Tim Armoo lost his first fortune within 15 months after selling his teenage business for £110,000, admitting that early success made him “cocky” and “arrogant”. He later rebuilt his wealth by founding Fanbytes, which was acquired by Brainlabs for an eight-figure sum in 2022.
Armoo started his first business, a tutoring service, at 14 and expanded it to 65 tutors within six weeks. He went on to create Entrepreneur Express, a publication bought by Horizon Media when he was 17.
“I made my first bit of money at 17—that was the first business that I meaningfully sold,” Armoo said. “And then I lost all that money from that.”
The £110,000 sale was life-changing for the teenager, who had arrived in the UK as a child with no money or established network after years of instability.
“I’m this kid from like South London, I was like, bro, this is £110 million,” he said. “So I got cocky, I got arrogant, and I started to invest it in stuff that I had absolutely zero clue about.”
Armoo first put some of the money into a dentist affiliate website, believing it would become a successful source of passive income. When that failed to take off, he turned to spread betting.
“I thought, I did it before, so I’m just going to do it again,” he said. “I thought I knew how to make money, and spread betting seemed like an easy way to make money… Silly. Within 12 to 15 months, all of it was gone.”
Tim Armoo rebuilt his fortune through Fanbytes
Armoo eventually made his money back, and more, by returning to the route through which he had first found success: building a business.
In 2017, during his second year at university, he founded Fanbytes while his peers were out partying. The influencer marketing agency later secured clients including the UK Government, Deliveroo and Samsung.
Brainlabs acquired Fanbytes in 2022 for an eight-figure sum, when Armoo was 27.
But the second sale brought a different challenge. Armoo said he had once dismissed founders who described feeling empty after selling a company, believing that financial security should be enough to prevent it.
“When I was building, I’d read these stories of people saying they felt empty after selling a business, and I’m like, okay, mate, all right,” he said. “If you’re empty with £10 million in the bank, okay, baby, go hug your money, and you wouldn’t feel empty.”
For around six months after the Fanbytes sale, he felt “on top of the world”. He then began asking what his life was supposed to look like without the company.
“It was just build business, sell business, make money, die,” Armoo said. “It was just like there was nothing afterward.”
He said the question of what to do next remained for about two years, as he tried to separate his identity from his achievements. It took around a year, he added, to distance his major success from his ego and required significant psychological change.
Armoo’s experience echoes accounts from other prominent founders who have struggled after major business exits. Arianna Huffington has described an “identity trap” affecting executives who remain in roles they no longer enjoy because leaving feels like losing part of themselves.
Brian Chesky, the co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb, has said the company’s 2020 flotation, which made him a billionaire, was among the saddest periods of his life. Loom co-founder Vinay Hiremath has also written about losing his sense of direction after selling the company to Atlassian for $975 million.
