The 22 Year Old Who Built A Seven-Figure Tech Platform From A Bedroom – And Why He Thinks Influence is The Next Asset Class

Che Zucconi doesn’t fit the standard profile of a tech founder. He left school with an A in Economics and an offer to join a major US investment bank in the city. Within a year, he was on the trading floor in derivatives sales; a world defined by pace, precision and complexity.

It was, in almost every sense, the opposite of the startup archetype. But it was also the education that shaped everything that followed.

That background in finance gave Zucconi a particular lens, which was a habit of asking where something important was being misunderstood, underutilised or unevenly distributed. Applied not to financial instruments but to social influence, that question became the founding logic behind Collabbay.

Built Solo, From One Spreadsheet

Collabbay began as a single Excel spreadsheet. While working full-time and studying simultaneously, Zucconi spent evenings and early mornings building a platform to connect brick-and-mortar venues with content creators. The model is straightforward: a venue lists an offer, whether it be a meal, an experience or a redeemable product, and creators browse, book, visit and produce content in return.

But what Zucconi has built around that core idea is considerably more involved. The platform manages the entire process end-to-end from discovery, booking, communication, content tracking and admin oversight.

The codebase now exceeds 50,000 lines of proprietary code across two fully functional applications. Every aspect of the platform and its operation has Zucconi’s involvement, such is is passion for it. It’s a lean, iterative approach built on the single principle of building fast, fixing immediately and testing in the leanest way possible. No co-founders, teams or external resources.

As Zucconi says, “Playing the right game is more important than winning at the wrong one.”

The Platform And Its Impact

Collabbay now supports over 600 London-based creators with a combined following of more than 27 million and is used by over 150 venues across the city from national chains to independents in Belgravia, Canary Wharf and Hackney.

More than 3,000 collaboration requests have been sent through the system. At £70 per month for venues, the pricing is deliberately accessible, designed to make creator-led marketing viable for independent businesses that typically lack the time or budget to navigate complexity.

The value is intangible. One collaboration on the platform generated over one million views for a venue – exposure that, as standard advertising benchmarks, would have cost thousands of pounds through paid media.

Beyond reach, the platform saves venues the operational burden of sourcing creators individually, negotiating and chasing deliverables.

Influence As An Asset Class

Underpinning Collabbay is a bigger argument – one Zucconi traces directly to his time in finance. His position is not simply that influencer marketing works. It is that social influence is, in the truest sense, an asset class and that the infrastructure around it is still in its earliest stages.

People pay more because of perception. They choose what feels relevant and they respond to trust, status and visibility. Social influence drives real commercial outcomes, yet smaller real-world businesses rarely have the tools to access it systematically. That is the gap Collabbay is designed to bridge.

It is also a deliberate bet on the human voice at a moment when AI is reshaping much of the digital economy. In a world where AI handles an increasing share of the rational, Zucconi argues that human influence over innately human things like eating, relationships, recommendations and social trends becomes more valuable, not less.

Backing, Traction And What Comes Next

The business has now closed its first pre-seed round at a seven-figure valuation, attracting backing from seasoned CEOs and experienced operators who took an interest before any institutional funding was in place. The traction came first and the validation followed – a sequence that Zucconi considers important.

Worth noting too is the role of government-backed schemes like Grow London, part of the Greater London Authority’s support infrastructure for early-stage businesses. Zucconi is keen to acknowledge programmes like these and the teams behind them for the meaningful difference they make to founders building without traditional resources or networks.

A Word For Unconventional Founders

There is one threat Zucconi is clearly keen to make audible. The UK startup conversation has been dominated by talk of an “ambition deficit.” His view is that the framing is wrong. The deficit, if there is one, is not in ambition but rather in the visibility of the people who are already building, quietly, from unconventional starting points.

His prerequisite list for building something worthwhile is deliberately short. Not a tech background and not family in business. Not the conventional route. Curiosity, persistence, commercial instinct and the willingness to keep figuring things out, even when the path is not obvious.

Building something worthwhile is a journey and one in which what appears to the outside world is closer to the finished product; a lot of hard work and thought has already gone into the success seen, he notes. But being slightly outside the expect mold can sharpen your eye. Having to build before you are funded can make the business more honest.

Collabbay is, in many ways, a product of all of those things. For a now 23 year old who started with a spreadsheet and an alarm set for 5:30am, the real work, as he puts it, is only just beginning.