Taj:

I was probably not the best kid through school. I had about four suspensions by grade six. 

Adam: 

Welcome to the Youngpreneur Podcast brought to you by The Hunter Futurepreneurs Program.

The Hunter Futurepreneurs program has been designed to inspire, educate, mentor and connect future entrepreneurs to start or build a sustainable business.  

It’s a free program for young people supported by the Commonwealth Government, under the Entrepreneurship Program Initiative.

On the show, you’ll meet other young people, not unlike yourself. These young entrepreneurs had an idea for a business and decided to take action and just got to work creating an opportunity for themselves. If you enjoy these stories please join us by subscribing to the podcast and checking out the other ways you can get involved by visiting the show notes at hunterfuturepreneurs.com.au/taj.

I’m your host Adam Spencer and I’d like to introduce you to your mentor today.

Taj:

My name is Taj Pabari, I’m the founder of Fiftysix Creations and we teach kids how to start their own business.

Adam:

We start off this conversation with me asking Taj, how he got started on his entrepreneurial journey.

Taj:

So, my first business was a tech blog, For Kids By Kids. And I started that when I was 11. I was probably not the best kid through school. I had about four suspensions by grade six, and I think I kinda realised from a young age that probably this traditional school system, there’s nothing wrong with school, in fact, I advocate for, I think every single child should obviously have a world class education, finish grade 12, but also have a career outside of the classroom. Now, I realised from a young age that I needed to have a career outside of the classroom. I was bored in the classroom. I didn’t enjoy what I was learning. I could not see the purpose of what I was learning, and I think the dots just quite simply never connected in school, which led me to starting this tech blog, For Kids By Kids.

So, I went to JB Hi-Fi on the weekends. My sister was probably one of the better kids in school. She was an A grade student. She did all of the co-curriculars. All weekend she’d be doing swimming and violin or whatever else she’d be doing. And I couldn’t think of anything worse. I wanted to play with technology all weekend. I wanted to fiddle with my laptop. Research. That was my ideal weekend.

So on weekends, when dad would drop my sister to swimming, I’d get him to drop me to JB Hi-Fi, take his 3.2 megapixel Canon camera, and I guess I take pictures of all the electronics in JB Hi-Fi. And then during the school week I would upload those pictures onto my tech blog, write a very short review in a way that either someone, either a very young person, so under the age of 16, or a very old person who didn’t really know about the specifics of technology, could understand my tech blog. Because I myself was only 11 years old anyway, so they were super basic reviews, pros, cons, did it look cool, was it heavy, was it light? It was just very basic items and we ended up amassing a following of that 50,000 users. Which was incredible. And it’s just my whole life outside of the classroom, that no one else knew about, that I was just doing from my school computer.

Adam:

Yeah. Where did this love of tech come from? 

Taj:

My parents were never tech people, which was cool in one way, obviously they didn’t really know what I was doing, but also had they been tech people, I probably wouldn’t have made some of the mistakes I did. But they did supply me with a fantastic internet connection, and when they did find out about the tech blog, dad was super cool about what I was, or kind of cool about what I was doing. But I think, so the tech blog really was my passion. I love technology. I was part of that digital native generation, gen Z, where we’ve been brought up around technology. It made me happy. It made me excited. And I think just like other kids’ passions was say, reading or violin or swimming or whatever it might’ve been, mine was electronics. I was excited from a young age. I’d be fixing phones, taking them apart, putting them back together. It was something I loved. So the tech blog really was purely a passion project. It never started as a business.

Adam:

All right. Yeah. It’s so important for young kids to find that thing that they’re passionate about. Because I remember you telling me, tech was the only way that you could focus in school.

Taj:

To be fair, I probably wasn’t that focused in the classroom either, during that time, but I guess it kinda gave me a purpose outside of the classroom. I think that was obviously quite rewarding for me, being able to find what made me tick. I was quite lucky.

Adam:

So you started the tech blog when you were 11, you kind of got it up to 50,000 views per day or thereabouts. And you ended up selling that when you were 13, right?

