Published: March 20, 2026 at 2:09 pm
I first met Samson Opaleye at the Climb23 conference in Leeds three years ago.
Sam, who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, had moved to the UK the previous year. He told me about his Instagram addiction and plans to tackle it with startup Applatch, which locked down certain apps on your phone when you needed to focus.
Fast-forward three years and Applatch, now Applatch Kids, is a very different business.
“It was a free app and we had 43,000 users,” he tells me over coffee in our Founder Friday interview in Sheffield. “I asked a couple of my friends if they would be willing to pay for it, and they said ‘no’ – because they felt they had enough self-control [to manage their social media activity themselves].
“But they said they would pay for something which controlled the apps their children use.”
A dad himself, he also saw the value in that proposition. “After speaking with many more parents as well as children – in order to further understand the problem – I saw the gap,” he says.
“I realised that there’s a bigger problem here with the children: they actually can’t control when to stop using entertainment apps and focus on study.”