HelpBnk

“I was bullied at school, and I carried it with me for a long time, the worthlessness, the fear, the feeling that I wasn't good enough. I left home at a young age feeling completely lost, not really knowing who I was. And even though I made it through my twenties and thirties, built a life, got married, had children, the stress never fully left my body. It was like I was always holding my breath through life, always in survival mode somewhere in the background. If I'm honest, there were moments during that time where I didn't want to be here anymore. That's not easy to say, but it's true, and it's why I do what I do now. In my forties I hit a breaking point, and that's when breathwork and mindfulness reached me in a way they hadn't before. Not overnight, not perfectly, but in a way that actually stuck. Now I run sessions, workshops, TikTok lives where people breathe with me in real time, and I've been supporting over-60s at Richmond Charity every Tuesday for about a year. I'm also developing QR-coded socks that link young people to affirmations and breathing techniques on the spot, because I know what it feels like to be struggling on the inside while functioning on the outside, and I want calm to be something you can reach for anywhere. I'm building this from lived experience, not theory. That's the only reason I know it works." @mindfuldebs

“I was four when I started to feel 'less than.' It was when I started school. The teachers rewarded the best spellers, and I wasn't one of them. It started with a tut when I stumbled over reading, and then it advanced to open segregation. I was put in the slow class. I'm sure today someone would have spotted I was dyslexic, but back then I was just slow. Somehow I worked my way into broadcasting anyway, and by the nineties I was Ireland's only national female radio DJ, working alongside 35 guys on air. I became a television presenter. I built something. But when I had children, something primal took over. Every morning I held their faces and told them, 'You are magnificent and perfect.' Not to give them inflated egos, but because I knew what it felt like when nobody said it. Then one day I was dropping one of them at school, holding her two little shoulders, looking her straight in the eye, saying the words, and I heard a teacher nearby laughing. 'She's cruising for a bruising,' she said. It hit me like a thunderbolt. Nothing had changed. So Mike and I started writing fairy tales, free online, set across the fifty states of America, each one quietly teaching a life skill, the way carrots hide in carrot cake. Two million views later, we started publishing books. Three of them hit number one on Amazon. In December our books landed in their first American library, and in January into their first American school. I've been working on this full-time since 2021, and we're not yet cash positive. But I keep thinking about that four-year-old in the slow class, and all the ones sitting there right now who don't know yet what they're actually good at." @unitedtalesofamerica

The reason 92% of people with a business idea never start isn't a money problem. They have a permission problem. When Zapier had Harris Poll survey 2,000 Americans in 2020, 61% had a business idea, 92% never followed through, and 63% said money was the blocker. The UK answer is different. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor finds that 58% of UK adults who see a real opportunity say fear of failure stops them, up from 40% before the pandemic. Both answers are real, but both are downstream of something deeper. The system optimises you for waiting. School teaches you to ask permission before you act. Jobs reward people who don't try too much. Most adults spend their entire lives needing someone else to say go. So in March we ran a 31-day challenge with @SuperteamUK, @Solana and @superteamearn that removed the wait. $1,000 in USDG, build something real, no one to ask. 10 founders did exactly that. Bronnie Ware spent years working in palliative care, and the regret she heard most wasn't a failed business or a bad investment, it was never having the courage to live a life true to themselves. The question isn't whether you have what you need to start. It's what you'll do with the 31 days you already have. Massive congrats to our 10 winners. On Instagram: @rvaclassicc, @diamondphotography1, @edugroovehub, @tidepoolhospitality On HelpBnk: @rvaclassic, @Diamondphotography, @chrishaldenby, @TidepoolHospitality, @rafael107, @Adebisi, @chelseawhite, @bansipatanvadiya, @valentineisichei, @crystlazxbt  Next challenge is coming. Watch this space. #helpbnk #solana #superteamUK

“My dad died when I was 21, a brain aneurysm, completely out of nowhere. One minute I was a college student covering shifts at a hotel, and the next he was gone. I didn't grieve properly. I just threw myself into work, and I still carry guilt about that. But hospitality was the one constant when everything else fell apart, and I never really left. Twenty-five years later I'm walking into pubs and restaurants across Sussex every day, selling gin for a local distillery, and every single operator tells me the same thing. They're cancelling services, cutting opening hours, overworking the people they have left, all because they can't find cover quickly enough or afford the agency fees. The flexible workforce already exists, passing shifts around on WhatsApp and Facebook, but there's no structure, no compliance, no protection for anyone. I could just sell them their gin and go home to a steady wage. For a long time, that's exactly what I did. Then a few months ago I pitched the idea out loud for the first time, just to hear whether it sounded like a real business or something I'd been telling myself. That was the moment it stopped living only in my head. I built the MVP myself using AI tools, which tells you everything about where I am right now. I know my limits. But I also know this industry kept me going during the worst days of my life, and I'm not ready to just watch it collapse." @tidepoolhospitality

