The highs and lows of Edventures in 2022: a personal note from our founder

Photo by iStrfry , Marcus on Unsplash

It’s safe to say that 2022 has been a year of struggles for us, but also a year of learning and new realisations. I can definitely say it’s been a complete startup rollercoaster, from frustrating lows to happy highs. Here’s an honest recap of 2022. My personal anticipation when this year started was that finding an experienced and versatile CTO would accelerate and excel our development, as well as to help us secure traction and funding. Oh, how wrong I was. This year’s journey has been a twisted one and carried more spanners than we’d anticipated, but I truly believe that there are always positives to draw from negative events.

TL;DR — here’s a quick recap

• Signed a CTO in March and made some good progress with internal organisation, structure, and overall professionalism. A lot of the progress we made here will help us, particularly in terms of organisational hygiene, further down the road.

• CTO left in October, throwing the major spanner of 2022 in our long-term work. A lot of work went into onboarding and integrating the CTO to integrate him into the team and make him a valuable part of the team. Unfortunately, he felt that what we needed to get done over the short and mid term was pushing his career in a different direction. The timing stung as we were just about to get into the grunt of the work.

• Finding our new footing. This forced us to spend some time reflecting and rediscovering a new direction, especially when it comes to the technical competence of the team. Our previous focus was to sign and retain experienced and skilled developers that were willing to be very hands-on and commit to the risky and uncertain conditions of being a part of an early-stage, pre revenue startup. Our new approach is now to focus on developers with the most necessary skills we need. Instead of years of experience, we want to see candidates with a great hunger and willingness to dig in, learn and spend a lot of time finding ways forward through trial and error. We also feel this better aligns with the essence of what is Edventures — passion, curiosity and hunger beats experience.

This better aligns with the essence of what is Edventures — passion, curiosity and hunger beats experience.

• More waves rocked the boat. Just as the first setback had sunk in, we suffered more losses on the team. Our Product Designer had to leave in October for struggles with mental health and shortly after in November, our Marketing Lead left due to an overwhelming number of commitments and lack of financial stability. This had us shaken but we paused, reviewed and reset.

• The silver lining. Following our new hiring policy, we signed a new full-stack developer, which has pushed our development up to full steam since late November. We may still be behind schedule, but we have momentum again. We’re also looking to find two more roles to add to our team.

• Still to catch our white wale. With the help of an experienced grant writer, we wrote and submitted our, to date, most well-written grant application ever to Vinnova, the Swedish Innovation Agency. Sadly, we didn’t get the grant, a surprise to both of us, but a good experience and new lessons learned too.

• New technology, new opportunities. The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT (that everyone’s raving about) will add width and depth to our prototype. Using their API will save us time and provide an additional fallback to find answers to a user’s question. It however doesn’t replace anything we’ve already worked on, and this helps us focus more on developing the unique combination of our own IP and developing it in a unique way.

The long, chronological version

The year started with our lead developer from 2021 leaving the team, a mutual decision, and we were without a lead developer for the first few months of the year. However, I saw it as a positive thing since we could regroup and level up our team. I was excited about this opportunity to find a team member that could become a foundational cornerstone to our progress.

After three months of mapping, generating the most ideal profile and interviewing high-quality candidates as lead developer, we landed on a person who would be willing to take on the role of CTO right away. Our excitement was palatable, we had secured an experienced and well-rounded developer for at least a few years to come.

Understandably, the new CTO had to transition out of his previous role as a CTO for a Canadian MedTech startup which left him little time to fully contribute to our development, along with contractual obligations he had to follow until he could fully exit his previous role. As our focus was on the long-term and this was a signing for years to come, we started onboarding him slowly and understood it would take some time to be fully integrated with us. He did, after all, quit his paid, full-time job, to start working with us. Our offer was full-time but unpaid until we could secure enough traction to secure the funding we needed.

It took until after summer, towards the end of August, to fully onboard our CTO, as we kept in mind the summer break to recharge. Up until then we’d onboarded him and we had started working on Business Modelling and Enterprise Architecture as a way for him to get a better 360 of our tech, business and vision, to be able to fully delve into the work after the summer break. Up until this point, no progress had been made on the prototype regarding the front end or the infrastructure. The good thing was that our work with Anna, our AI chatbot, still made headway and was getting ready for testing.

The good thing was that our work with Anna, our AI chatbot, still made headway and was getting ready for testing.

As August ended, we now had our CTO fully to ourselves, without any constraining contractual obligations or other commitments. We were finally going to get grinding. September saw some progress in the front end and infrastructure; however, we only made a small dent in the large backlog that we had. The progress we did make, was getting clarity on the infrastructure, both short and long-term, along with our technical roadmap.

