March 7, 2024 •

Keeping Up With Edventures

Keeping Up With Edventures: Jan-Feb 2024

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Photo by Jaanus Jagomägi on Unsplash

This blog post was originally sent out via our newsletter 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,

Time flies, and here we are, already in March. It’s exciting to see how our journey is gaining momentum and I have a strong feeling that this year is not just a leap year, but a year when Edventures takes a big leap as well. Discover the highlights of the past two months and join us as we strive to make significant leaps in enhancing entrepreneurship education!

January: Prototype launch and spreading the word about Edventures

At the end of January, we finalised and (soft) LAUNCHED the prototype of our conversational AI feature, Anna. In this prototype, entrepreneur users are able to register an account, start a business idea, and get unlimited feedback, information and coaching from Anna.

As we launched the prototype, we also introduced our Earlybird community on Discord, through which the prototype is accessible to our test users. Right after launching, the community grew to 60+ members in less than 24h! We spread the news about the community in select channels, to keep the community close-knit in the beginning. However, we plan on opening it up gradually over this year.

Our community serves a dual purpose: first, it’s a space for our primary target audience - young and budding entrepreneurs - to connect, share experiences, and support each other in their journey. Second, it’s a place for us to gather all the prototype feedback and keep close conversations with our early adopters, who are just starting their entrepreneurship journey. Ultimately, we know this will help us better understand our users’ needs and allow us to quickly improve our product.

When we shared the news about our prototype launch, we saw a 700% increase in followers on Linkedin. As of today, 7 March, we have 1,528 page followers and 382 newsletter subscribers on Linkedin, and we plan to grow this over the year. Please follow us and invite people in your network who would be interested in our journey!

February: Product Improvements, Validation of End User Needs, Media Attention and Changes to the Team

After launching the prototype, we’ve been busy fixing bugs and improving the prototype. A lot of focus has been put into the frontend, and also fixing bugs between the backend and the frontend, essentially affecting the user experience.

In mid-February, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), the world’s leading source for entrepreneurship research, released their latest annual report, based on responses from over 136,000 individuals across 46 economies.

Two interesting finds were:

  • GEM experts revealed that in 63.3% of economies, entrepreneurial education is the weakest among all analysed frameworks. Not so shockingly, only 10.2% of countries (5 out of 49) have a “satisfactory or better” rating for entrepreneurial education in schools.

  • Fear of failure is a big hurdle, especially for women. In 35 out of 45 countries, at least two in five adults hold back from starting a business due to this fear. And, in 37 of these countries, more women than men with promising business ideas are reluctant to take the plunge.

But here’s what REALLY caught my interest:

  • The GEM global authorship team, made up of 10 academics scattered worldwide, highlighted in their report something that I’ve been advocating for a loooong time: “Many new businesses may never come to fruition because a generation of schoolchildren grew up unaware that starting a business was a possibility.”

This is the EXACT reason why Edventures exist. Our app, designed for personalised entrepreneurship learning and guidance, addresses these challenges head-on. I strongly recommend you to read their report.

In February, we also stepped up our effort in signing pilot projects with reference customers. Currently, we are in discussions with five entrepreneurship support organisations in India, South Africa, Malaysia, and Sweden, together representing over 100k+ entrepreneur users. We’re committed to engage in more conversations that can pave the way for additional pilot projects, so if you’re reading this and is a part of an organisation offering entrepreneurship support - reach out and let’s explore possibilites!

We’ve applied to Sequoia Arc, a prestigious 7-week program by renowned VC Sequoia Capital. This immersive experience offers mentorship to founders, tapping into decades of expertise in building impactful companies. It focuses on fostering community collaboration and guiding founders in establishing robust foundations for long-term success. Final decisions are expected by mid-to-late April, so by our next update you’ll know whether we got in or not.

We were highlighted through my connections as a Junior Achievement alumni, earning a mention in the JA Gather Alumni newsletter reaching 11k (!) monthly subscribers. Additionally, I was featured on the Startup Greece’s podcast “SG Talks” in episode 77, sharing the Edventures journey from its inception in 2017 to today and outlining our goals for the year. Watch the 37-minute episode on YouTube or on streaming platforms like Spotify.

In February, our team underwent a change as our highly skilled Flutter developer, Gauransh Sharma, concluded his three-month tenure with us, starting from December last year. Gauransh significantly contributed to accelerating our frontend development, refining some of the code, and enhancing the Anna interface. Because of our constraints as a bootstrapped startup, we’re unable to keep him, and we’re immensely grateful for Gauransh’s impactful contributions during his brief time with us and wish him the best in his future endeavours!

Following Gauransh’s departure, we announced for a new Flutter engineer role, and the interest was massive! Within 12 days from posting our job ad, we’ve had 179 applications, 14 interviews, 4 code tests, and now we’re down to the final selection of candidates. In our next update we’ll introduce you to our latest addition to the team!

What is in the pipeline for the coming 2 months

As we step into March, I’m excited to share with you what we have in our pipeline for March and April:

  • We expect to find agreements for some of the pilot projects that we’re currently in talks with.
  • We’ll launch our new website, better presenting our different features as well as our company and impact.
  • Finalising and launching our coach feature, Franklin, so that coaches, teachers and people having a role that supports entrepreneurs can access insights and analytics into the performance of their entrepreneurs.
  • A BUNCH of applications

Thank you for your continued support, please share our work with people you think would be aligned with our mission, and we look forward to sharing more updates with you soon. Here’s to a promising and entrepreneurial 2024!

Stay foolish, stay ambitious!

Alexander and the Edventures team

If you are just getting to know us

At Edventures, we champion progress. Our mantra is ‘keep moving forward’ and we want to embody this mantra in our app, to simplify your entrepreneurial journey. It’s as simple as texting. Let’s keep moving forward, together.

PS. This blog post was originally sent out via our newsletter 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! 📝