“From age 9 until I was 26, I never had a single free summer. Every year was exams, retakes, pressure, and the constant message that I wasn't good enough. I didn't understand why until 2023, when I collapsed completely and a therapist finally confirmed I have ADHD. Suddenly my entire childhood made sense. The system was built around memorisation and long attention spans, and those were exactly the two things my brain couldn't do. That same year we'd just bought our first home, and it had serious hidden problems. For eight months, on top of my full-time job, I renovated it myself. My father had to come and help because I was overwhelmed. My hair started falling out from the stress. Then I was made redundant. At my lowest point I told Patricia: 'I give myself five years to change my life, or I'll lose myself completely.' That sentence didn't come from drama. It came from exhaustion. Patricia has wanted to be a teacher since she was five years old. She used to line up her soft toys and teach them. In Spain, nobody gave her a chance for seven years. She worked in school canteens. So in 2019 I left my stable job and we moved to London, because I knew that if someone gave her one opportunity, her ability would speak for itself. She was hired by the first nursery she applied to, an OFSTED Outstanding nursery, and within months she was identifying things others had missed entirely. One child was struggling with reading and everyone assumed learning difficulties. Patricia watched him and thought it was his vision. The parents got him tested, he was prescribed glasses, and his performance improved immediately. We've been together almost 18 years. We've never owned a car. We spent three years in a 33m² flat through COVID, saving everything we could. We still haven't been able to start a family, and that waiting has been Patricia's deepest pain. This August we're opening a nursery from our home. The same house I renovated with my bare hands while my health was falling apar

Will you go and pitch?

Community is one of the most powerful things you can build around a dream. Yesterday at HelpBnk, the best pitch won a mentorship with Simon Squibb. We've re-launched the doorbell of dreams in Dubai and you can now find it outside of Pepperoni Comedy Club! The doorbell is simple. You ring it, you share your dream, and the community shows up to help. We hosted a Pitch Clinic hosted by Adam Moss and Guy Parsonage (CEO & Head of Growth at HelpBnk). Learn how to pitch effectively, hear expert feedback, and even step up to share your idea live. The best pitch won a mentorship with Simon Squibb. Pitching actually matters more than most people realise. A study at Dominican University found that people who wrote down their goals and shared them out loud were 42% more likely to actually achieve them. Pitching does three things at once. It forces clarity. If you can't explain your dream in 60 seconds, you don't understand it yet. It creates commitment. Once you've said it in a room full of strangers, walking away from it feels different. It opens doors. Half the people in that room know someone, have done something, or can introduce you to the person who'll help. That's what the doorbell is really for. A simple action that turns a private dream into a public commitment, in front of a community that actually wants you to win. We can't wait to see your pitch! Who knows what happens by spreading the word?

“I didn't have a pain point that launched my game dev career. I had more of a wonder point. I was 8 when I played a few computer games with my brother, and my imagination immediately went to the endless possibilities that come with world creation. So I opened Scratch and started building. My first game had the player dodging fireballs launched from the mouth of a dragon, and you played as a ninja who mostly had to rely on reaction speed to survive. I didn't know any game development principles and I certainly didn't have any art skills, but I made that game and then I made everyone in my family play it. It remains one of the highlights of my childhood. That same year I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The hardest part was that I didn't know what it was, but I could see that it worried the people around me. There's no cure, so it's still with me now, just an unfortunate routine at this point. The games never stopped, though. Many thousands of hours across projects that tried and failed, each one teaching me something. I ran a game development summer camp for five years, moved to San Francisco to get closer to where the technology was heading, and kept building. My current game is called Bravely Doomed, a fantasy RPG deck-builder you can play right in your browser with no download, no subscription. I started it four months ago and it's live right now, with around 20 users giving me feedback every week. I want to make a world people genuinely love spending time in. I know that's a long way off. But I've been ready for that since I was 8." @philsindiegames

Will we see you at one of our events?

Across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, entrepreneurship is exploding. The UAE has been ranked #1 in the world for entrepreneurship four years running. Riyadh has climbed 60 places in the global startup rankings in just three years. Take Tabby. A Saudi founder started it in Dubai in 2019. Today it has 15 million users, processes over $10 billion a year, and moved its HQ to Riyadh. It's now Saudi Arabia's first fintech unicorn, valued at $3.3 billion. That's how fast things move here. And it usually starts with one conversation. That's why we're bringing the Doorbell of Dreams to where the ambition already lives. May 14th – Pitch Clinic at Pepperoni's Comedy Club, Dubai. Live feedback from HelpBnk CEO Adam Moss and Head of Growth Guy Parsonage. Step up to the Doorbell and pitch your idea in person. May 22nd – 5Iron Golf at The Westin Dubai. Coffee, breakfast, golf, and the kind of conversations that turn into businesses. And we're planning something big in Saudi Arabia. Keep an eye on helpbnk.com for details. #helpbnk #KSA #UAE #entrepreneur