Taj:

13, 14. So I think during that time we were hosted on a Blogspot URL. So it’s not like I even paid for the URL. It was running on Blogspot, was paying nothing, and Google realised because it was on their platform, there’s a lot of views, you should put ads on the website, and this was when Google was actually recruiting people who had high view websites, to put ads on a website. So it’s not like we even applied for it, which was unreal. Anyway, so we got an invitation from Google and they were like, “You’re hosting on our platform. We can see you’re getting a huge number of views. We’ll automatically approve you for Google AdSense.” And at the time Google AdSense was paying like $3 or $4 a click, because they were incentivising us to put ads. Because at the time it was like, “Why would you put ads on your website.”

So Google was playing a crazy amount to put ads on. For every click, which for an 11 year old kid, it was just crazy. So in weekends when dad would drop me to JB Hi-Fi or Harvey Norman or wherever had dropped me, I’d click on my ads like 20 times, which was amazing. And also at the time Google AdSense didn’t have an IP address tracker. So if you clicked on your ads five or six clicks during the week, and then there was a spike on a weekend, within reason, up to 20, they didn’t notice. So every week it was just incredible, because I had tuckshop money that I’d never had in my life. I was completely self sufficient, for a 12… With the exception of rent and paying my school fees, and everything. But I was self sufficient for all the entertainment things I wanted as an 11 year old, and I was getting to do something that I love. So it was incredible.

Adam:

Yeah. After you sold the tech blog, what did you do next?

Taj:

One of the things that I personally wanted is, I was watching a lot of amazing people launch their own products. I was watching Tim Cook, I was watching Steve Jobs, I was watching Bill Gates, I was watching some phenomenal people launch their own products. And for me the idea was, “I’ve been writing a lot of blogs about other people’s technology. How cool would it be to actually have my own?” And had this idea for a do it yourself tablet for kids, taglined ‘As easy as a puzzle, as fun as a computer game’, and I thought, ” I am literally the age of the target market for this product.” I was 13 when I had the idea, 14 when I was like, “All right, let me actually do something about it,” and thought, “All right, well I don’t need to do any market research because I want this.” My target market is my friends.

Taj:

So I asked a couple of my friends, “Do you think this is cool?” And they said, “Yes.” Put together this incredible marketing pack of what I thought this tablet would look like, and showed one of my school teachers and said, “Hey, I need to borrow the 3D printer, the CNC router”, and they let me use as much acrylic as I wanted. They let me use a 3D printer. They let me use the laser cutters, the CNC routers, and I was able to create a prototype of what the device would actually look like, and ended up putting together a prototype that actually worked, sent it to a couple of media outlets, put together a team.

And within six months we were on the front page of pretty much all media outlets from News Corp, to National Geographic, to ABC, 60 Minutes did a half an hour profile of us during prime time on a Sunday night with Liz Hayes, Koch put us on Sunrise, we were on the Today Show with Karl. We literally had every media outlet in Australia jump on, and we sold a lot of devices. Which was amazing. I was 14 still, and we had a huge following of people who wanted this tablet, which, I was quite lucky with. And that was the start of the tablet-based Fiftysix Creations.

Adam:

Tell me more about this tablet, and what it was designed to do for kids.

Taj:

I woke up in the morning and wrote it down on a piece of paper next to me, and I was like, “Actually this is cool. This is something that I would’ve really wanted.” And I know, for me, I think the opportunity to do that, ‘as easy as a puzzle’. I mean I didn’t want it to be a hobbyists device. I wanted it to be a mainstream device where it’s, as easy as a puzzle. So all the pieces were like puzzle pieces, super easy, simple, and it would work.

Adam:

Right. And was that one, it was called Lego for the 21st century? Is that, am I getting it right?

Taj:

Correct.

Adam:

Yeah.

Taj:

We tag lined it, Lego of the 21st century. That’s it.

Adam:

I’ve got a quote here from you that I found in a media clipping somewhere, and it’s, “I was inspired by people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and when I saw them changing the world, I thought, why don’t I try and change the world too?” That thought in a, were you, 14 year old kid. Is that unusual or do all kids think this way?

