Even if many of us don’t like to admit, or realise, society is still largely built on assumptions about age.
Age so often becomes shorthand for how much someone knows or how much value they can realistically add, and, when you’re 21 and building a global company, just how seriously people take you.
We met on the first day of our technology degree apprenticeships at the University of Birmingham, and ended up in the same halls. Despite our age, neither of us was new to business building and both already delivered consulting services to fee-paying customers. Working on a business together was a natural and obvious thing for us to think about.
Like most students, we were drowning in coursework. Faced with hundreds of PDFs, unstructured recordings of lectures and no good way to turn any of it into something we could learn from, we built what would become StudyStash to solve our own problem. We turned our materials into flashcards and practice tests and added gamification features to make revision feel less like a chore.
Then we shared it with fellow students, and it quickly became clear the problem was much more common than we first thought. What started as a simple study aid caught the attention of the University of Birmingham’s Elevate incubator and soon the university itself, which became our first paying customer.
Challenging the stereotype
At the beginning, we were walking into rooms where some of the people across the table had just watched us sit exams. There was no established brand to hide behind or track record to point to and, essentially, we were still viewed as students with a nice project idea; we weren’t treated like serious business people.
In an attempt to compensate, we even brought older, more experienced people into meetings and got a lot more formal in how we presented ourselves, thinking that looking and sounding more established would make us more credible.
It didn’t and we never needed it to. What we needed was a real pain that was worthy of fixing and a novel way of fixing it – this is where the credentials come from, not age or experience.
With this in place, our age actually became our biggest strength. We knew the problem first-hand because we were students ourselves; we weren’t part of the establishment and weren’t tainted by the way the system had always worked. People believed in us and rooted for us because we challenged the old order. Now our product and customer references do the talking.
Growing alongside the business
At the same time, we’ve grown personally in tandem with the business we’re building. We know now that the people who love our product aren’t necessarily those who buy it, and that building something for ourselves is very different from building technology an institution can trust at scale.
We secured ISO27001 certification very early on to build institutional trust and it made a massive difference – as soon as we mention ISO certification, most questions about our technology melt away. The more capable we have become as founders, too, the more capable StudyStash has become as a product.
Pitching angels? Mindset matters more than your financial model
Today it plugs into Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle, adapts around how individual students are learning and is used by more than 160+ institutions across three continents.
It all happens faster than you can imagine
Yet perhaps the biggest lesson from these early credibility battles is how quickly things evolve and how you are limited only by your own ambition. As we’ve demonstrated, today you can build huge value with a few good people, some smart technology and a lot of hard work.
Within a little over a year of graduating, we’ve built a team, expanded across three continents, broken into the US and then agreed to sell StudyStash to Kortext. At no point did we suddenly stop feeling like graduates and start feeling like the founders of a global company. One stage simply ran into another, and now we’re moving to Silicon Valley to lead the next phase.
StudyStash today bears only a passing resemblance to the revision tool we first pitched, and the company we build from Silicon Valley will undoubtedly change again. The same is true of us.
We started out thinking credibility was something we needed to manufacture because our age meant we hadn’t earned it yet. What we learnt was that credibility comes from building, adapting and delivering value, regardless of how old you are.
In short, our age was never the problem we thought it was. A credible offering that delivers real customer value makes age irrelevant and even, as in our case, a real asset.