I served 23 years. Now I run a tech company.

When Robbie was released in 2023 after more than two decades in prison, he couldn’t send an email. Three years on, he’s a self-taught tech boss with his own online games business. He tells how he did it – and answers questions from Inside Time

When I was jailed for life in 2000 at the age of 18, the internet was in its early days, and I hadn’t even used it. Mobile phones had the game Snake as their most advanced feature, and the PlayStation 2 hadn’t even come out. 

Fast forward to my release in 2023 and I’m hardly being prepared. I remember it cropped up on my sentence plan to do IT (information technology). “Everything is computer related now,” they told me. “It’s important you learn to prepare for release.” I was forced to do a course at Gartree in 2015 and it was the same the one I’d done 10 years previously at Woodhill, focusing on Windows XP. I’ve never used Windows XP since being released. 

Okay, I had iPhones here and there in jail, but I didn’t use them to learn essentials like online banking or job applications. When I was released a lot of it was still new to me, such as Apple Pay and linking devices, but I picked things up relatively quickly. 

A year or so later, I’m out of work and all the money-making ideas I had in jail are coming back to me. One of them was football pools score prediction game, done in every jail. You know the one – five points for a correct score, three for a draw, two for an away win and one for a home win. I always thought it would make a good app, so I made some enquiries. Some tech companies were quoting £30,000 to get it in the App Store. And on top of that I’d need a gambling licence – which would cost another £30,000 and involve a DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) check. I didn’t have a chance of getting one.  

When I was off work after knee surgery, those ideas came back. Now Chat GPT (an artificial intelligence tool) was my answer to everything. Why not create the pools game as a website? That’s a lot cheaper, and if it’s successful, I could upscale it. Avoid the UK gambling laws by playing for points, not real money. Even better, why not just create it myself?

I watched endless YouTube videos explaining software, developing platforms and programming languages. I couldn’t keep up. There’s tools that can be used for stunning games and landscapes. These are the real IT courses you need, that they don’t teach you in prison. As I was a total beginner, some of the instructions got lost – but I was keen and I was learning. By accident, my company RobTechUK was born.

My first website was a word game called Letters In. Then came another, Word Steps. Word Shuffle was my first original game. I branded all my ideas together on the website robtech.uk, with a logo inspired by my prison experience. Ideas kept coming – more word games, rebranded as ‘brain training’; more football-style games. I’ve even developed a media platform, psephia.com, which could be my big break, but it’s early days. Ideas I had over 10 years ago in jail are coming back to me. Now I have six websites and three more domains locked. None are making me money yet, but they’re not costing me anything either. Income will follow, and who knows where it will lead?