Exited entrepreneur, Timothy Armoo, reveals his cheat codes for success

Strategy & Tragedy: CEO Stories with Steph Melodia is the best business podcast for curious entrepreneurs featured in the UK's Top 20 charts for business shows.

Hosted by Stephanie Melodia, Strategy & Tragedy features candid interviews with entrepreneurs who have scaled - and failed - their businesses - sharing their lessons in entrepreneurship along the way. From Simon Squibb of 'What's Your Dream?' Internet fame to Lottie Whyte of Sunday Times Top 100 Fastest-Growing company, MyoMaster. From exited founders like Nick-Telson Sillett to subject matter experts like Alex Merry in the public speaking arena and Matt Lerner, the GOAT of Growth.

This is one of the best podcasts to listen to if you're looking for educational and inspirational content on Spotify, Apple, Google, Amazon, YouTube or watch the clips on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts

-

In this week's episode, Stephanie Melodia interviews Timothy Armoo, entrepreneur, investor, international speaker, and now published author with his new book, ‘What's Stopping You?’ out now.

Best known for founding Fanbytes, a Gen Z–focused influencer marketing agency, which he started while at university — and within just five years, scaled it to 80 employees, raised $2M in funding, and won clients including Deliveroo, Samsung and the UK Government - before selling it in an 8-figure deal to Brainlabs in 2022.

He has since brokered two more exits, earning him major recognition including being names as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, for one. He’s also committed to social impact with the Fanbytes Fund, backing influencer campaigns for Black-owned businesses.

Watch on YouTube via the link below or keep reading for the transcript, where Steph and Timo discuss:

• Normalising success through environment - Timo deliberately exposed himself to success by working in luxury hotel lobbies as a teenager, which helped him mentally rehearse and normalise achievement despite growing up on a council estate in South London.
  

• "It's not that deep" mindset - How Timo developed a philosophy of relaxed intensity, treating setbacks (like losing a £500k investment) as manageable rather than catastrophic, which reduced stress and improved decision-making throughout his entrepreneurial journey.
  

• Everything big starts small - His first £5 profit from a tutoring business at age 14 was more significant than his later 8-figure exit because it proved he could execute ideas and make money, establishing the foundation for all future success.
  

• The power of self-talk and belief - Drawing from books like Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, he emphasizes being intentional about how you describe yourself, avoiding negative self-definitions and building a "chair of belief" supported by multiple evidence points of past wins.
  

• Personal tragedy as motivation - His father's death just before launching Fanbytes became a driving force, giving him perspective that business challenges weren't truly catastrophic and fuelling his determination to make the company succeed as a promise to his late father.

SM: In your new book, you say: "We all have a version of us who is the confident, successful person we know we can be. But too often, we get in our own way. I certainly did. And it took me years to overcome myself and eventually become successful." So, Timo I'd love to hear-

TA: Wow, that's good.

SM: Well, you wrote it!

TA: I know, and now that I'm hearing it back, I'm like that's good, woah, that was a banger.

SM: Yeah. Banger. Buy the book. There's more there's more of that goodness where that came from. And it ties in so perfectly to the great title, right? 'What's stopping you?'

TA: Exactly.

SM: It ties in perfectly. So I'd love to hear, what are some of the mental frameworks, principles that helped you overcome some of those blockers and ultimately win at this game of life?

TA: Well, the first thing, I really like the fact that you called it game of life, because I think that, it is a game, and as a result, it is a system of inputs and also outputs. So if I think about myself growing up in South London, living on a council estate with my dad, being a black kid growing up in South London, there was basically only one input I was getting, which was you basically have to be one of the mandem. I had lived in Ghana, and I'd come here. So all my inputs were basically shaped by my environment, which was basically, it wasn't cool to be smart. That was a big thing. It was basically the only way you made it out, quote, unquote, was becoming either a footballer or a rapper.

And the truth was - because I spent a bit of time in Ghana - I had this, like, very weird undertone in my mind of you can do more. You can be more. But it was just again feeling every single time, and I credit my mom a lot.

