You’re never too young to: Start a business
As the Head of Customer Happiness here at Osper I have the absolute pleasure of talking to, and meeting some remarkable young people. Having been inspired by all the stories I hear, I have decided it’s just plain selfish not to share them. So here in the words of 17 year-old Hannibal Knowles is his story of starting a business with a friend.
Sabina
We are Fred Parry and Hannibal Knowles and we cofounded Gimmy, a project that we’re working on which we hope will make your managing of contacts a whole lot easier and less time consuming.
We’re both 17 years old and still in school and became interested in entrepreneurship from our school’s Entrepreneurship Society. When the idea first came to Fred about what has now evolved into Gimmy, we didn’t think much of it. However there was one thing that we had heard time and time again from speakers who had set up successful businesses that with time, effort and the right people you can make a success of an idea. Although we have not quite “made a success” of it yet, we’re working on it!
One of the main pieces of advice we would give to a young person looking to embark on a startup mission is that it is people that count. Some people definitely didn’t buy into us because of our age, but there will be someone out there who wants to help you out if they believe in the idea and believe in you.
We have also realised that as we have met people along the way, you are never too young to do business and learn about money management.
We thought we were young to start up, but Osper’s CEO Alick told us he had a CD business when he was only 13! We have had to transfer skills that we learnt when spending pocket money to making decisions when allocating money to areas of the business. The fact that we both had our piggy banks and were able to make the decisions from a young age has meant that those skills are more available to us now we are trying to move forward with our business.
There has been nothing more exciting than being young entrepreneurs for us. We’ve had an amazing set of experiences so far, and met a lot of cool people. We even got to attend Pitch at Palace, which was a huge event at St. James’ Palace with young people pitching to some of the most important businessmen in the country. The tech scene is also so exciting at the moment and once you’re absorbed in it, you won’t want to leave it! We’re very grateful to have been able to have had business experience even before we are “adults”, and we want young people to know that being too young isn’t really a thing anymore when starting businesses, even if you are just selling something to your schoolmates or have a vision to take a product worldwide!
If you’ve got a story that you want to share, please email us at sabinak@osper.com — we’d love to hear about it! Or just check out Osper here.
