“That was my first exposure to it but I learned very quickly how much risk was involved in being an entrepreneur because the first couple of concerts did make some pocket money for myself but if you don’t make money that comes out of your pocket.”
Would you mind giving us a brief overview of ‘Pa’?
Well, I came back to CIT as a mature student.
I started when I was 26 and so I should graduate at age 30. I came back to do media – well digital media – because that’s what I was doing myself anyway.
I have worked in Marketing ‘loosely’ for the past few years, either doing photography for pubs and nightclubs for the past couple of years. I have been doing social media marketing for small businesses and start-ups and that kind of thing. So, I came back to college to legitimize what I had been doing anyway.
It was a career that I fell into so I thought that if I had a bit of paper to say that I can do it and do it well then that’s a huge bonus.
Tell me a bit about your experience with entrepreneurship?
Well I have kind of always been interested in entrepreneurship. When I was a child, I was the kind of kid that would go out and cut grass for a fiver – provided I had my dad’s lawn mower.
I suppose the first business that I ever started, or tried to start was when I was a teenager. I took part in the BlastBeat Programme, where they encouraged kids to set up gigs and discos to try and make some money for charity except I took that programme and what I learned from it as a transition year ‘thing’ after the project was done and just kept doing it over the summer months but just kept the money for myself.
That was my first exposure to it but I learned very quickly how much risk was involved in being an entrepreneur because the first couple of concerts did make some pocket money for myself but if you don’t make money that comes out of your pocket.
It was something that I didn’t continue past the first summer.
Then, when I was 17 I applied for the Dragon’s Den.
Which was….an experience. I applied first as a joke sending them off an email saying ‘Oh yeah, I own a business, I want to publish my own adults magazine’ and to my surprise RTE got back to me looking for a business plan and rather than admit that I was joking and sending them spoof emails, I googled how to write a business plan.
I spent a weekend making one and I sent it off to them and they were quite impressed. They asked me if there was a gap in the market for this, why this?
And so I looked into it again and replied with ‘there is a luxury tax applied to these magazine so if we produce them in this country, they will be more relevant to the consumer; it will fill the niche of Irish people who want that kind of thing and still be cheaper to produce.’
So, I went on the TV show and was quickly told ‘NO! Why is a 17 year old doing this?’ But, I got to be on TV and that was my first, kind of, exposure to start-up culture and business.
I made a lot of contacts that way.
From there I went to university to study psychology and I hated it! So, I dropped out after a year and moved to London where I setup my first successful business – Bayswater Dog Walkers.
It started off as something similar to what I would do as a teenager to make some pocket money. I would walk dogs. Then I specifically started to target posh neighbourhoods and I started to charge more and more money. I saw that there was kind of an inverse of what you would expect.
When I charged more money, people trusted me more because they expected it to be premium service. Even though I was doing the same thing.
So, I got a bit creative and started using social media. In the old days this was Bebo and MySpace. I set up a business profile and a Gumtree profile.
People were very impressed with the professionalism of it, even though it was still just me. After doing that for about 6 months to a year, it had grown a bit and I had employees and then I managed to sell the business to a legitimate pet care company.
From there I worked as a barman. It was from working as a barman that I fell into the career that I am in now. You see I wanted to be the bar photographer.
It seemed like an easier job, people were nicer to the photographer than they were to the barman. So, I picked up a camera, I picked up a DSLR and started to learn about how to take photos.
I learned a lot about photography just from trial and error and that’s really what got me to here. After a few years of working freelance and being hired by companies to be their social media manager, I came back to college and that’s where I am now.
I was also part of the Student Inc. programme. A friend of mine and I had an idea for thing that eventually became called I Need A. It was a short term recruitment service for people who worked in shift work like dog walkers, bar staff , you know?
That sort of thing. So I took part in the Student Inc. programme which I spent the 3 months researching and found out that it is not a viable idea. Which is a fine thing to learn.
Before I put all my money into it, I was able to take the time and talk to experts and compare it to current employment law in the EU and Ireland. I learned that recruitment is so bulky and slow and is heavy with red tap for a reason – it’s because of the laws that are there.
So, it was impossible for us to make headway in that industry, even with a technology solution, because it was breaking the law.
So, I didn’t become a millionaire, went back to college and for my placement came back to the Rubicon Centre because I had such a great experience here over the summer. So, I asked around and I found the lads in RiiConnect.
They needed someone with media experience, they needed someone to do the marketing side of their business. When I started with them they only had their logo and nothing else. So for the past few months I have gone from working with them to being part of their core team.
Will you explain a bit about what RiiConnect is?
RiiConnect is a digital wellness app. It is designed specifically to encourage teens in schools and small groups to break free from phone addiction and using too much internet.
Which sounds simple. Which sounds like something that would be solved by having strict rules. But the idea of the app is that it uses positive reinforcement instead of having an outright ban on phones.
Because, at the end of the day, we live in a connected society, we can’t just go cold turkey on the Internet.
I suppose people have this idea of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship as these visionaries that come up with ideas that seem to have been plucked out of nowhere but from your experience and all the different things that you have gone through it seems more so a process of learning from experience and looking at what is an obstacle, what are the possible solutions and how we can overcome it?
What is your outlook on entrepreneurship?
Is it this glorified multimillionaire, niche trait or can anyone be an entrepreneur if they just open their eyes?
This is what I realised from this business. Specifically from applying for Dragon’s Den; there are no qualifications to be an entrepreneur.
There is no barrier, there is no license. As long as you solve a problem and you do it in a way that allows people to pay you for solving that problem – you’re an entrepreneur.
People get frightened off by the new boom of tech entrepreneurs because when you look to start the development of an app you are looking at €50,000 just to develop that app. Then, people look at the solution to problems in society and they only way to do it is through apps. This is very rarely the case.
And the end of the day, you just offer a solution to a problem that somebody has and they pay you for it.
It’s the simplest transaction out there.
It’s not mysterious.
It’s not difficult.
Just have a good idea and be good at something.
Entrepreneurship isn’t an end goal it’s a process.
