On February 15, Young Creators organized its first ever Young Creator of the Year Award at startup hub TQ in Amsterdam. With twenty nominations from the community and three finalists on stage, the final winner was Thomas Lijten. At just 17 years of age, Lijten opened up ice cream shop Daisy’s Ice, Coffee & More in the summer of 2016. Business is good: he managed to rake in his projected annual revenue in just under nine weeks.
Community
Young Creators is a community of young entrepreneurs, developers and designers who work on their own project or startup. The group had grown rapidly over the last year and now has more than 21.000 members. Most activity in he group evolves around the Facebook group. That’s the place where everybody asks questions, puts interesting content and also posts free lance jobs. Via this group people help each other and inspire one another to actually realize their ideas and dreams.
AppKunda
The other two finalists were Vic Luijkx (15) and Maba Jarbou (23). Vic created software that helps elderly suffering from dementia to still work on their computer independently. Inspired by his own grandfather who faced dementia problems, Vic started opavandongen.nl. Now the product is further developed and others can make use of it as well. Maba started as an entrepreneur while importing and renting out beer pong tables. He recently began with AppKunda, a startup that helps other starting entrepreneurs to collectively buy expensive software for a better price.
New platform
“The Facebook group once started out to find peers and help each other out on all kinds of questions that you run into when you start a project or business,” says founder Robert van Hoesel. “And that’s what the Facebook group is still about. However; the group is growing fast and that also creates some challenges. Therefore we will launch a new platform, youngcreators.co, in a couple of weeks, where people can find relevant information and have a place where they can share their portfolio and post free lance jobs.”