Keeping Up With Edventures: August 2024

Photo by Alexander Zahari and Jamie Yau

This blog post was originally sent out via our newsletter and published on LinkedIn last week. If you want earlier updates about our progress straight to your inbox and be among the first to test our prototype, join our Earlybird Community and make sure you sign up for our newsletter!

Dear Edventures community,

August was great fun. It was a month of refining both our platform and our connections. From energising international collaborations to ongoing product development, we’ve been laying the groundwork for exciting new opportunities ahead.

August: A Month of Maintenance and Finetuning

My expectation for August was to gain more clarity about the pilot projects currently in discussion, and partly so through the trip to Porto for the JA Worldwide Global Alumni Summit. While no agreements were signed, we made progress as more key conversations now are in the final stages. The reasons why haven’t signed a pilot project, yet, come down to two factors: organisations needing to secure additional funding and resolving some functionality bugs before the platform is fully “product ready” (more on this below). We dedicated the month to addressing these issues, ensuring both the user interface and backend are more stable.

The trip to Porto for the JA Global Alumni Summit, held between 22-25 August, was my first international JA event, and it exceeded my expectations. More than 320 alumni from 70 nations worldwide came together in an incredible melting pot. I met up with alumni and directors from various JA organisations across the world, and the way I’d summarise my impressions after the event is: “socially recharged”. I met with both old/existing connections, with whom I’ve been talking over video calls the past few months to engage with our platform, and made many new ones. It was such an energy boost to meet with a lot of people I’ve up until then only met over video calls. The JA community is a very positive and supportive community, which is a great place to be for any entrepreneur, but also offers a space that otherwise is difficult to find as a founder. An important place to be for Edventures, but also for me as an alumn and continue to engage with the JA community.

One exciting conversation that came from the JA Summit was a potential new pilot project. In our bid to test Edventures in non-Anglophone regions, we’ve been engaging in promising conversations with the head of non-Anglophone member countries of Junior Achievement Africa. We’re particularly excited about testing out a translation feature to see whether our platform can a) still provide quality coaching in another language than English, and b) therefore reach more young entrepreneurs, no matter their language.

On the product side, our search for a standout product designer continues. We’ve interviewed several candidates but are still looking for the right fit to elevate our app’s design and experience.

Meanwhile, our team has been hard at work refining the app and make it “product ready”. This means taking our current prototype and making small but important adjustments, such as improving performance, ensuring consistency, and squashing user interface bugs, to ensure it’s polished and reliable, basically good enough to put in front of paying customers.

At the end of August, I slowly started our focused fundraising efforts which I expect is something that will take us the rest of the year to successfully complete. Our aim is to raise €375,000 which will be used to fund our dedicated and focused development for the following 24 months, securing more paying customers and pilots that, at least, will get us to break-even. If you know someone who might be interested in investing in us at this stage, forward this email to the person in question, and feel free to make an introduction. We’ll need all the support and love we can get!

What’s in the pipeline for next month?

September will be spent planning the upcoming autumn, during which I’ll be on a tech conference tour for about a month’s time. Starting in Dubai to attend GITEX Impact and Expand North Star between 13-16 October, to then layover in Kuala Lumpur, before heading to Singapore to attend Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH) between 28-30 October. From Singapore, I’ll head back to Europe, first to have a week in Greece, before heading to Portugal and Lisbon to attend Web Summit between 11-14 November.

The purpose of this tour is to meet with both potential investors as well as customers and partners. I already have some meetings lined up, but I’m actively looking for more, and will spend a great part of September adding more to my schedule. If you’re reading this and will be at any of these events, let me know and let’s meet up in person! Just hit “Reply” to this email.

On that note, I want to thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to sharing more updates with you next month!

Stay foolish, stay ambitious!

Alexander and the Edventures team