What losing my job taught me about building a company fast

Last October, I lost my job in the city.

One day I had a well-paid role, a team, and a routine. The next, I didn’t.

That kind of moment stops you in your tracks and you have to pivot. You stop thinking in terms of long-term and start focusing on what you actually know.

For me, that was student recruitment. I’d previously spent fifteen years working in higher education. I knew how much effort went into attracting students. I also knew where things were going wrong.

Around the same time, I’d started playing around with voice AI at home. Not for work, just out of interest. I was using ElevenLabs to make fairytales for my son. One evening I listened back and thought: that sounds genuinely natural, not robotic or like a system, like a proper conversation.

That’s when I had a genuine lightbulb moment. Most student enquiries happen out of hours. Most colleges and universities still rely on forms or delayed responses. If someone asks a question and doesn’t get an answer, they move on, and this is especially true for young people.

For institutions that now rely on tuition fees for half their revenue, that’s not a small problem. And it’s not a new problem either, but now I could see that the technology to do something about it had finally changed.

I built a rough prototype over a weekend and took it to Middlesex University. I just parked up, walked onto campus with my phone, and asked students to try it. I wanted to know if it felt natural or awkward.

It definitely didn’t feel awkward. The students didn’t hesitate. They just grabbed my phone off me and talked to it.

At that point I needed a second opinion, so I put together a basic pitch deck and went to John Crick. He’s spent over twenty years in international student recruitment and was part of the early team at Enroly. I knew he’d tell me straight whether he thought my idea had legs.

He thought it did, became co-founder and we’ve moved quickly.

Within five months we had a working product, two accelerator places, support from ElevenLabs, and early investment at a £2 million valuation. We’ve delivered demos to Russell Group universities, colleges, and language schools, receiving consistently strong and highly positive feedback. That sort of pace changes you. You don’t have time to overthink, you have to make decisions and move on. I’m not sure I’d have been capable of that with the safety net of a salary.

See Also

Value gained when businesses automate and optimise cash reserves

There’s something else I’ve noticed. When you’ve actually worked inside the problem you’re trying to solve, you don’t spend much time second-guessing the idea. We weren’t going looking for a gap in the market. We knew the gap, we’d seen it cost institutions valuable students for years.

The timing helped too. Expectations have shifted, students expect answers immediately and most university systems aren’t set up for that. That gap is what AskEd will fix.

It’s still inconsistent, I’m assured building a startup always is. There are good days and bad ones, and the bad ones are worse than anything I experienced in a job.

But it moves faster than anything I’ve done before. And when you’re building something you understand, you don’t notice the speed until you stop for a minute and realise how far you’ve really come.