How two 22-year-old founders built an agency serving 550+ clients
Aprendizados de
Jonathan TemboCo-founder
Thomas MaudsleyCo-founder
Antoine MaugerCo-founder, JTA
- Industry
- Growth agency
- Team size
- Small
- Equipes
- Operações e Vendas e RevOps
At 22, Jonathan Tembo and Thomas Maudsley are building the kind of success their parents once hoped they’d have. Just not in quite the way anyone expected.
The two friends run J&T Promotions, an agency with more than 550 clients and a team of 15 full-time employees.
Both made deals with their parents to keep conventional career paths in reserve: Jonathan is preparing to qualify as a solicitor, and Thomas plans to take his accountancy exams. However, neither expects those qualifications to become their day job.
As they built J&T Promotions around university and Jonathan’s law career, the traction they saw gave them confidence that entrepreneurship could become something more. It also gave their parents a reason to believe the unconventional path might work.
“I’m a man of my word,” says Jonathan. “I promised my parents four years ago that I’d become a fully qualified solicitor, and I’m going to keep that promise. But qualifying and choosing a career are two different things. I’ve already chosen mine.”
Two years ago, it was just Tom and me being completely delusional about where we could take the business. Now we’ve got more than 550 clients and a team of 15, and we’ve taken it where we said we would.
Jonathan and Thomas met in school and became best friends, with no plans to start a business together. After graduating, Thomas went to university to study math and economics, while Jonathan began his law degree apprenticeship in Leeds.
Meanwhile, Thomas built a website for his mother, who runs a small campsite.
“I started looking at other websites and thought I could do a better job,” says Thomas. “I went to Jonathan and said, ‘We can build websites for other businesses.’”
Jonathan handled sales before work and during lunch breaks, while Thomas built the websites between university lectures.
“We ran a Meta ad that was just me sitting at a desk saying ‘I’ll build you a website for 300 quid’,” says Thomas. “That ad brought in leads for a year.”
By early summer 2025, Jonathan and Thomas saw how quickly AI was changing what they could build, and decided to go all in.
For Jonathan, that meant walking away from the law apprenticeship he’d worked hard to earn. Thomas took a different leap: turning his early experiments with Lovable into real client work.
He was in the car on the way to his grandmother’s house when a prospective client asked if J&T Promotions could deliver a mobile app. Jonathan built an app in about 20 minutes and showed it to the prospective client.
That moment was almost a life-changing experience. The client signed with us and became our biggest account. It changed what I thought we could build.
The founders didn’t overhaul the agency immediately. They spent the following months testing Lovable while continuing to build client sites manually in WordPress. But by January 2026, Jonathan and Thomas were confident enough in Lovable to move their full website design process over. Since then, J&T Promotions has grown its roster to 550 clients.
That growth gave Jonathan and Thomas something beyond a bigger website business: hundreds of ongoing conversations with business owners.
“They started asking us, ‘What else can you do for me?’” says Jonathan. “And our question back was simple: ‘What else do you need?’ That completely changed the direction we saw for the business.”
As those client requests became more technically complex, Jonathan and Thomas brought in Thomas’s former schoolmate, Antoine Mauger, to expand the scope of their business and lead that development work. Together, they built JTA, a new arm of the business focused on client needs that extend beyond websites.
That work now includes designing and building complex software and business systems. For one client, they designed a solution to connect a property rental company’s booking platform to its existing property management and payment systems. They built a competition and leaderboard platform for a UK dog agility club, and a dashboard that helps a home improvement business track jobs, finances, and invoicing.
“We’re testing a different model where we guide the client as they learn to build directly in Lovable,” says Antoine. “They know the platform, but they need our help figuring out how to build something that can work securely at scale and connect with their existing systems. They’ve been surprised how quickly they can move from an idea to a prototype and then to a launched version.”
As J&T Promotions grew, Jonathan and Thomas found themselves with another business that needed better systems: their own.
“Jonathan and I liked talking about the growth of the business and getting excited about where we could be in a year,” says Thomas. “So I built a simple calculator showing how many websites we were selling, at what price, and what that could mean for our recurring revenue.”
The calculator, called Sync, didn’t stay simple for long. As the company’s client base and team grew, they kept building. Today, Sync is the Lovable-built platform J&T Promotions uses to run nearly every part of the company, connecting each step of the client journey while giving the founders a live view of performance.
“More importantly, the data is all in one place,” says Thomas. “It’s automatically tracked without adding more manual work for the sales or design teams. That’s changed the way we run the business.”
With Sync, the J&T Promotions team can:
J&T Promotions’ projected ARR has more than doubled since May 2026.
“The coolest thing is when we jump on our Monday morning call at 9 a.m. and see 15 people there,” says Jonathan. “It’s one of those moments that reminds us how far we’ve come from when it was just Tom and me.”
The pair still intend to complete their qualifications in law and accounting; they promised their parents, after all. But both founders expect those skills to be useful as J&T Promotions continues to grow.
Jonathan says his mother understood what drove his decision to leave DLA Piper.
“She knows I’m going to keep building and pushing forward,” he says. “Whatever happens, she trusts me to find a way.”
Lovable helped Jonathan and Thomas find their way from a one-off idea to a fast-growing agency. They’re no longer trying to figure out whether they can build a business together. Now they get to figure out how far they can take it.
