SPEAKING.APP

When I was 15, my business studies teacher wrote in my report card, “Steve has an incredible tendency to ask a lot of questions. And although we admire his curiosity, it can become very time-consuming.” He was right. At 17, I remember jumping up in the common room while the heads of my school were debating which coffee machines to buy. I asked, “Why are we spending money on coffee machines? If we reason from first principles, we don’t need to sift through catalogs and pay for coffee machines. We have 2,000 paying customers in this school. Surely the coffee machine companies should be paying us.” So on my break time, I went to the computer room and emailed the five coffee machine companies in the area. Within a month, our whole school and neighboring schools were equipped with coffee machines. Cool, right? But curiosity does not always lead to comfortable outcomes. At 18, I started questioning the conventional educational model. I stopped believing school was going to give me what I needed to become who I wanted to be, so I stopped going. My attendance hit 20 percent, and I got expelled. And anyone with a traditional African mother knows exactly why, when the school called home, I took a long time to walk home. Still, I knew one thing for sure. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Convention told me the route was simple: go to university, sit in a room, and get the degree, that piece of paper. But I challenged it. In my first lecture, I’m sitting there thinking, “If I’m going to be an entrepreneur, who am I going to show this degree to? Is a degree from a bad university going to work for me, or against me? And am I really going to learn how to run a business by sitting in a lecture theater?” I decided the answer was no. A few months later, I dropped out. Then I had my first real idea. The idea was a business called Wallpark. It was meant to bring students into a social media world with one big wall where universities and anyone connected to student life could participate. It took me about 18 months to build. Then I hit the first big challenge: I needed very important people to invest. I needed developers. I needed attention. Convention said, “Send cold emails. Make cold calls.” But reasoning from what I knew to be true, that felt broken. Important people are busy. They get endless calls and emails. Those emails are impersonal, and often screened. So I did something different. I bought a big pile of gold envelopes. Because when you get a gold envelope in the post, you think you might have won something. You move everything else out of the way to get to that one. Especially if it has your name on it, a bow on it, and a handwritten letter inside. That approach got me investors. It got Panasonic to send me tens of thousands of pounds worth of free equipment. Wallpark launched. Then came the problem almost every business hits. We had very little money, but we needed millions of people to come to our website. And this time I truly had no money. When I say no money, I mean minus money. I’d maxed out all my credit cards. I’d maxed out all my overdrafts. I had a growing pile of bailiff letters on my desk. I’d got myself a CCJ. I was eating a concoction of powdered oats every day, basically flour, water, and powdered oats. I lost about two stone because I had no money. My computer barely resembled a computer. To get it to work, I had to solder the wires with a Christmas ball, and it would last about half an hour, as long as I did not move it. Convention said, “Flyer students. Put posters up. Buy ads in the student newspapers.” But again, I went back to fundamentals. I mapped a student’s day from waking up to falling asleep and filled in everything in between. The opportunity was not catching them on the way to a lecture. It was that they spent their time on their phones. So we checked where they spent that time. On a mobile phone, you can go into settings and see exactly where time goes. The answer was loud and clear. Social media. So we built there. I found a student Twitter page with 3,000 followers run by a guy called Dom. I met Dom. I told him to drop out of university too. Much to his mother’s dismay, he did. He joined me in Manchester, and together we built the largest student communities in this part of the world. We built 50 big student pages. Those pages drove millions of people to our website every month. We had four million people on social media. About a million people came to our website every month. We won awards. We were on TV and in the papers. I became “the Wallpark guy.” Then we hit the next problem. We needed to make money. Awkward. The conventional model said, “You’ve got a website. Put brands on the website.” But again, from first principles, it made no sense. Brands just want students. We had four million students on social media, and one million coming to our site from social media. Why did you need Wallpark? You could just put brands on social media. So after three years of building Wallpark, building a team, and being that guy, I quit. For the next few months, I went around the country rounding up every young person in their bedroom who had built a large social media account. We still hire 25 of them full-time today. We connected hundreds and hundreds of pages into one chain, and we called it Social Chain. Then another challenge arrived. A company came to us with an addictive mobile game and asked, “Can you market this for us?” We had never marketed anyone else’s product. Convention said, “Run paid ads on Facebook and Twitter.” But we dug into what was true. It is not convincing when you tell me your product is good. There is too much noise. Nobody cares about this game yet. If people are going to check it out, you have to make them care. So we flipped the model. From every one of our pages, we told everybody not to download the game. “It would ruin your life if you download it.” From our student pages: “Do not download Tippi Tap. It will ruin your life. You won’t get a degree. Retweet to save a degree.” From our British pages, we compared it to late buses, the Germans, and David Cameron. It all happened at once. That curiosity, that fear of missing out, that sense of “What is this thing, and why has it come from left field?” made two million people almost instantly download the game. It went to number one in the overall App Store, above Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It did hundreds of thousands in revenue in the first month. Thank God we had that revenue share. It trended number one on Twitter. It was on BBC News the next day. It was a phenomenon. As demand grew, we hit the next challenge. We needed to hire really creative people. The conventional model said, “Take CVs.” But a CV is not an expression of creativity. It does not tell you who someone is. And who am I, as a dropout, to judge someone on how qualified they are? I believed that if someone can sell themselves creatively, they can sell our brands. So we made the application process a competition of creativity. One day, someone flew an owl into my office. I am not lying. The owl landed on my arm and dropped a USB stick onto my desk. And that is not even the most ridiculous application we have had. Then came another challenge: how do you keep a room full of mainly dropouts together in a company? People said, “Impose rules. Discipline. That will control them.” I did not believe that either. People work harder if they love their job. They will fight for it. They will value it. They will protect it. Families are stronger than teams. So I took an old derelict warehouse and turned it into a playground. Slides, puppies, unlimited alcohol. No rules. Take as many holidays as you like. No notice periods. There is a zip wire being built into the office right now. Trees. Areas to sleep. We set one rule, and it is still written on the wall in our office today. Do not die. And the company grew, and it grew, and it grew. In 16 months, it was in four locations around the world, with over 60 full-time staff. In its first full year, it was set to do eight to 10 million in revenue. We reimagined how we do business. Importantly to me, no one has ever left Social Chain. We have won some of the biggest awards in our industry. And even more importantly than all of that, my mum is happy. When I look back at the moments that defined me and my journey, there’s a clear, consistent pattern. Every time I made my best progress, I was brave enough to ignore convention and start with the fundamentals of the problem in front of me. Then I trusted my instincts to build a solution that fit my moment, my circumstances, and the truth of how people actually behave. Yes, it can be time-consuming, just like my teacher warned me. But it leads to solutions that are more innovative, more practical, and more real. And I believe that way of thinking can help you build better solutions in your own life. It can help us build a better future for ourselves, and for our kids. Thank you.