“I grew up in a small town in Kansas where there were very clear rules about who you were allowed to be. I was gay, and everything around me told me I was wrong. At 18, I joined the U.S. Navy to escape. I served 3.5 years, deployed on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, and believed I had finally earned a place to belong. Then, just months before completing my contract, I was discharged for being gay. I was homeless. I showered in restaurant bathrooms until I could get a job and rebuild. Three years later I had my first condo, my first car, a great job. I felt like I had finally climbed back. Then a skiing accident shattered my left shoulder, and I couldn't work for nearly a year. I lost the job, the home, the car, and the medical bills pushed me into bankruptcy. Again, everything was gone. What hurt most wasn't the physical pain. It was sitting alone, realising I had done everything right and still ended up with nothing. There was no language for what I was experiencing. No framework. Just silence and the expectation that I should somehow be resilient and move on. Years later, in my Master's programme, I was being taught the classic organisational change models, and something in me just couldn't accept them. Every model assumed that if change was communicated properly, people would eventually accept it. My life told me that wasn't true. I raised my hand and asked the professors: 'Can you accept change?' Yes. 'Can you reject change?' Yes. 'Then why do none of your models allow for that?' The room went completely silent. Then I asked: 'Where is the model that teaches me how to manage change when it's about me?' They said it didn't exist. Then they told me to make it my Master's assignment. For over 100 years, we've called it change resistance, as if people automatically reject change. But how can we assume people reject something they've never been taught how to manage? People aren't resistant. They're untrained.” @scaredsowhat

Speak to other founders on helpbnk.com and ask them how they spend their time. Make dedicated time for your project and research the concept of "deep work".

"I don't have time" is the most polite lie we tell ourselves. The truth is harder, because we have time. We just spent it on something else. Two hours scrolling or an evening watching a series we won't remember in a month. A weekend lost to other people's priorities. None of it because we're lazy. But the thing that actually matters felt too big, too risky, or too uncertain to start. So we hide behind being busy, because busy is safer than scared. Look at anyone who built something real. They didn't find more hours in the day. They have the same 24 you do. What they did was protect a small chunk of those hours and aim them at the one thing that mattered. Sara Blakely built the first Spanx prototype after work, in evenings she could have given to anything else. James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes around the edges of his life before one of them worked. Most founders we talk to didn't quit their job and go all-in on day one. They got up earlier. Stayed up later. Carved out 45 minutes nobody else was using. Behavioural research backs this up. When people are asked to track how they spend their week, almost everyone is surprised by how much "lost time" they find. The hours were always there. Frankly, most of the time we don't have a time problem. It is a priority problem dressed up as a time problem. Your dream is the most important part of you. It deserves more than the leftovers of your week. HelpBnk exists to help you take it seriously, free from the pressure to figure it all out alone. Invest 60min in one of your projects today. #helpbnk #entrepreneur

“I drew a portrait of our family dog, Nico, and gave it to my dad as a Christmas present. I didn't think much of it at the time. Then Nico passed away, and that portrait became the thing we held onto. We'd stand in front of it and talk about all his little quirks, all the things we loved about him. I realised the drawing wasn't just a drawing anymore. It was a way back into him. That's when I understood that art could help people grieve. I wanted to offer that to other people going through the same heartbreak, so I started taking commissions for friends and family at £40 a piece, and I loved every part of it. I quit my job not long after, even though I didn't have a plan. I just couldn't ignore it anymore. It was scary, but it felt necessary. Now I ship work all over the world, I've been shortlisted for creative start-up of the year, and a £1.7k commission was the moment I knew this could actually be a life. I've also adopted an orangutan and a snow leopard through donations from my wildlife sales, which still feels a little surreal to say out loud. What I'm really trying to build is something bigger than individual paintings. I want bodies of work in rooms where the conservation story gets told alongside the art. I'm not sure how to get into those rooms yet, but I think about Nico on that wall, and I remember that's where all of this started." @jenniferstarnesart

“I was a City barber, and they let me go because I couldn't work full-time anymore. I'd just become a single mum in my early 30s, and full-time wasn't something I could offer. So I started cutting children's hair at my daughter's nursery. That was the beginning of TotsCrops, nineteen years ago now. The idea was simple: children are already calm and settled in their nursery, so that's where the haircut should happen. Parents book online, tell us exactly what they want, and our stylists come to them. No noisy salon, no meltdown, no tears. Then COVID hit and the whole thing shut down for around three years. I had to leave my London home. My daughter was leaving for university at the same time, so the house was suddenly empty in every direction. It was a dreadful time. But I'd already built too much to walk away. A booking system that scales to fifty locations. A children's hairdressing chair now in its fourth generation. Seven characters called the Septuplets, from a planet near Jupiter, who help kids feel safe in the chair. You build what you need to build. Now I'm training hairdressers online, and I'm thinking about all the mums out there who just need flexible work and a way back in. That was me once, standing in a nursery with a pair of scissors, figuring it out." @totscrops

