Mentor Mondays: Carl Thomas of MiPic
When you’re starting up, there’s no better place to learn from those who’ve been there and done it before. Mentoring is a crucial part of the Virgin Startup programme, and a way for our businesses to get insight into the highs and lows of entrepreneur life.
Mentor Mondays is a series which brings mentoring to everyone – short videos providing nuggets of wisdom from all kinds of industries and entrepreneurs at different levels.
Today’s Mentor Mondays comes from Carl Thomas, founder of MiPic, a platform that lets people sell their art and photos by turning them into phone cases, flip flops, prints and much more. In a world where it’s increasingly difficult for artists to monetise their work, businesses like MiPic are the future. Below Carl talks about the turning points that led to his business success.
“There have been three key turning points and factors in our development so far. Number one was when a national print manufacturing company agreed to partner with us. Number two was when I resigned from my day job to focus on the MiPic platform full time, and number three was when we won the Innovation and People’s Choice award at Pitch To Rich – a competition which saw us pitch to Richard Branson and a panel of entrepreneurs.
To succeed you need to have relentless motivation and belief in yourself. I spent 2 years developing the MiPic platform in my evenings and weekends whilst working full-time as an architect, because I believed something would come of MiPic.”
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