Real Life: My journey from homeless teen to top entrepreneur

Founder of Clue Content - the award-winning enterprise working to level the social media playing field through accessible services and analytics - Inge Hunter started her first business aged just 17, while living in a Cambridge homeless hostel. She talks to Alice Ryan

I was homeless at 17, living in a hostel in Cambridge. I don’t talk about my life before that point because, obviously, it’s messy; you don’t get there unless it’s messy. The first night in the hostel, I remember sitting on the floor - the mattress in my room was covered in blood because the girl before me self-harmed - just weeping and weeping.

It must have been about 2am when I realised: ‘This is it. This is the beginning of the rest of your life. Time will come. So what are we going to do now, to make sure it does?’ The answer was get some sleep, get up in the morning and go to college. Sometimes your rock bottom can be the best thing that happens.

I was doing my A-levels at Hills Road and needed to get the bus to and from college. A dayrider cost £3.80 and I only had £4 a week to live on, so I had to make money. I knew someone I could get alcohol from, so I made and sold cocktails on the street. I’d go up and down nightclub and May Ball queues, selling shitty Long Island Iced Teas in milk cartons for £15.

That grew into a mobile cocktail bar, which in turn grew into an event management company and then wedding planning, which I thought would be glamorous, but in fact was awful! I used to pick up oil brokers’ daughters who’d drop half a million on their wedding. Just after I had my second child, my son - I had my first, my daughter, while I was still at university - I got a call from a bride who was buying 150 cushions and couldn’t decide between duck egg and baby blue. I was eight hours out of C-section surgery and remember thinking ‘What am I doing?’ That was my last wedding.

People were always asking how I managed to get these big clients through social media, so I decided to move into consultancy. I worked with one big developer that was marketing houses on their square-footage and their timber frames. I’d say no, that’s not what people are buying: they’re buying the Aga, the candle in the bathroom - the lifestyle. I managed to sell two £2 million houses for them through Instagram DMs. It’s psychology.

Social media is responsible for everything: everything you wear, every place you eat, everyone you vote for - most thoughts you have, unfortunately. A very few people with an awful lot of money really understand how to use it; the majority of people don’t. But you can’t grow a business today without it, or sell a book, or launch a music career. That’s why I set up Clue - to level the playing field.

Firstly, we create content for people, giving them access to an entire production team for less than the cost of a single in-house hire. The dream is to have content hubs all over the country. There’s one in Newmarket already; we have a studio you can book for £100 an hour.

I’ve also been working for two years now on technology that analyses social media data, predicts performance and tells you what to do - and we’ve just launched. Anyone can sign up and it will tell you: post this, use this caption, do it at this time. It can also be used to research macro questions, like ‘Can you change the footfall of a local area?’ It needs to be done; social media has to be democratised.

I’m going to India this International Women’s Day to do a cross-country rickshaw ride, Chennai to Goa, with 50 other female founders to raise money for schools and entrepreneurial opportunities for women in India. I was invited because I won in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards last year. I’ll be going with fellow winners: people like Louise Hill, who runs GoHenry, and Pauline Paterson, who owns Dr PawPaw - really inspiring people. The plan is to raise £350,000.

Clue is the last company I’ll ever found; the plan is to sell it when I’m 40 - I’m 34 now - leaving the world of social media a better place than I found it. I’d like to be able to invest in other girls like me, because I think you find a lot of entrepreneurialism in homeless young women, it’s just not being channelled.

Each pivot in my career was born out of opportunity, and of seeing ways in which people could be served better. You just crack on, don’t you? Survival also has a lot to answer for. When you’re pushed up against a wall, and you only have yourself to rely on, you can really start to understand what you can do. Also, I love it!

To find out more about Inge, who’s also an author and speaker, go to ingehunter.co.uk Further information about Clue Content is at cluecontent.com