When I was in Ghana, my mom would find people who are traveling from London to Ghana and pay them so that they could send me books to read, which was just incredible. I'm so grateful for that because that's the reason why I really love reading.

So I think there were all of these different things that happened in my life which told me that I was meant to do something significant. I was meant to be special, but also my physical environment was showing me the complete opposite. And that's why I say there's a version of you because there's almost the external version that you see which which says, alright, council estate, smelly staircase, dad works in social care, divorced parents.

That version there is, like, beaten at you every single day.

But then internally, there's that version of you where you're like, 'well, actually, here is all the evidence that I have to basically show that this could be different and that this is different.'

SM: Shoutout to Mama Armoo straight off the bat. How cool is she for getting those books?! So how did you overcome?

I get what you're saying, like, there is this internal niggle, and you're never gonna get away from that, right? If you've got something in that, and thankfully, if you've got at least one of your two parents are kind of nurturing some of it. But to your point, you've got the social pressures. You've got what you're seeing, role models. Like, you need a lot more to counteract that and overcome it, so tell us the rest of the story - what gets you beyond just the niggles?

TA: I think there were two main things that really helped me. One was I brainwashed myself. I'll explain what I mean:

When I was around 13, I discovered this website called retire21.com, and it's still live, actually. I remember just stumbling across that site and just reading these stories of people who are just a bit older than me. And they were building online businesses. They were making money and just thinking, 'oh my god. It's it's possible. It's possible for you not to wait for you to be an adult, for you to go and do things.' I think right now, there's a very popular phrase online, which is 'you can just do things,' right? And I think at that point, I was very much like, 'wow, yeah. I can just do things.'

And so that was one way I just brainwashed myself by consuming so many of content like that where it just normalizes success.

The second thing that I did (and I highly encourage people to do this now):

So, as I mentioned, I grew up on Old Kent Road. And what I would every Sunday, starting around 14-15, what I would do is every Sunday, I will go to the poshest, hotel, and I would just sit in the lobby, and I would work away on my Toshiba laptop. And for me, it was almost my way of, like, brainwashing myself to say, I'm actually meant to be here. So I would choose Claridge's, and it got to a point where I'd go every Sunday to Claridge's, and I'll sit in the lobby and I work. Doorman got to know me, and the doorman was a guy called Ian.

And, I remember one day I came, he said, hello, sir. And I remember thinking, oh my god. This is insane. Like, he is calling me a sir.

So I think, actually, the piece of advice to a lot of people would be you might feel mentally stuck, and a big part of it might also be that you might feel that mental stuck then translates to being physically stuck.

And even if it's as simple as one day, take yourself out, work from there, take yourself somewhere and just have, like, a really nice tea... What you're doing is you are normalizing to your brain because your brain doesn't know what is normal and what is abnormal. So with constant mental rehearsal, what would happen is that you will start to normalize these things. And doing that at a young age just took me away from that kind of dark mental space that I was in.

SM: Incredible. I'm so impressed by how ahead of the curve you were. It's like pre-Instagram, before the trends, pre-visualization manifesting and exposing yourself to these environments, to this level of success, which I love. But this is turning back, like, the sands of time, so I'm curious:

I love the keyword that you mentioned there, normalizing success.

This is something I've observed from you and other very, very successful outliers is it's no like, it's no big deal. I remember you you commenting someone was, interviewing you about exiting, selling your business in this 8 figure deal aged just 27. Incredible business success. And, your response to that was, yeah, like, it was all part of the plan, fine, no big deal.

So I'd love, first of all, for you to just expand on that because I'm fascinated, but also reconciling laissez-faire attitude with these humongous ambitions.

We were just talking about the book as well that we've got here too, and definitely preorder or buy if it's out now because it's awesome. But you say about this too. Like, this is the first book that you've published. You've got this incredible deal, but your ambition is to get that to be a Sunday Times bestseller. But you're, like, chill about it as well. So, let's square the hole in that.

TA: Have you ever heard of the story of the duck who's on the lake? And above the lake, the duck looks very, very calm, but then underneath paddling crazy. I think that's probably me.