Taj:

I get to work with lots and lots of young people now, over the last couple of years, with the new Fiftysix Creations. We’ve had the opportunity to work with about 60,000 of those kids, and I think this generation is incredibly creative. We’re a generation that wants to create, that wants to innovate, that wants to make things more efficient.

And I certainly know a lot of the kids that we work with are very similar. They have no issue with coming up with ideas to change the world, coming up with ideas, they’re going to make the world a better place, which is obviously quite exciting, and I think I’ve certainly got the best job in the world, I’m getting to work with people who do want to change things, and people who do want to make the world a better place. Which I think is something else quite unique to this generation. Because we’re not confined to a postcode. Even though we might be based in Brisbane, Sydney, or even a regional community of Australia, they understand that, “Hey, my postcode no longer defines me.” And our goal at Fiftysix Creations is to make sure that every young person knows that, age, gender, or postcard really is no barrier, and every single child should have the opportunity to create.

Adam:

Yeah. We’re going to get to the modern Fiftysix Creations, and where it is today, in a second. With the tablet, you’re about two years into that and you’ve made a lot of sales. You’re not making much progress with the tablet and what happens next? You guys end up deciding to wind that product up?

Taj:

Yeah, look, we didn’t have a choice. I think we sat on a huge number of preorders for about two years. A parent who’d ordered the Fiftysix tablet kit for their child’s 16th birthday, the child turned 18 years old, moved out of home, and they’d still not received the device. So over the course of two years we weren’t able to commercialise this idea. We had huge supply chain difficulties. We weren’t able to get something that was safe. And obviously in our industry, all we needed was one person to do the wrong thing, or swallow a piece that you shouldn’t have swallowed, and that was the end of our business.

Adam:

Yeah.

Taj:

So we realised we’re going to refund the orders, and yeah, that was the end of it.

And for about a month we were like, “What the hell are we going to do? We’ve literally come from the peak to not a lot.” So we decided, “All right, well, the hardest part, or in my opinion, the hardest part of a business is, especially in the infancy, obviously not in the scaling stage, but in the infancy is, making sales and coming up with a product that people actually want.” We made a huge number of sales for the tablet, and we certainly built a product that people wanted. “How about we teach other young people how to do the same?” So we began running workshops, teaching young people how to start their own business, and I started delivering the programs by myself and, we still do the exact same thing. Luckily now, we actually teach the kids how to scale their businesses, that we feel qualified to do the same as well. And we go out to schools, we go out to regional communities, teaching kids how to start and execute, on their business ideas.

Adam:

Can you tell me about that first workshop? Was it just the school that you were going to, that you started running the workshops in? Or how did you get those first customers, I guess?

Taj:

Look, I was the target market. I knew exactly what schools wanted. So when I went to schools, I was literally just cold calling schools saying, “Do you want a workshop?” I had a huge profile from the tablet. So a lot of the schools that ended up purchasing tablets. So I had a lot of school connections anyway. But in a lot of senses, it was cold calling. Cold calling schools and saying, “Hey, well we weren’t able to deliver on a tablet, but do you want a workshop?” And as resulted with building up a huge profile, schools were like, “Yeah, come down.”.

We literally charged from day one. And I think that’s one of the most luckiest things we did. I had a profile, schools never expected us to give the programs for free, and we realised from day one, “Is this something people wanted,” because if they weren’t willing to pay for it, it obviously it wasn’t a good fit. But people wanted us, people were happy to pay us to go and deliver the programs, and I think we got super lucky.

Adam:

Yeah. That’s the thing that stands out for me there is, a 16 year old kid, not being afraid to get on the phone and cold call. There are adults that are scared to cold call.

Taj:

Yeah. I think obviously the first one’s always difficult. Second one gets a little less difficult, and as you go on, it gets easier and easier.

Adam:

Solving the problem of youth unemployment. Was that the mission all along? Was that the mission from the very beginning? And why is that important to you?

