❝Story02:30
Magic tricks in his grandma's garden in Ghana at nine
Armoo's first performing experience was a short-lived magician's career in Ghana aged nine, doing trivial tricks for 15-30 friends and family with his grandma in the front row. He traces two motives: craving to be the centre of attention as an only child, and a fascination with the hacks behind things — seeing an output and working backwards to the inputs. He argues most of what people do, from business to public speaking to academia, comes back to wanting to feel important.
“I've always been very interested in figuring out how things work and how right so you see the output here but what were the different…”
“most of the things we do whether it's business whether it's public speaking whether it's Sports where there's even like being good at Academia like…”
❝Story08:00
A £500 bet that became a 65-tutor marketplace
At 14, walking home on Oakland Road, a friend bet Armoo he could not make £500 before turning 18 — a sum he thought might buy a Mercedes. Searching how to make money online in 2013 returned mostly scams, but one line stuck: work with what you know. Having just scored 100 in a maths test, he started tutoring maths. When classmates asked for physics and chemistry he asked teachers who had topped each exam, recruited them, and matched them with students at £15-18 an hour while keeping £5. He grew it to 65 tutors in six weeks.
“he made his bet to me he said like you wouldn't make 500 pounds before you turned 18”
“I I basically like built a bunch of businesses off like connecting people”
❝Story39:30
Selling Entrepreneur Express at 17 for £110k
Armoo's magazine failed as a print business because he had not thought through advertising economics, so he poured everything into the online version, using Facebook pages to drive traffic and monetising with banner ads and programmatic exchanges. Eleven months in, a US agency called Horizon Media emailed to partner, asked for his stats, then offered to buy instead. He was 17, in boarding school, wearing Man United shorts at 2am. The deal was £70k up front plus traffic-based payouts over 15 months, totalling around £110k, with the site and Facebook pages transferred within two weeks.
“I felt invincible I fell but I also felt like I discovered a cheat sheet like this was no funding nothing at all I used…”
“rather than partner up we just like to buy you”
❝Story49:00
Finding his dad dead at 21 and the promise it created
Armoo lists his setbacks: growing up on Oakland Road during the peak of the Peckham and Brixton beef, where being out after 7pm was dangerous and he befriended gangsters for safety; living just with his dad without a nuclear family; and at 21, his father dying of a stroke — Armoo found the body in his room. Two or three weeks earlier, as Fanbytes was starting, his dad had told him he did not understand what he was doing but was proud of him. Armoo told himself there was no conceivable world in which the business would not succeed.
“and then I think probably at 21 my dad passed away and that was a major setback that even drove my sense of like I…”
“when he passed away he said he was very proud of me and I basically told myself that there was no conceivable World in which…”
❝Story53:30
The gangster who told him 'this ain't for you'
Armoo describes trying to be part of the local crew for safety, while privately reading Retire21 and Mashable and finding the people around him uninterested in anything he cared about. A lead gangster called Mike took him aside and told him this was not for him — recognising that his heart was in business and intellectual work, not the streets. Armoo's reaction: if the lead gangster knows it is not for you, it is not for you. He later wrote a LinkedIn post headlined that this was the day a gangster saved his life.
“one of the gangsters there guy called Mike's he actually like took me aside and said this ain't for you bro”
“I remember when he said that I was like mate if the lead gangster knows right but this is not for me that is not…”
❝Story1:31:30
A DocuSign email, a Santander refresh, and his dad's grave
Armoo describes the two moments the exit became real. The first was signing the share purchase agreement at 1am on a Friday over Zoom — investors, then Mitch, then Ambrose, then him, followed by a Gmail notification saying everyone had signed. He went to bed and to the gym the next day; a life-changing event arrived as an email. The second was the money landing: his co-founders on Lloyds saw theirs first while his Santander balance showed nothing, and he panicked about the sort code before it appeared. He screamed, then went to his dad's grave and cried.
“and the crazy thing about that is I done went to bed and the next day I just went to gym and it was just…”
“later that day I went to my dad's grave and I was just like I was just crying”