During Fanbytes, I remember and for those who don't know what Fanbytes was, basically, we had around 20, I'd spotted this idea, which was basically that influencers were gonna be the next big thing, and brands would need a way to tap into those influencers. And I had seen it had worked in The US, and I thought, well, we should basically do that also in The UK. And most importantly, because we were part of the Gen z audience, we should position it like brands to tap into a Gen z audience using Gen z influences. And that was actually, like, a very specific, practical, intentional decision that I made because I thought, well, I've seen this game before. I've read enough books to know that when there's a period like this of crazy growth in some industry, there comes to be some sort of consolidation further on.

And the people who actually win in that consolidation, the people who are specialized in some way. And so with FanBytes, I saw that, and I went, okay. Cool. We are gonna build this business, which is gonna be all around helping brands to tap into that. Now here's something very interesting, which is in the first four years of fan bias, I was a very intensely stressed person.

And we were growing, but it was just as if we were just absolutely just pulling and pulling and pulling and make things work. Just as if, sir, after here. I can't I never pronounce the name correctly. Yeah.

The what's it? The Greek, like pushing the ball. Exactly. Right? Just pushing. And for some reason, all our other competitors, the ones who were doing well, it didn't seem like it was a crazy amount of effort for them. And I thought to myself, okay.

What are we doing wrong? Or what am I doing wrong? And I realized that the thing I was doing wrong, and this is gonna sound counterintuitive, thing I was doing wrong was I was expecting it to be very hard. Yeah. And because that was my expectation, anytime something went wrong or anytime something went a bit left, I treat it as if it was an absolute catastrophe.

So, like, actually, in my book, there's a so the book is split into 11 different cheat codes is what we call them. And one of the cheat codes is cheat code number eight, which is it's not that deep. Right? This is what I wanted to ask you about, Krishna. And it's not that deep.

It's just something that we always said in South London. And and I remember once in business, we had an investor pull out of a deal to invest 500 k. And at the final minute, he basically decided not to. And I remember my first thought was, oh, it's not that deep. And I remember just feeling this sense of weightlessness to be like, oh, okay.

It's not that deep because we're gonna figure it out. And so I think when I started to take on that sort of of, well, nothing can really kill us, and anything that happened is not really that deep anyway. The moment that I started to internalize that, it's almost as if I had what I can only describe as a relaxed intensity. Yeah. And that really helped.

And for your listeners, that feeling of almost like practicing a it would all work out. Things are expected to go slightly wrong, but that's fine because that's part of the game. Yeah. When you adopt that many, everything changes for you. Yeah.

Super interesting to hear. I remember one of the talks I went to, you repeated that phrase a few times. Yeah. Not that deep. I really latched onto it.

You being able to react in the moment with that last minute investor fallout by saying to yourself it's not that deep. How much mental rehearsal did you have to be able to take your mind there immediately in the moment? So I'll tell you something that really helped me, and it may not be what you expect. It's actually because of us know things that happened. So when I started Phambites at 21, just a few months before my dad had passed away.

So he had, passed away because of a stroke. In fact, even worse, I had found him in his room, passed away. So an incredibly traumatic thing for a 21 year old who was just living with his dad. So sorry to hear that, Timo. So I think what happened was every other thing just became almost a foot when you have a dad who has passed away that you've witnessed.

And, also, just before he had passed away, for the first time ever, and it's just because he was like an African dad who basically didn't know how to show feelings. For for the first time ever, an article had actually come out about myself. I think it was I don't know where it was. I think it was in the Times or the Daily Mail. And for the first time, he was like, oh, Timo, I'm I'm very proud of what you're doing.

I don't understand what it is, but I'm very proud to keep going, keep going. And then literally a few days afterwards, he passed away. And so for me, I've always had this internal thing of, well, this thing has to work. And so something very funny is on the 05/05/2022, when we sold the business, I remember going up to the rest of my team and telling them about, you know, why they deal all the kind of logical professional reasons. And then I just went off script, and I just went and another reason why we had to make this work is because my dad passed away just a few days before we launched this, and I promised him and I told him that this thing was gonna become a success.