Taj:

Look, at the start it wasn’t. The vision was, entrepreneurship for the sake of teaching entrepreneurship. So we’re running workshops for the kids in cities, teaching them how to start a business. And a lot of city kids have lots of options, which is great. They can start a business, they can go to university, they can go travelling, they can get a full-time job, they can get a part-time job. There’s a lot of options. They can go down a TAFE pathway.

Taj:

But in regional communities there is no option. You either start a business, or you rely on the system. And we saw that as a big problem. I love big problems, and I think if there’s an opportunity to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, then great. And instead of using entrepreneurship for the sake of entrepreneurship, or to give kids in cities just another pathway, we thought, “How about we use entrepreneurship to actually give these kids one other pathway, of that two pathways, or of that three pathways.” And the kids in regions are actually starting the businesses, they’re working on the businesses, and the percentage of the businesses that are actually coming off the ground are significantly higher in regions, where they don’t have a choice, opposed to cities, where there’s lots of choice.

Adam:

Where did the name come from for Fiftysix Creations? Was that your idea?

Taj:

Yeah, look, so numbers five and six in numerology actually means opportunity. And when we started the organisation, obviously we didn’t have the regional focus, but the focus was to give every single young person, regardless of age, gender, postcode, or demographic, the opportunity to have access to a world-class entrepreneurial education. And that’s why our name still to this day, nearly six years on, is Fiftysix Creations, because even still, we want to give every single young person the opportunity to have access to a world-class education.

Adam:

That’s fantastic. That’s a huge mission. When you then launched those initial workshops, and is that what you’re still focusing on today?

Taj:

Yeah. Workshops are a big part. We do a lot of work with state and federal government, to help us distribute our program, to communities that might not necessarily be able to afford our workshop. So, big projects with government is also a massive part of our work.

Adam:

How did that come about? Were you the one leading that, and how did you get in the door? How did you start that conversation with organisations like that?

Taj:

It’s an industry I loved. Just like technology, it was one of those other things that I was truly fascinated about. So the way I guess I got into that area was purely because I was interested in it. I had connections in that industry, because I was fascinated, and obviously when we started having a need for government work, or when we started to kinda scale, I already had connections. I already had people in that industry, MPS, ministers, shadow ministers, that I could refer to, and be like, “Hey, how do I do this?” And it just kept coming up from there. I think I got quite lucky. I had a passion for it and government wanted to fund entrepreneurial education. I had connections, and it just ended up working out quite nicely.

Adam:

You also do a lot of work with Westpac, right? 

Taj:

Correct.

Adam:

I’m just really curious to understand how you were able to form these relationships, these partnerships with massive organisations like this.

Taj:

Once again, it’s literally just networking. Same thing, I was on LinkedIn from a very young age. I signed up for my LinkedIn profile when I was 11 years old, messaging random people and asking if I could just buy them a coffee during my school holidays. And a lot of times they would say yes, and most people want to help young entrepreneurs, I would tell them, “I’ll meet you at your office.” And I’d get a bus from home, put on my dads shirts, or suits, or whatever it was, to make myself look slightly older than I actually was. And I guess just ask them “Hey, this is what I’m doing. what do you think?” And they’d either tell me, “It’s a great idea, and hey, this is how I can help,” or, “It’s a bad idea, and this is how I can help.”

And both outcomes, they’d always be quite willing to help. And with a lot of our government partnerships, I’ve taken the exact same route to them as well. “Hey, this is what I want to do with you, but open to alternatives. What do you think?” If they think it’s a great idea, then they’ll write me a letter of support, since it’s a minister. Or if they don’t think it’s a good idea, then well, “Hey, how can I make it a good idea?” And I’ll work with that MP to make it a brilliant concept.

So I’ve been really quite lucky. I think it’s all been based around networking, trying to make relationships with the people that obviously have some amount of significance. And Westpac was the exact same thing. I wrote a cold message to the former CEO of Westpac, Brian Hartzer, and said, “Hey, this is what I want to do. I’d love Westpac to fund it.” And this is guy who’s running a multibillion dollar company, right? It’s the oldest company in Australia. They turned 200 years old last year. And I cold messaged the CEO, and he replied and the CEO’s office ended up funding the partnership, and it’s incredible because we’re actually giving young people the opportunity to, I guess, understand core financial literacy skills in school. Which is, I think, fundamental for growth and development for a child.

