Speaking
& Media

James Hacking is the founder and Chief Playmaker of Socially Powerful, a global social-first marketing agency he bootstrapped from a back-room laptop into a £40m business with 200+ people across four international offices — with no outside investment.

His route in was not a straight line. A childhood spent chasing a professional football career ended with injury, and a pivot into football freestyle put him in front of a camera and inside the earliest wave of social video. In 2014 he was part of the team behind Pepsi Max's 'The Unbelievable Game', a campaign that passed 400 million views and proved to him that social was not a channel — it was the whole game.

Before Socially Powerful he lost roughly £500,000 in a business that failed. That failure shaped everything that followed: a bootstrapped model, obsessive focus on creators as media, and technology built in-house rather than rented.

Today James works with brands including Amazon, L'Oréal, TikTok and Levi's, invests through SEEDA, is building Lyvecart in live commerce, and documents the whole climb publicly on YouTube. His target is simple and stated out loud: £100m.