And then suddenly, everyone in the company just in that moment, like, it all made sense. It all made sense why I almost had this very relaxed intensity towards things. It it all made sense why when things went bad, I always corral the team together to say, let's fix it together. Now for people listen. I don't think that you need to have, like, family trauma happen to you.

But I think that those sort of things put things in enormous context. So I've had so many things. Even since the fan by sex, I've had so many things bad happen, and I've just gone, oh, that's alright. It's not that deep. We'll figure it out.

And in the book, I talk about, like, different ways to frame circumstances and problems in order to make sure that, you always get sight of the bigger picture. Wow, Timo. Thank you for sharing that, and I'm so sorry. It definitely puts things into it's funny because the conversation I just had before was on a similar sort of lines with someone going through this horrible kind of tragedy, and how when you haven't had that or, like, of course, I get it. I understand.

I empathize. But unless you've been through that experience Yeah. It is hard to shortcut that. Yeah. It is hard to fill that motivation and mission on a cellular level.

Right? I mean, I love how you kind of use that emotionally to corral the troops, and and that all does make a lot of sense. But is there anything else in the book that kinda speaks to someone who thankfully hasn't gone through that Yeah. But can still change some of that energy? So in Chico number two, I believe, is everything big starts small.

And if I had a tattoo I don't like tattoos because I'm scared of needles. But if I did have a tattoo, it would just say, like, everything big starts small. Because so Fanbyte was the company I started at 21. Before that, I started a bunch of them that all failed. At 70, started a business called Entrepreneur Express, which sold for a $110.

Right? And I was this 17 year old kid, and I was like, woah. That's the most amount of money I've ever made. But then at 14 was actually the first ever business I started, which was a tutoring business. And in that tutoring business, I basically was teaching people math, and then I ended up building a network of tutors where I will be the middleman.

And I will basically take a cut between the people who wanna tutor in and this and and the Now why do I give that context? Because if you actually look at my life, you would go, wow. The most significant amount that he made was when he sold fan bites and he made the money, etcetera. But, actually, I think the most significant amount of money I ever made was that £5 cut that I took when I started that tutoring business. I was charging people £15 an hour to connect them.

The tutor would get £10 and I'll get £5. And that for me, if that hadn't happened, none of this would have happened because at that time, like, being a poor kid from South London, I had proved to myself that I could think about an idea, a tutoring business. I'm gonna tutor people. I'm gonna connect with two people and make money from it. I had basically painted a self image which said, I am the sort of person who can make money.

And if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have then gone on to do the thing at 17. I wouldn't have then gone to do the thing at 21. So the reason I share that story is because there's gonna be a lot of people who are listening to this who basically are like, cool. I wanna start that big business, and I wanna do this. And I'm looking on social media and seeing this person with, like, 50 employees and a 100 employees and all this stuff.

Yeah. But it all starts off with that first contract. Love that. That first customer who paid you £20 for your fashion brand, and you go, wow. Incredible.

Like, I had this idea, and I put it out. It all starts with that. And when you internalize that, when you truly internalize that that bill with hundreds of employees and multiple revenue and blah blah blah, all starts with that first deal, that first customer, that first signature, that first yes, you start to realize that you should be, like, almost obsessing just more about that and really enjoying that as opposed to just saying, I'm going to enjoy myself when we are bigger. I'm going to congratulate myself when we're bigger. It should be I'm gonna congratulate myself now for even doing that first thing.

Love it. Your mic drop. I'm gonna say, like, it's not that deep, but that was deep. I love that deep. That's deep.

I love it. I love it. And it's a message that really needs highlighting that in the age of social media. Yeah. Like, I, a thousand percent, was a victim of that rubbernecking Interesting.

Looking at I was so successful. The LinkedIn humble brags. You and you're like, oh, they've got the office. They've got the neon signs. We've got this, that.

And you're just constantly looking at, you know, the summit, the Mount Everest. You got the whole journey, not the destination sort of cliche. But you also this is a very important thing. Sometimes people say, like, don't compare yourself to others. I disagree with that.

That as human beings, we are comparison creatures. And what I would what I would then say so in in Ghana, because I'm from Ghana, there's a very famous quote, which is, do they have two heads? Right? So if an auntie or uncle or anyone sees, you know, someone your age or around your age do something and you're like, oh, man. I wish I could do that.

