Can you hurt your credit if you haven’t started building it?

I have been trying to help my boyfriend get a credit card to start building his credit. I first tried with Discover because that’s what I use. And I had a link that he could use to get $50 credit for getting approved. Well, he didn’t because I couldn’t verify that he was a college student. So I next tried CapitalOne and got approved for a $200 credit line. But we had to pay a $49 deposit. What I’m worried about is that I applied to Discover twice because I had a network issue and it didn’t load the first time, and the second time said that i had a application in progress. With CapitalOne I applied once and got him approved and then applied a second time because I couldn’t remember what email I used and got denied. I’m having issues getting his app account set up that’s why I tried again I get his and my birthday confused. I was just wondering if those extra times will hurt him even if he hasn’t started building his credit yet?