Ben O'Connor, 16, hails from a dairy‑farming family in County Down, Ireland, and began his entrepreneurial journey with a firewood venture at 11 before launching Giftery, a mail‑order gift‑basket business, at 13.
Within three years, Giftery sold 200,000 gift boxes and proved O'Connor's knack for scaling, though he recalls early meetings where his age made it hard to command respect; "It can be hard to get respect when you're a lot younger than the people you're going into meetings with," he said.
Now O'Connor is building FarmFlow, a farm‑management platform that tracks tasks from milking schedules to feed rations, and he plans to roll it out in August with a long soft launch; the app will operate offline on phones and keep data encrypted end‑to‑end.
O'Connor says the system can hold only so many users during the trial phase, so he is limiting numbers to ensure stability; "the system can hold only so many, so we're trying to keep numbers limited while we further test it," he added.
He intends FarmFlow to remain free, with a paid tier for advanced features, and will start an apprenticeship in September while juggling GCSEs; the August relaunch will allow local farmers to test the software and could streamline farm operations across the region.