What is Hourstriker and how was it started

What exactly is Hourstriker? That’s the question I’m going to try to answer in this post.

From as far back as I can remember, I always had some interest in watches. I remember my father having a gold watch, the brand escapes me, that I remember along with his gold lighter were things never to be touched. The first watch I remember wearing was a gold plated watch with a green dial on a leather strap that I got in high school. I wore it until the gold plating finally started wearing off.

The earliest memory I have of a nice watch was a fake TAG Heuer that somehow found its way to me. For the longest time I wasn’t sure if it was real or a knock off. Years later I finally showed it to a friend who knew a thing or two about watches and was quickly told it was a fake. Being over 20 years ago the thought of having something nice and then finding out it was not so nice, more than likely spurred my interest in “luxury” watches.

Around this time I was a college aged kid transitioning between school life and work life. Although my major at the University of Texas was Computer Science, it was not the major I picked and I had zero interest in it. Although I had always been interested in computers and had built many, writing code never interested me.



Even with zero interest in coding, I had taught myself some HTML over the years. The friend of mine that exposed my Tag as fake was extremely interested in watches, and being around him really started to increase my interest in watches. Now being in college and spending any money that came my way on parts for my car, luxury watches were far from obtainable. My friend came from a wealthy family and had started buying and selling watches in his free time. He soon approached me to build a website to list his watches on for sale. I was not very entrepreneurial back then, but I thought it wouldn’t take much time and I could help him out. Now I have zero memory of how that site turned out, but it was probably pretty bad. We didn’t end up doing much with the site, but it was my first step into the world of selling watches online, probably around the year 2000.



While at my first real job at a large computer retail chain, I made another friend that would end up teaching me what would become my professional skill. Through the way of a failed electrical engineering internship and then finally a full blown job in software development, I was learning how to create entire sites from the frontend to the database and backend.

Although I wasn’t making a crazy salary at this software development job, I was still living at home and had some disposable income. Of course a lot of it went to getting nicer cars, but I also dipped my toes into the world of luxury watches. The first watch I bought was an Omega Seamaster GMT. Like many times in my life I thought, “Wow this is the nicest xyz I’ll ever have”. Naturally in no time I was already looking at other watches. In short succession I sold the Seamaster and ended up buying a Seamaster Planet Ocean with an orange bezel. Having gone to the University of Texas and loving everything UT, the color was a natural fit.

As I really started to get into the world of watches and found myself on forums and at Barnes & Noble reading everything I could about every new watch, my mind was opened to so many other watch manufactures I have never heard of previously. Around this time I really became obsessed with IWC. Now the jump in price from my Planet Ocean to a 5001 Portuguese or a 5002 Big Pilot was huge and in my mind was never going to happen. The closest IWC I could afford that I liked was an automatic GST chronograph in titanium. By far this watch was heads and shoulders more special than my previous two Omegas and it really meant a lot to me. Naturally at this time I wanted something nicer and more expensive.



This posed a huge problem for junior software developer me. How could somebody making $32,000 a year afford a $10,000 or more expensive watch. Sure I was still living at home, but I had started dating my eventual wife and I didn’t really want to live at home forever. Spending one third of your income on a watch just didn’t make sense and wouldn’t happen. I had to come up with an idea of how to make this horological dream of mine come true.

After some time, something just clicked in my head… I was getting pretty good at this software development stuff and I knew I could build a custom site from the ground up that could be a nice online watch store. You have to remember back in the early to mid 2000s, there really wasn’t any off the shelf shopping cart sites. OK so I could build the site, but where would I get watches to sell with no connections and no real money to my name?

The answer was to partner with an existing watch seller that didn’t currently have a website. Now this wasn’t really that hard to find since nobody was really selling watches online back then, except for a handful of authorized dealers. The first watch seller I approached was a seller that sponsored one of the many car forums I was on at the time. I told him my idea and he was all for it and very excited. In return for my work, in time I would get paid with a watch. What could be better, this seemed like a perfect side hustle for me, long before the term was coined.

The site didn’t take too long to create and I was fairly happy with the final result. Since there were not too many people selling watches online at the time, the new site got picked up fairly quickly by Google and did well. Soon enough I figured out that although sales were going through the site, the seller I had partnered with was not being honest about the sales. This kind of put me in a weird position where I couldn’t keep working on and hosting a site I wasn’t going to get compensated for. Once again where do I go to find another dealer? This time I tried my luck with a small seller on eBay.

Although I didn’t know who this seller was, they had a nice handful of watches and very good feedback on eBay. A rather long email later explaining that I had a site ready to go and what had happened with the previous seller, I had myself a new seller / partner.