Adam:

You make it sound so easy, as if a 20 year old, just going out there and reaching out. And I know you’ve got a big team behind you now, and that that does help, but in the early days, you know you’re 14, 16, on LinkedIn, just reaching out to people. If you did it like that, there’s no excuse for other young people out there, to go and do exactly the same thing that you did. Right?

Taj:

Yeah. Look, as I said, I think I got incredibly lucky. There was a lot of things that just ended up working well for me, whether it be certain connections I was able to make, certain events I was lucky to be part of, certain people I just bumped into. So I got very, very, very lucky. 

Adam:

Well, let’s talk about LinkedIn a little bit now. You met some amazing people, and in fact, I believe this is how you met your first investor as well, just by reaching out on LinkedIn.

Taj:

I met Steve McDonald, our first impact investor, literally from cold message. He sent me a message when I was 14, or 13. And he said, “If you’re ever in Sydney, let me know, and if I’m ever in Brisbane and I’ll let you know.” And we were never able to get the days to work. And finally after a year we got the dates to work. Got my dad’s suit on again, and we met Steve, pitched the idea, and he’s like, “This is incredible. I love it. I want to invest.” And within 30 days he made another trip to Brisbane, and he invested into the company, and that was purely as a result of a random message from LinkedIn. That’s happened on, I don’t know how many occasions, whether it be advisors, teammates, customers, major customers. It’s just been incredible.

And I think obviously there’s been this rise of fake profiles on LinkedIn, so I can’t say I’m a huge fan as I was maybe two years ago, but still I think, for the sake of connection making, and obviously messaging particular people, I think it’s incredibly valuable, because you can get your air time literally in their inboxes, something that they’re going to see straight away. And now politicians are getting on LinkedIn. You’ve got premiers, you’ve got ministers, MP’s, and you can get right into their inboxes, they’ve literally gotten LinkedIn on their mobile phone. So while they might not have notifications on, they see these messages coming through. Which is, I mean that’s quite rare.

Adam:

Do you have any advice for young people out there that you could give them about LinkedIn?

Taj:

Look, I think just be active. Having a LinkedIn profile and then waiting for people to connect with you is just bullshit. You’ve got to be proactive. If you’ve got a particular interest, a particular need, a particular request, go out and literally find people, spend three days searching, to try to find people in that area, that can help you, or you can obviously contribute back to them as well perhaps. And I think I was proactive. I know a lot of the people that have succeeded on LinkedIn have being proactive. But if you’re just going to sit there, I’ve seen lots of people jumping into LinkedIn because they’ve been told to by their universities, but they just sit there thinking, “Well, people messaging me.” That’s literally never going to happen. You’ve got to get out there, put yourself out there, cold message people, cold call people, to kind of create some significance on the platform.

Adam:

Your team is really important to you. But you started the company basically by yourself. 

Taj:

ook, while I certainly was the founder of the organisation, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to obviously get any of this off the ground if it wasn’t for the team, both past, present, in that initial stages. I was in school, for a lot of the time, so I needed people to go to meetings, form partnerships, that sort of thing. So I got really lucky at the very start. Sure, my name was in the media articles. My name is listed as the founder of the organisation, but I was incredibly lucky with the people that haven’t been recognised in media articles. Steve’s contribution financially to get us off the ground, as well as all the team members. So I think it has literally been a mix of incredible luck throughout this whole process, that has allowed us to get to where we are right now. Everything’s just aligned really well.

Adam:

What’s been the biggest challenge for you in trying to run a business as a young entrepreneur?

