---
title: "Building a Company at Thirteen"
description: "How I founded HMD Payments at thirteen, built zero-fee payment infrastructure, and what it taught me to sell the first real thing I made."
date: 2025-01-19
category: Business
readingTime: "2 min read"
---


The first real thing I built was a payment company. I founded it in 2022. I was thirteen.

That sentence does more work than it should, so let me take the glamour out of it straight away. Founding a payment business at thirteen is not a film montage. It is reading regulations you only half understand, reading them again, and slowly realising that the boring paragraphs are the ones that matter most.

By 2022 I had been building software for two years. HMD Developments already had a team and a growing list of products, and almost every one of them eventually touched money. Each time, that meant integrating someone else's payment API, accepting someone else's fee structure, and working around someone else's limitations. I got tired of paying rent on infrastructure I did not control, so I decided to build my own.

The idea was [a payment platform with zero fees to the merchant](/blog/building-a-zero-fee-payment-infrastructure): cryptocurrency, IBAN transfers, and cards, sustained by volume agreements rather than a cut of every transaction. It was an ambitious thing to attempt at any age. Deciding to build it properly, rather than as a weekend experiment, is what pushed me to [incorporate HMD Corporation as a holding company](/blog/hmd-corp-architecture), so that the payments business and HMD Developments had a real structure around them.

Payments is the one corner of software where "move fast and break things" will, very literally, break things. Money was flowing through the system. A bug there is not a cosmetic glitch; it is someone's money in the wrong place. That changes how you work. You write less code and you check it far more. You learn what KYC, anti-money-laundering, and PCI DSS actually demand, not as acronyms but as obligations that never switch off.

I also learned that retention in payments is a strong, honest signal. Payment infrastructure is painful to switch, so once someone builds their workflow around your API, they stay unless you give them a real reason to leave. Small as the platform was, the users who were there kept coming back. That mattered more than the size of the numbers.

The strangest part of the whole period was how ordinary it felt while it was happening. The compliance reading, the careful deploys, the last checks before money moved. It was just work: detailed, often dull, occasionally tense. That the person doing it was thirteen only seemed remarkable when I stepped outside the situation and looked back at it.

In 2023, I sold it.

Selling the first real thing you build is stranger than building it. When you build, every decision is yours. When you sell, you hand all of those decisions to someone else, and you have to be at peace with the fact that they will do some of them differently. The HMD Pay name was retired. The software was not. It still runs today, under new ownership, processing real transactions every day, and almost nobody using it knows where it came from.

People ask whether that is a loss. It is not. An exit taught me something that founding could not: a business is not your name on a thing, it is the thing itself, working, whether or not your name is still attached to it. Building taught me to make something real. Selling taught me to let it stand on its own.

If you are thinking about [building payment infrastructure from scratch](/blog/zero-fee-payments-technical-deep-dive), think hard about whether you should. It is heavier than it looks, and most of the weight is the part nobody sees. But if you do build it, build it properly, the way you would want to inherit it. One day someone might.