and skilled team with strong ways of working, more than able to thrive and succeed without me.
Six of the last eight months were company records, and every one profitable. Not just because of technology, but technology certainly helped enable it.
Thanks & Acknowledgements
Leading this team has been nothing short of epic. I’ll miss them all and will be cheering them on from the sidelines. Huge thanks to Dave Edmonston for the opportunity, and to George Young, whose partnership has shaped how I think about Product. Our investor pitches together are memories I’ll treasure. Along with…
What’s Next
Next up is Cognito, a new chapter that feels like both a repeat and an evolution. Another chance to build, scale, and win, but this time with a noble mission at its core. An ambitious CEO, a strong vision, and the drive to scale-up make it an exciting adventure.
If you know anyone studying KS3, GCSE, or A-levels, point them our way:
Olly Brand 