I Invented the Gig Economy in Britain, But No One Backed Me

I was 20 years old with a vision, a vision that came before its time but lacked the financial backing to bring it to life. If the Prince’s Trust had invested in me back then, I genuinely believe I could have been a multi-billionaire today.

By Sean Ash 

In the early 2000s, I came up with a business idea called Errands, a simple but powerful concept: to deliver food, shopping, and essentials to people who needed them using bicycles. Today, that might sound familiar. It’s what companies like Just Eat, Uber Eats, and Deliveroo do. But back then, this wasn’t a multi-billion-pound industry. It was an idea too early for its time, and one I couldn’t get funded.

The idea was born out of something personal and practical. My granddad was getting older, and his mobility wasn’t great, so every day I’d cycle to the local newsagent to pick up his milk and newspaper and drop them off at his home. He’d give me a pound for doing it, not that I expected anything, but that simple, regular task planted a seed in my mind. If he needed that kind of help, surely others did too.

So I thought, why not turn it into a business?

Back then, we didn’t have smartphones or broadband internet in most homes. We had dial-up, noisy modems, and webpages that took minutes to load. There were no apps. No gig economy. No food delivery services as we know them today. If you wanted to make something happen, you had to do it manually, with a bike, an A–Z street map, and a lot of determination.

I sat down and wrote a business plan. Errands would start small, delivering essentials locally using bicycles, because that’s what I had. With time and success, the plan was to invest in vans and expand. I wasn’t trying to capitalise on vulnerability. I wanted to provide a useful, respectful service for people like my granddad, those who valued independence but couldn’t always get to the shops.

I applied to The Prince’s Trust with that plan. I approached banks too. But no one saw the vision. And I get it, in a way. I was still young. I didn’t have a strong credit score. I hadn’t taken out loans or built financial trust. I was just another working-class kid with an idea on paper and a bike in the shed. To them, I probably looked like someone dreaming too big, someone with no collateral, no track record, and no chance.

But the idea itself? That was solid. It needed someone to believe in it, but no one did. I tried every avenue I could to secure funding and get investment, but no one would give me the money to kickstart my business. I knocked on doors with hand written flyers that took hours to individually write up. Eventually, I gave up on the idea. I just didn’t have the means or the support. 

And then, years later, services like Just Eat took off.

It’s true that Just Eat was founded in Denmark in 2001, around the same time I came up with Errands. But this was a different time. We didn’t have the kind of global internet visibility we have today. Unless something was featured on the news or in a newspaper, we rarely knew what startups were doing overseas. So there’s no suggestion that anyone copied anyone else. Ideas like this developed independently and locally because the need was real, and people were beginning to notice it. That’s all the more reason I look back knowing my idea was valid.

What I wonder now is, where did Just Eat get their funding from? Who backed them? Because that’s what I didn’t have, and it’s why Errands never took off. I didn’t lack the idea. I lacked the Kickstarter, the seed funding, the investor connections, or even the belief from institutions like banks or youth enterprise schemes. If I’d had that, our local economy could have been thriving on Errands, and maybe the UK would have become a leader in this space earlier.

Still, I look back without bitterness. I saw a genuine need in my community and imagined a way to meet it. Not through market research, but through lived experience. That’s what set my idea apart. It wasn’t just about money. It was about care, efficiency, and real people.

And to be honest, that’s pretty much been the story of my life. I’ve always had great ideas. I’ve always seen things before others did. But when you don’t have money, when you don’t have collateral, people don’t listen, no matter how strong your vision is. It’s the same whether you want to start a business, buy a house, or apply for a loan. If you haven’t got backing, you’re not going anywhere.

And that, in many ways, is everything that’s wrong with the world today. There are people out there right now with ideas that could change the world, but without the funding, they’ll never get the chance. It’s not the quality of the idea that wins. It’s the privilege of being able to afford to make it real.

So… what might Errands have been worth today?

Looking at comparable companies:

• Just Eat merged with Takeaway.com and was valued at over £5.9 billion.
• Deliveroo, after years of scaling, floated on the stock market with an initial valuation of around £7 billion, though it fluctuated.
• Even smaller, local delivery startups today can attract early investment rounds in the hundreds of thousands, with later-stage valuations reaching tens or hundreds of millions.

If The Prince’s Trust, or anyone, had believed in me back then with even £5,000 to £10,000, and I’d been given a fair shot to scale Errands, build a team, and grow with the rise of smartphones and broadband, who knows?

Realistically, even on a modest scale, Errands could easily have become a multi-million-pound enterprise today. At the very least, I might have been a founder with real equity in a space I helped envision before it even had a name.

But I had no connections, no credit, and no capital. Just a bike, a street map, and an idea that, in hindsight, wasn’t just valid, it was visionary. I still find myself coming across ideas today and it has been the story of my life. What good is an idea without the means or belief to bring it to life?