After the site was rebranded we started marketing the site on car and general interest forums. Also clicks from Google started rolling in. This was a very grass roots way to build a following for a site, but it was working. At first I was getting a few hundred dollars a week from the business and I had all the faith in the world that the seller and I had a good and trusted relationship. One thing this seller could offer was being able to source new watches from a large selection of brands across a large network of authorized dealers. This meant that for over 20 watch manufactures I was entering their entire current and back catalogs into the website. This was probably the most work I have ever done in my life and was pulling 12 hour days constantly.

As could be expected this website really caught on, and at the time my day job had doubled in salary, but it was clear the watch business would soon surpass the $72,000 I was making writing code. Around this time, I had also got engaged to my girlfriend and bought a house we were remodeling. My partner knew us well and thought it was a good time to expand the business into jewelry. My wife was then brought aboard to handle all the jewelry sales and shipping, which we kept in our little house in Southwest Austin.

We continued this arrangement for about a year, but then the income being generated by the watch site and the time needed to run it became too much. It just made more sense to quit my day job and focus on this site full time. It also made sense to pick up and move cross-country from Austin to be with my now two partners in Philadelphia, which we did.

Little did we realize at the time that the 2008 financial crisis was going to hit and nearly destroy the watch business we had built over the last few years. Soon we found ourselves in a position where we couldn’t really afford the house we bought in Philadelphia that was nearly three times more expensive than our old house in Austin. We thought we were invincible and money was everywhere, but learned the hard way this was not true. The hard decision was made to move back to Austin and become more a consultant than an active partner in the business, mostly focusing on the website and technical side of the business.

From my time in Philadelphia I was exposed to every watch you could imagine all the way up to million dollar Pateks. I also would wear pre-owned watches as if they were my own. Doing this and living with so many different watches in real life makes you realize what you like. Now our site was really known as being the site to find limited edition Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshores and were also the watches my partners loved the most, so I ended up wearing a ton of limited Offshores and deciding that was my watch of choice.



This was a double edged sword though. While it’s great being exposed to all these watches, you also tend to become a bit numb to them. With all the years of work I did entering in catalogs of watches and also the whole 2008 fiasco, I really just felt burned out and a bit jaded to watches. I continued to work with my partner over the years, but my interest in watches was zero.

That all changed in 2021 when my interest in watches was ignited again. Up until this point I didn’t even really own a watch. I had sold everything and there was never a reason to buy one when an entire catalog of pre-owned watches were at your fingertips to wear. Around this time my partner started creating YouTube shows about the company and that really drew my interest back into watches.

The watch site my partner and I had started almost 20 years ago had grown into such a large company that I knew there wasn’t much I could add past my software development. I had mentioned to him that I would like to start something of my own, while continuing to support his business. I didn’t really know what that was, but mentioned we might do something with jewelry and possibly watches.

Over the next year I got bit by the watch bug hard and acquired an IWC Big Pilot Heritage in Titanium, an IWC Aquatimer 2000, a 46mm IWC Pilots Top Gun Chrono and a Glashutte Original Sport Evolution for my wife. I had also picked up cheaper watches from streetwear brands I loved like a Seiko collaboration with Neighborhood Japan and a G-shock collaboration with Supreme. With just getting re-acquainted to the watch hobby and spending hours every day reading about everything I had glossed over the past decade, I saw an advertisement for a watch show coming to the Austin area. The show was called MicroLUX and featured both some established larger name brands as well as some very small independents. My wife and I didn’t know what to expect, but were pleasantly surprised when we showed up. Everyone was extremely knowledgeable and as friendly as could be. Having been on the side of the industry where a ten thousand dollar watch was considered cheap and for the most part the watch industry was Rolex, Patek, Audemars and Richard Mille, it was so refreshing to see a whole different planet of watch enthusiasts.



Having owned businesses in many diverse segments, I’ve become fairly versed in not only growing businesses based on sales, but also those based purely on content. With Hourstriker our original vision is to have a site that not only offers fun and informative content on the world of watches, but also offers curated smaller brands and watches for sale that are vetted by us. We don’t plan to just throw up every reference number we come across on the site, but rather make it easy and enjoyable to peruse our inventory. We also want to have a site that somebody shopping for a simple divers watch feels just as home as somebody else looking at a grande complication from one of the big three.

Our goal is to also frequently add articles, watch reviews and news from the world of watches. We would also like to have a very extensive area of the site dedicated to information about various complications, manufactures and components that make up your watch. Hopefully we can become a site that you bookmark and check a few times a week for new content.

Anyway, sorry for the rant… but hopefully this gives you a little more of explanation of who we are and where we come from.