Then the question is, do they have two, do they have two heads? And that is effectively saying, like, that person is different to you. So people say don't compare yourself. I think that you should compare yourself, but then you should then ask yourself, do they have two heads? What is different between me and that person?

Because in most cases, it is that they have just applied very simple things and done it over a sustained period of time because it is extremely hard. And we're not talking about comparing yourself to, like, the Elon Musk of the world, etcetera, because, like, I truly believe there are some people who are just geniuses. But most of us are not geniuses. We're just doing very basic things by just doing it for a sustained enough period of time, and we have enough self talk to ourselves saying we can do this. We can.

Then you wake up one day. I remember in Fanbyte, one day I cried. I've never actually told this story before. Strategy exclusive. One day, this is after COVID, and then we brought people into the team.

And I remember I came into the office at midday, and we had about 65 people there who are all just, like, working on their laptops and everything else. And I just came in, and I just felt so emotional. Had to then go to the bathroom, and I just started crying. Oh, Timo. And And the reason I started crying was because all I ever wanted when I was younger was, like, just to build something I was proud of.

And at no point did I think the company would get to this stage. At no point did I think I'd be coming up the stairs and because our office was not even big enough for the team of people, so we had people taking calls on the stairs. Mhmm. And and we had people, you know, closing for, like, Nike and Samsung whilst on the stairs trying to juggle the laptop on their thighs. And I started crying because, like, wow.

It's happened. The thing that I really wanted is happened. And this would be the case for so many people who are trying to say build businesses or do anything, like, get that promotion, get into that healthy relationship is you wouldn't see it happening. And then one day you wake up and you go, wow. This is the life I designed.

And when that happened, you need to, like, take stock of it. Yeah. Oh, Tiara, that's so sweet. I was like enjoying it as well. Right?

It's like taking stock because it is easy, especially in entrepreneurship, right, to just be, like, head down, grinding, putting in the and you're like, wait a minute. Like, that was such a sweet moment to just kinda be present, take stock of your team, your stuff. Oh, I love how you paint that picture as well, like, overflowing into the stairwell. I definitely wanna talk to you about wealth, and I know you talked about this before. So I appreciate you being open about what's typically a taboo subject.

Yeah. Just onto that. I I just have one more quick question. Like, what is coming across that leaps and bounds to me on the other side of the table here is how wise you are, like, way beyond your years. And there's so much of what you're taught you know, I already mentioned, you know, this whole kind of before when you used to go as carriages and exposing your person to this world of success to normalizing success.

There's something else you mentioned, which was like, I am the type of person. We now know, like, all the the psychological power of how we self identify. I know atomic habits, I absolutely love. Right? And it talks about, like, if you wanna go and go and run, you call yourself a runner.

Like, where did that come from for you? Like, are you like, is this thanks to mama Amu buying you all this books? Like Yeah. Because it get also with you saying, like, not growing up around these people, this stuff. Like, all this stuff, I've just found out Yeah.

In the past few years. So I think there are two main sources. One was books. And it's and it's a big reason why I penned down this book because I thought, wow. Books really help to transform life.

And if in some way my book can help someone else, that'd be great. Yeah. Amazing. And by books, I mean, one of the most profound books I ever read was a book called, Psycho Cybernetics Okay. Which is an amazing book.

And I'll give a brief summary, but, basically, it was written by a guy called Maxwell Maltz. And Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon, and he basically realized something that, say, both of us could have a scar on our face. And we'd both go to him, and he'd fix your scar and be like, great. Good. I'm amazing.

I'm done. He'd fix my scar, and it'd be gone, but then I will still walk around as if I have this scar in my face, not be able to look people in the eye, not be able to do so many things. And he basically concluded that the brain can't actually tell the difference between what is real and what is fake. And the brain is what he called an autosuggestion mechanism. Right?

So if you tell it certain things, it believes certain things, and then it acts in that way. And I remember reading that book probably around, like, sixteen, 17, and it almost being a just almost as if someone had, like, opened up my brain and turned on the bulb and said, look at this. Like, this is how your life is. And so as a result of that, that's why I've become a heavy proponent of the things that you say to yourself. And so I pull up so many of my friends when they say something like, oh, I'm the type of person who no.

