A Finsbury Park entrepreneur behind one of the UK’s most popular websites yesterday hit a £1million jackpot – just two years after his business went full-time.

Chris Holbrook, 38, is the brains behind Free Postcode Lottery, the world’s first free-to-enter lottery.

His company, behind Finsbury Park station in Morris Place, has a daily prize pot of £400. Users simply enter their postcode and check the results every day. Missed prizes are rolled over to the next day. Winners also have the opportunity to donate their money to charity.

The site makes money through adverts, and yesterday struck a £1million deal with Zeal Investments for 10 per cent of the company.

Chris intially ran Free Postcode Lottery in his spare time after founding the company in 2011. While cycling to work, he was listening to Radio 4’s Today programme, which was discussing a cancer drug and how provision was a “postcode lottery”.

From there, Chris’s idea for Free Postcode Lottery was born: reward rather than punish people for where they live. A former IT worker, he went full-time two years ago and it now has 300,000 daily users.

Chris, who moved to Finsbury Park from Canada aged 11, said: “This deal is a massive step towards shaking up a slow-moving industry. The global lottery market is in desperate need of fresh and original ideas and we believe the free-to-enter model of Free Postcode Lottery provides that.”

The investment will go towards his ambition of giving away £20,000 a day, with 20 pc of the population playing. Chris added: “Since we launched, many others have tried and failed to replicate our success and a large part of that is down our fantastically loyal players. Nothing is changing – apart from maybe bigger daily jackpots!”