If you're serious about starting today, go on helpbnk.com and click on "start a business"

When small business owners are surveyed about their biggest regret, it's rarely a bad hire or the partner who burned them. Most of them say they waited too long to start. In a 2022 survey of entrepreneurs, 85% said they wished they had started their business sooner than they actually did. Which leads to the conclusion most people would rather not face: the most valuable thing you have isn't money. It's time. And you're losing it faster than you think. The average adult loses 218 minutes a day to procrastination. That works out to 55 days a year. Roughly two months of life, every year, given over to "I'll start when I'm ready." If you actually want to start, here are three things to do before you go to bed tonight: 1) Tell one person what you're really working on. If you're anywhere near London, come pitch us at the Doorbell of Dreams in Twickenham. (We also run free accelerator programmes) 2) Send the message you've been putting off for weeks. It doesn't have to be perfect. Mentor, customer, investor, doesn't matter who. Just send it. And if they don't reply, send it again next week. 3) Ship something this week. A piece of content, a product, a new deal with a customer. Anything that proves you actually exist outside your own head. Five years from now, you'll be five years older either way. The only question is whether you'll be five years closer to the thing you actually want. #helpbnk #entrepreneur

“I'd turn the tap on, put the hosepipe in, walk away, and come back to a huge puddle. Every time. And every time, Jason would give me that look. It sounds like such a small thing, but it happened constantly, and not just at home. Jason's a farrier, so he's in yards and farms all day, and he'd see the same puddles everywhere. People are busy. Nobody stands watching a bucket fill. And the consequences are always the same: mess, wasted water, that familiar frustration. Before all of this, I was a diagnostic radiographer. I loved helping people every day, and when I stepped away from that career I felt genuinely lost without the purpose of it. Then I started learning about the global water crisis, and something clicked, because I realised this could be my way back to that feeling. We spent five years building SealStop from nothing. It didn't exist anywhere else, so we couldn't copy or tweak anything. We had false starts, designers who didn't see it, failed prototypes, and we're still on version four. People told me a hundred times it would be cheaper to manufacture in Asia, but that was never an option for me. The hardest stretch of my life, though, was before any of this. My youngest son was born with complicated medical problems and the doctors kept saying reflux, colic, he'll grow out of it. I knew something was wrong. I pushed for referrals, asked the uncomfortable questions, reached out to consultants until we finally got the right diagnosis. He needed surgery. He's seven now and doing well. I think about that time whenever someone tells me to wait and see." @sealstopltd

“I've worked in travel sales for ten years, and every day I was sent leads that told me almost nothing about the person on the other end of the phone. Outdated channels, expensive, no real insight. It costs the industry millions of pounds a year and it makes giving genuinely good advice so much harder than it should be. I saw it at every company I worked for. At some point you stop accepting it as just how things are. Losing my dad to a brain tumour gave me a sense of perspective I can't fully put into words. Good things come from bad situations, and we only have one go at this, right? That thought sits with me every day now. So I invested everything I had, borrowed more on top of that, scrapped the first version of the product and built a better one. My partner and I welcomed our first child into the world in the middle of all of it, and I walked away from the security of a regular pay cheque at the same time. The dream, honestly, is to show my son how magical the world is. That's what I'm building toward." @safariwithcharlie

“My Nan was from Dominica, and the recipe came from her. From the time I was young, I understood there was something different about it, bold heat but real flavour underneath, smooth enough to work with food rather than just burn through it. I've been carrying that recipe for years, watching hot sauce after hot sauce hit the market with nothing behind them except heat. And I kept thinking, the right product already exists. It's just not where it belongs yet. Then in May 2025 I had a serious hand injury that stopped me from cooking or handling knives for months. I couldn't produce anything. So I sat with the business instead, planned, refined, prepared. When I got full use of my hand back, I came back harder. I've put over £15,000 of my own money into this. No external backing, just me. Evenings, weekends, every rejection, every door that didn't open. My brother Ronnie died when I was 30 and he was 35. He fell 100 feet. I had to identify him. That was nearly 28 years ago and it has never left me. He always had my back growing up, the youngest of eight kids, and losing him taught me that life is not a test run. If I had my way I'd be old school, down the markets, face to face. But I know where this sauce belongs, and I'm not stopping until it gets there." @hotsaucescartel