As much progress as we made during this time, a few cracks began to show. Alas, the honeymoon was over. One of the major lessons we learned during this year is getting clear on what we require for the benefit of the project and the team. While getting dirty with all the tasks that needed to be done, somewhere along the line our CTO realised that this wasn’t the work he thought he’d be doing, nor did it align with what he needed to do to further his career. Unfortunately, the grunt work that we needed to do short to mid term, in terms of our technology, was outside what he wanted to work with and learn, and in early October, only six months after joining, we saw the end of the collaboration we thought would be a long term, prosperous one for Edventures; and he decided to quit.

…and in early October, only six months after joining, we saw the end of the collaboration we thought would be a long term, prosperous one for Edventures; and he decided to quit.

The decision to quit caught me completely off guard as the day before his announcement, we had a deeper discussion together with our AI Lead on how to proceed to work together in the leadership team amongst other long-term decisions. This was a massive hit, not only for me; it was a major surprise to everyone on the team.

When asked, there were a number of different reasons, but the overarching gist was that our CTO didn’t see alignment in the work that needed to be done for Edventures’ progress and his career development. After asking him whether there were other reasons for his decision, there was unfortunately no real clarity to that question. This left me struggling to understand what went wrong. Ever since October, I’ve spent quite some time reflecting, trying to identify points of improvement in my leadership; my own actions and words, and moving forward, identify what was missing in the team that can be rectified or handled better, to avoid a similar situation from happening again.

October continued to be an especially tough month, probably the toughest of the year…

October continued to be an especially tough month, probably the toughest of the year — not only because of our CTO quitting, but our very skilled Product Designer, who had been part of the team since January, also left. His decision to leave was based on a continuing struggle with mental health, a topic we have started to take more into consideration as we are aware of the impact it can have on individuals. In addition to that, at the turn of October/November, our Marketing Lead also decided that it was time to leave the team, due to overarching commitments with her education and engagements which left little to no time for Edventures.

Lessons from 2022

With that, we sum up the rollercoaster that is running a startup. This newsletter highlights the struggles of bootstrapping, which I’ve been wrestling with since founding Edventures. Being open and transparent about the struggles of bootstrapping, I hope, will help other founders trying to bootstrap their way to profitability. What I’ve learned are the biggest challenges building a team while bootstrapping is to primarily finding people who have a combination of:

• Being able to devote a lot of time to the project
• An interest/passion for what we do
• Having the basic skills in their domain, BUT
• Also having a hunger and desire to learn a lot along the journey
• And finally, an understanding of the difficult nature of being part of a startup that the unremunerated efforts needed to get to a point where remuneration is on the table

Now, looking back and re-reading this whole story to myself, it’s both painful and quite embarrassing. When it comes to the CTO, what’s painful is realising how much time was invested that never paid off — not realising when things started going in the wrong direction earlier and acting upon it to prevent it. It’s also an unfortunate situation when you work closely with wonderful people who have great skills and a desire to stay with the team, but circumstances outside of your or their control make it impossible for them to stay on. It’s painful to be unable to offer them more when they deserve so much more, and painful to see them go, as you feel powerless.

Being open and transparent about the struggles of bootstrapping, I hope, will help other founders trying to bootstrap their way to profitability.

The Next Chapter

With a new year on the horizon, it’s time to start wrapping things up. As we look back at this past year, we’ve realised two key things that we’ll take with us for 2023:

1. Video content is king. When it comes to marketing content, we’ll double down on what worked: the interview series with young founders and entrepreneurs. We see that we can offer the most value to our followers this way, and also help aspiring entrepreneurs without having our prototype ready for testing. Instead of just doing written interviews, like we have in the past, we’ll put extra emphasis on video content. 2. Curiosity and devotion beats everything. For our team, we’ll focus on recruiting people who are hungry and willing to learn quickly, who have high availability and can devote a lot of time to Edventures. The route of opting for candidates with a lot of experience, especially for as long as we’re bootstrapping, didn’t work for us. If there’s one positive takeaway after this year, it’s that I’ve learned and gained more clarity on what the crucial characteristics and personality traits are to focus on when adding new members to this team moving forward. Better late than never.

All in all, what’s ahead for 2023?

Despite the ups and downs of 2022, I’m optimistic for 2023. We now have wind in our sails again and a new hiring policy that should lead to more long-lasting and highly aligned team members. The roadmap is fairly simple — finalising and starting testing the prototype in early 2023, releasing the Alpha version in mid-2023 and a full-on MVP, Beta version, should be ready by the end of 2023.

Achieving that goal will be a mixture of process, tools, and personnel changes. If you’re interested or know someone who is to join in this journey, we’re looking for a Product Designer and Frontend Developer, as well as two roles for our marketing efforts — one Visual Communicator and one Video Content Creator.

Wrapping up this end-of-the-year post, there’s one final thing I’d like to acknowledge — and that’s you. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, educator, potential investor, customer or another type of stakeholder, I want to send a BIG “Thank you” for being with us on this journey. We’re excited to carry out the vision of Edventures, and look forward to building this legacy with you — to reach more momentum and growth in the new year.

Most gratefully and passionately,
Alexander Zahari, founder of Edventures

PS. Don’t forget to sign up to our waitlist! 📝