Oscar Galliers

From Sixth Form Sketch to Shipped Product

Plenty of founders can describe a product. Fewer can point to one running. Galliers can list the pieces: a web app, a shop portal for merchants, and a mobile app that works. The concept has stayed remarkably consistent since it was first imagined with a friend at school, a social network organised around shopping rather than around photos or status updates, and the persistence in that consistency is the point. Galliers has spent the years since sixth form trying to build it to the best of their ability, returning to it, refining it, and eventually launching it to friends and family.

The valuation from business brokers matters less as a number than as a signal. It is external confirmation that what began as a teenage idea has crossed into the category of an actual asset. For a founder operating as both CEO and CTO, that crossing is hard-won, because there is no engineering team to hand the specification to and no product team to hand the strategy to. Every decision about what to build and how to build it lands in the same place.

AI as a Tool, Not an Autopilot

Galliers is candid that Buzzima reached launch with the help of Codex. Without it, the founder says, getting anywhere near a shipped product would not have been possible. That is a striking thing for someone holding the CTO title to say, and it reflects something honest about how technical work is changing for small teams and solo builders. The qualification matters more than the admission.

"It is not one hundred percent accurate all the time, so you have to know your stuff as well," Galliers notes. The working method is iterative and firmly human-led: direct it, correct it, redo it, test again. Trial and error, with a person who understands the requirements sitting at the controls. Galliers' view is that the only way to get real value out of these tools now is to already know what you want and broadly how it should be done, so the output arrives tailored to your own specification rather than generic. Delegation without comprehension produces something that looks finished and is not.

The interest in the subject predates the tooling. In sixth form Galliers completed two separate pieces of work on artificial intelligence, an Extended Project Qualification and a higher level reflective project, both graded B. Long before AI became a standing item in every boardroom, it was already the thing Galliers chose to write about twice.

The Value of a Mentor Who Stays

One relationship stands out in the story of how Buzzima got built. A mentor, a chief AI professor who is prominent in the field and widely followed, has been a constant presence since just after Galliers left sixth form, and still writes academic references when they are needed. The relationship has outlasted the classroom by years.

What makes it valuable is not proximity to a well-known name. It is continuity. A mentor who has watched the same idea evolve from a school project into a company can offer a kind of perspective no new advisor can replicate, because they remember every earlier version of it. Galliers credits that relationship openly as a contribution to where the business now stands, and speaks about it with straightforward gratitude rather than as a networking achievement. That instinct, to keep good people close over long horizons rather than to collect them, is one of the more mature things about how Galliers operates.

Advice for the Year Ahead

Galliers reaches for a physical metaphor when talking about timing. Surfing, skateboarding: you time your jump as well as you can, because getting it right determines how far you travel and how much reach you get out of it. The underlying advice is simpler than the image. Start early. Momentum compounds, and it is far easier to build on something already moving than to generate motion from a standing start.

The example Galliers offers is deliberately unglamorous. A LinkedIn presence begun around 2021 or 2022 now stands at 755 connections. Not a headline number, and Galliers does not present it as one, only as evidence that beginning early beats waiting. You never know, Galliers points out, where a door like that eventually leads.

It is advice the founder has actually lived. An idea that could have stayed a conversation between two students in Essex is now a company with a product, a merchant portal and a valuation, largely because Galliers started early and refused to stop.