From Electrician to £3M-Backed Startup: Jack Hopkins Built Tradeaze Delivering Bricks Himself

Jack Hopkins was a qualified electrician who got so frustrated watching jobs grind to a halt that he put £200K of his own savings on the line, got on a bike, and started delivering bricks himself. That experiment became Tradeaze, now a UK construction logistics marketplace with nearly 3,000 drivers, partnerships with Travis Perkins and Jewson, and £3M raised to date.

The origin story is just the beginning though. Fewer than 1% of UK builders' merchants offer same-day delivery, despite construction workers losing an estimated two hours a day to chasing materials. Jack quantifies the scale of that problem brilliantly with a single story about a £50 delivery that unlocked an £80K staged payment for a tradesperson who could not afford to wait another 90 days. In this episode Jamie traces the full journey from a WhatsApp MVP in Fulham to a national on-demand platform.

You will hear how Jack and his co-founders drove their own vans for a year to understand both sides of their marketplace, how they landed Travis Perkins as a trial customer before they had a polished product, and the discipline that came from raising in small tranches when investors kept saying no. There is also a candid stretch on where AI is already cutting real operational costs and why e-commerce checkout is the next major frontier for the business.

About Tradeaze
Tradeaze is a UK construction logistics marketplace connecting builders' merchants with a nationwide network of on-demand delivery drivers. Built for the trades, the platform gives merchants and contractors access to same-day and priority delivery for everything from small electrical parts to full loads of timber and bricks, with vehicles ranging from bikes through to flatbed trucks. Founded in 2021 and now operating across all major UK regions, Tradeaze works with some of the country's largest builders' merchants and has nearly 3,000 drivers on the platform.