Not many young, inexperienced entrepreneurs set out to raise £10,500 (€14,957) to get their first, untested business project off the ground and somehow manage to get 1,890 people – mostly complete strangers – to give them money.

Persuading investors, big or small, to part with their cash, particularly when they do not know who you are, is never easy.

But when people literally fall over themselves to give you money, as in the case of Belfast entrepreneur Cillian McMinn, who raised £93,173 (€132,725), it is a completely different matter.

McMinn says he has spent the last eight years dreaming up various business ideas, but it was only when he came up with the concept of the “element cube” that he knew he was on to a winner. This is a small cube which could sit on a desktop and contains all 62 known collectible elements, from aluminium to zirconium.

McMinn was never keen on chemistry at school; in fact, he left aged 16 with few formal qualifications but plenty of big plans.

“I decided when I was 10 that I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he says. “I really like the idea of inventing things, I am really interested in design, and I like to do things independently.”

Opportunity

His element cube project was sparked by his interest in the idea of collecting different elements. He quickly realised that to collect elements in any kind of quantity “cost thousands of pounds”, which got him thinking: what if you could somehow create something that brought them together at an affordable price?

At around the same time, McMinn said he was was also thinking, “What’s the coolest thing I could put on my desk?” – and that was how the concept came about.

He eventually came up with the idea of a cube that consisted of every collectable element, all 62 of them. He says he believed the idea of a minimalist cube with all the elements jumbled up together might appeal to a few people, “maybe chemistry teachers or niche geeks”.

Then he set about researching how and where he could get it produced and how much it would cost – which is where crowdfunding came in.

“It was really a leap of faith for me,” he says. “I’ve never really had a job, so I had to use the benefits I was claiming after I left school to get me started and pay for the initial cube.

“I don’t produce it myself. I spent a lot of time researching producers and suppliers, so I knew I would have to cover all of those costs, and my initial target on Kickstarter was to raise £10,500. I didn’t think that it would end up being the second most funded project to date from Northern Ireland and raise £93,173.”

Necklace and bracelet

At the moment he is keeping a close eye on the production schedule for all of the orders received so far from his Belfast HQ, as he calls it – which in reality is his parents’ kitchen table.

But he is not planning just to enjoy this one early taste of success. The teenager’s thoughts are already turning towards his next project, which will see him team up with other young entrepreneurs based at the Northern Ireland Science Park.

“We’re going to be launching another Kickstarter project,” he says. “I don’t want to say too much about it at the moment, but next time it is going to be more to do with a tech project. It is very exciting. I hope we’re going to be creating tech products that everyone is going to want to use in the future.”