No. No. No. No. No.

No. Don't say that. You know? I'm the type of person who doesn't show up on time. I'm the person who always forgets things.

It's like you forgot that one thing. That doesn't mean you're the type of person who forgets everything. And then if you keep telling yourself that, what happens is when the opportunities come for you, you tell yourself, oh, I'm gonna forget it anyway. So then you don't do it. And so being able to, really own the self talk that you give is very important.

And then I think very candidly, the hardest part about business, especially as a first time entrepreneur, is that you don't know what you don't know. And so as a result, every single thing that comes up seems like it's going to be the worst thing that's ever gonna happen to you. It's a reason why, for example, the average age of a successful entrepreneur Like, 50, like, 40 something? There you go. Yeah.

The average age of a successful entrepreneur is 42. Yeah. And it's because, basically, they spend their entire career figuring out all the unknown unknowns. So the only thing that is left is just the known knowns. So they just do the thing that they ought to do.

And so for me, when I think about life philosophy or business, framework, it often is basically that I've done all the things not to do. I have been I have been, negative self talk. I have been, I've been very selfish. I've been I've been unnecessarily intense to people. And then I realized, oh, that doesn't get me the thing that I want.

So therefore, I'm just gonna do the opposite of that. And so a combination of that and books has been transformed me. Yeah. And I can imagine, like, Timur Amu of today does not need to, like, wake up and say morning affirmations in the mirror, at least not even when you were 12. But, like, for anyone who does need a bit of extra help with, like, if they're falling into that trap of, like, not quite or is that like you said, with that negative sort of self talk, what advice can you give?

And is there anything in the book again that talks to that? Step one is awareness that you're doing this. And then step two is actually evidence. So here's what I mean by that. I believe that all our beliefs about who we are are all basically based of evidence that we have told ourselves.

So if you have your if you imagine that you have a chair, I'm gonna call it the chair of belief. If you only have one evidence point, which says you are a sort of person. So let's say your belief is I can become a successful entrepreneur. And you have one belief, which is when you were 12 years old, you started a tuck shop and you made a $100. Great.

That's one belief. The problem with that is if you imagine a chair, it can't really stand on just one thing. But if you build up very small evidence points that oh, and also I had a small design service and I charge a stranger a £100 and they paid me. Cool. That's another stick.

And then also I was able to do a presentation at my workplace in front of 10 people. Cool. That's another belief. And what you should do is very much write down on a sheet of paper, this is all the things, this is all the evidence points that I have that I am the sort of person who can actually end up becoming a successful entrepreneur. You do that, what you find is you have a belief chair which is built on so much strong foundations that is virtually unshakable for you then to go, oh, I can't actually do this.

And so if you're in a space now where you're almost, you know, talking to yourself negatively, a, be aware of it, and then candidly, get a sheet of paper out and just write, like, your little successes. And it can be anything from the thing that you did at nine to the thing that you did at twelve to the thing that you did at 29. All these little things that you did that prove that you were actually someone who is a winner. And, eventually, as you just look at that, you go, wow. That person's a winner.

I should probably start acting like that. I love that answer too. And I love how this goes beyond, like, the hacks, the vacuous motivation. Yeah. Because, like, it's not enough to just do, like, morning affirmations.

Yeah. You're like, oh, okay. Fine. I'll just keep telling him I am a successful entrepreneur or whatever. Like, if you don't actually believe that so you do need to collect that

-

Tune in to Strategy & Tragedy wherever you get your podcasts to listen to the rest of the interview.

In the meantime, please hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. Thank you. Really hope you've enjoyed this. Episodes are weekly, so make sure to tune in next time.

Strategy & Tragedy: CEO Stories with Steph Melodia is the best podcast for curious entrepreneurs and ambitious founders. Learn from those a few steps ahead of you in these candid interviews of the highs and lows of scaling and failing business.

Watch the full episode here, subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music.

Thank you for listening and for supporting the show!