Taj:

As young entrepreneurs, when we have our highs, they’re a lot higher than the average human being. In turn, when we have our lows, they’re a lot lower than the average human being. We don’t have the world wisdom. We haven’t had the life experience that some of the older entrepreneurs have, which is obviously fundamentally important when you start a business. But equally when young entrepreneurs go for things, we don’t see why we shouldn’t do anything. Right? We don’t have the life experience to tell us that taking this risk might not be the best idea. So we go for the impossible. And I think that’s something that’s quite special with young entrepreneurs. I think I’ve been very lucky in that aspect. I’ve gone for the impossible and I think I’ve been quite lucky.

We’ve been failing above everyone else, which made a lot of our work look quite successful. We set our goals quite high, and we’ve been incredibly successful.

Look, in terms of a team, I don’t have the world wisdom, I haven’t had the life experience. You don’t get taught that in school. You don’t get taught that from an online course. And that’s something I’ve fundamentally struggled with, and I’ve just had to bring people around me to help me manage a team. Which is something I’m still learning and something that I will continue to learn, I think over the next 60 years.

Adam:

I know previously we just spoke about, a future of work and how passionate you are about that. 

Taj:

Yeah. Look, I think there’s young people going through schools today, I think learning coding, or being told if your child doesn’t know how to code they will be left behind, and I think that’s something that’s quite sad because quite simply that’s not true. Five, 10 years ago, being able to code was an incredibly useful skillset. There weren’t a lot of coders, and therefore people who knew how to code were being paid very well. A junior coder was being paid 60, 70, $80,000 in sometimes, just because there wasn’t enough coders. In the innovation economy, we’ve got enough coders. In fact, there are systems that have been created that code themselves.

Our education system is telling young people if your child doesn’t know how to code, they will be left behind. Really the skills of the future are based around people skills, so things like communication, creativity, collaboration. They’re soft skills, skills that are incredibly difficult to learn from a textbook, and skills that can only be learned through application and through experimentation, and skills that we think every single young person needs to learn in school otherwise, truly, that’s what’s going to ensure they get left behind, not their technical skills. The technical skills can be trained. You fundamentally cannot train young people to be creative from a textbook. You cannot train a young person with interpersonal skills from a textbook, and I think that’s something that we need to be emphasising for every single young person, to make sure they are ready for that 21st-century workforce of the future.

Adam:

Thank you for listening to the Youngpreneur Podcast brought to you by The Hunter Futurepreneurs program. What exactly is the Hunter Futurepreneurs Program? I’d like you to meet the Entrepreneurship Facilitator at Hunter Futurepreneurs…

Cheryl:

I’m Cheryl Royle and I’m the entrepreneurship facilitator for the Hunter Region.

The Hunter Futurepreneurs Program exists to support, inspire, educate and mentor young people who have an idea or a passion they want to explore. We show you step by step how to validate your idea and build a successful business.  

If you are…or know a young person with an idea,

Hunter Futurepreneurs are here for you.

Adam:

Do you have an idea for a business but have no idea where to start? I’ll tell you where to start, it’s simple, all you need to do is go to the show notes page for this episode, hunterfuturepreneurs.com.au/taj, and there you’ll be able to answer a couple of quick questions and then Cheryl will be in touch with you to schedule a free meeting to help you get started the right way. 

Cheryl:

So that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. Two young guys coming in, knocking on my door, saying, “This is my idea. What do I do with it?” And we developed it to at least getting them a grant to make it happen.

Proud. Proud, but I felt that the opportunity, the opportunities that were going to open up for these young boys were incredible, and the journey that they’ve been on has been incredible as well. So they’ve learnt so many things. They’ve learnt about finances. They’ve learnt about resilience on how … They’ve learnt about how to develop an app. They’ve learnt about things like contracts, working with other people. It’s just been amazing and it’s been an amazing journey. Whether that app is successful or not doesn’t matter now. These young boys have walked away with skills that will hold them very high throughout their lives.

Adam:

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts for more incredible stories from other Young Entrepreneurs to learn how they started and built their businesses. They started from scratch just like you, there is no better time to get started than right now, get in touch with the Hunter Futurepreneurs team today at hunterfuturepreneurs.com.au/taj.

Thank you for listening!