Founding early ventures as a teenager

My first business, Alpha Tutoring, actually came out of a bet I had with a friend of mine. He bet me that I’d never be able to afford our dream black Mercedes, which we’d humbly valued at £500 at the time. I was determined to prove him wrong. 

I knew very little about entrepreneurship at the time, but I essentially realised I could leverage what I knew and the skills I already had. I was good at maths, and was earning a bit of money from tutoring. So I hatched this idea to set up a tutoring agency with other kids at my school, handpicking the best at each subject and connecting them to tutees. Just as quickly as the business started taking off, I saw my own revenue starting to diminish. It turns out that 1) you can’t rely on 15 year olds to pay you your ‘middle man’ fee, and 2) as soon as parents had found a good tutor, there was no reason to keep paying me. 

Learning number one: own as much as your infrastructure as possible. Otherwise you’re just a middle man. At Fanbytes, we own our communities, but also the payments, the technology, etc, to give our clients a reason to keep coming back. 

Then came EntrepreneurExpress, the publication I set up, scaled, and sold in just over 11 months. I did everything here, from content creation to sales to marketing. Most importantly, this was my crash course in the world of advertising. When I sold the business, I thought they were buying it for the quality of the blogs I was writing. In retrospect, I realised they were buying our captive audience, and the Facebook groups we’d built to grow and engage that audience. Learning number two: identify where the true value is in your business, and leverage that.

Key milestones for Fanbytes

1. Taking the business out of university

Launching a business while at university feels fairly low risk. You’re always doing it with the knowledge that, if it fails, you’ll just end up getting an ordinary job once you graduate anyway. Pressing on with the business even after we’d graduated felt like a huge step for Ambrose and I. It showed that we were really serious about Fanbytes, and that we truly believed it would work. 

Learning number five: choose a co-founder who can support you emotionally. Many people say that you should pick co-founders with complimentary skills. This is obviously important, but I actually believe that you should find someone who is able to support you mentally and emotionally through the journey. It’s a taxing experience being a founder, and there were certainly times when I felt like giving up (particularly when you’ve sent hundreds of emails that no one is replying to). One of the most important things Ambrose has done for me is being there to support me through those times. 

2. Landing our first major customers

Much like raising your first investment, bringing in your first customers feels like a strong vouch of confidence for the business. For me, one of the biggest clients has been the UK government, who we’ve been working with since 2019. During COVID, we helped deliver NHS England’s messaging and safety guidelines on social media. 

3. Launching the Bytehouse

The Bytehouse was the first TikTok influencer house in the UK, bringing together six of the most popular TikTok influencers under one roof. This was another example of an initiative that grew out of a simple idea, and we just ‘magicked’ it into existence. This made a major statement in the industry—an agency that was building out its own IP in a really creative way, showing that Fanbytes had innovation in its DNA.   

4. Setting up the Fanbytes Impact Fund

During the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd protests in Summer 2020, it seemed every business and founder was rushing to make a statement. But I couldn’t help feeling a lot of these were insincere or inauthentic: I didn’t want to just be another founder who appeared on a panel, etc. 

I acknowledged Fanbytes’ power to drive attention and influence people’s decisions (often to buy things). So what if we went out to Black-owned businesses, and tangibly helped them to grow by funding an influencer campaign run by Black influencers? 

I started by committing £10k myself, before writing to all of our investors to ask for their contributions. The response blew me away, eventually raising £100k that would help support Black entrepreneurs and elevate Black influencers. 

5. Our acquisition by Brainlabs

It’s been ten years since EntrepreneurExpress was acquired—so what’s different this time around? Well, for one, there’s a few more zeros on the valuation this time. 

The whole process has been different though. I never built my first businesses with the vision of getting acquired: I kind of kept growing and kept making money. But with Fanbytes, as soon as I started taking on external investment, you have to have a liquidity event in mind, so the process is much more thought out. 

We had a lot of interest from a number of different angles, so we really had the power to choose who we felt would positively contribute to supercharging the business. Joining Brainlabs feels like having that end goal in front of mind. 

Final (perhaps most important) learning: It’s not about money, it’s about winning. So much of what you do as a founder is about optimising for winning. Obviously, the amount of money you’re making is important, but I believe that a better way to think about it is optimising to win. 

In our second year, we made our first million in revenue: but as soon as we hit that, we were already thinking about the next million, the next win. Even thinking back to founding my first business, it was really just to win a bet and prove my friend wrong.

At each major milestone you pass, you always just think about the next goal and the next win. Realising this made me realise why I’m doing this—not just to make money, but to win, and to build something of significance that can impact people’s lives.