Millennial Money: How Millennial Entrepreneurs Are Shaping Digital Business

Having grown up around educators, it was natural for Mark Hughes to pursue a career in this field.

With the vision of creating a platform where students could find the right tutor for their needs, Mark and his long-time friend Scott Woodley founded Tutorful, an online marketplace for both in-person and digital tutoring.

As of today, more than 80,000 students have found a tutor through the website.

As tutoring shifts towards the digital sphere, Mark is aware of the challenges that online learning can pose to his business.

“I think the real barrier to the adoption of more digital tools like online tutoring is the parents,” he said. “They’ve grown up in a different era, and there are pretty strong misconceptions around the effectiveness of digital tools that will take a few years to overcome.”

Mark also recognizes that his approach to business relations is different from other CEOs: between fruit baskets on Tuesdays, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) lamps, monthly socials, an abundance of plants and flexible working hours, he wants to ensure all employees are supported on the workplace.

“We regularly collect anonymous feedback in our office to ensure we’re always listening and able to support our staff the best we can. A lot of the feedback we get is around mental health and maintaining positive work environment.

“Whilst I’m at the higher end of the millennial scale, a lot of our experiences are similar so I hope I can listen and adapt to what my team needs.”

After funding his own software development company and becoming increasingly passionate about Bitcoin, Danny Scott and his business partners decided to make the jump.

“As entrepreneurs, you naturally have a passion to build things and solve problems. It becomes a hobby rather than work, and I was lucky enough to find like-minded people within our company,” he said.

He founded CoinCorner in 2014 with the aim of creating a place where people in the UK could buy Bitcoin as easily as possible.

However, starting out in such a niche field wasn’t always easy.

“As a young founder, I do feel it can be a challenge to overcome the doubts of experience and knowledge,” he said. “However, I have always tried to use this to my advantage – I made a real effort to learn not only the industry we operate in, but also how businesses work, how finance works, how start-ups work and how technology works.”

After reaching 150,000 users in 2018, Danny’s goal for the future is to help provide more education on Bitcoin, which he describes as “the biggest innovation in tech since the Internet.”

His advice to young entrepreneurs is to never hold back, especially when making the executive decision of starting a business.

“One thing I’ve learnt is you are never ready,” he said. “I come into work every day to new problems, you just have to be able to react accordingly to the best of your ability.”