Keeping Up With Edventures: May 2024

Photo by Alexander Zahari

This blog post was originally sent out via our newsletter and publsihed 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,

As I send out this final catch-up update, we’ve almost reached the mid of June and are looking back on our progress and events in May. It has been an eventful month filled with extensive travelling and the pleasure of meeting many inspiring new people.

If you’re just getting to know us, here’s a recap

Whether it’s your first or hundredth newsletter, I’m so happy you’re reading this newsletter and that you want to follow us on our journey towards democratising entrepreneurship education and learning and becoming the global leader in entrepreneurship support. You’re receiving this newsletter because we’ve been in touch for the past weeks, months or maybe years, and because your interest, skills, experience and/or professional focus aligns with our mission and values.

For those who are new, Edventures is an edtech and future-of-work startup from Sweden, dedicated to becoming the global leader in entrepreneurship support. We’re developing a conversational AI that offers personalised coaching and learning, tailored to each entrepreneur’s unique business idea, needs, and challenges.

Read on to discover our latest updates and milestones this month, and stay tuned for the exciting journey ahead!

Best,

Alexander Zahari

Founder and Product Visionary

May: Malta adventure, AI enhancements, successful school outreach, and pursuing a new product designer

May has been quite a month! We’ve had some shifts in the team that impacted our chatbot development and slightly delayed our discussions with customers regarding pilot projects. However, the interest we’re seeing is fantastic, and we’re working hard to get our prototype ready for more demos and pilots.

On the app front, we’ve been busy making it more stable and easier to use, but we’ve also taken some time to rethink and reassess existing parts of the app. A big highlight in May was welcoming our new AI engineer, Chukwudi. He’s hit the ground running, updating our AI system with a new infrastructure, introducing new frameworks and making changes already. You might remember we were using a framework called Rasa for our conversational AI, but in April we realised Rasa wasn’t cutting it, so this upgrade was definitely needed.

I travelled to Malta from the 6th to the 11th of May and attended the EU-Startups Summit on the 9th and 10th. There, I connected with investors (both angels and VCs), potential partners, and many interesting entrepreneurs and individuals from the European startup community. Two exciting meetings were with the Edutech Fund based in Poland but investing across Europe, with which I’ll follow up once we gain more traction and begin our fundraising later this year, and the SuperCharger Ventures edtech accelerator, a 12-week programme in Malta designed to support edtech startups from anywhere in the world.

The interesting thing about SuperCharger Ventures is that they have strong ties to Southeast Asia, having originally started as a fintech accelerator in Hong Kong and Malaysia before pivoting to edtech post-COVID-19, recognising the sector’s rising importance. Their extensive experience and network in Southeast Asia align perfectly with our primary target markets and go-to-market strategy, as Southeast Asia is one of our prioritised geographies. This synergy and alignment make us particularly excited to submit our application to their Malta programme.

We kicked off an outreach campaign targeting Swedish upper secondary/high schools that offer the JA company programme, reaching out to about 700 deans and principals. The response has been amazing, with a unique open rate of 53.84% and a click-through rate (CTR) of 4.90%! To put this in perspective, the benchmark open rate within education is between 28-44% (depending on the source of this data), and the average CTR is between 2.7-4.4%. We’ve sparked interest from 40-50 schools, had meetings with about half of them, and we’re set to continue these conversations in June. I’m hopeful to launch some pilot projects when the new school year starts in August/September.

May was also a busy month for applications. While we focused on quality over quantity, my travel from 2nd to 17th May left limited time to work on them. Despite this, we successfully applied for the First Round PMF Method (deadline 7 May), the Halcyon EquityTech Fellowship (an incubator for impact founders), and Vinnova’s Nordic Innovation House Fellowship, as well as to the Eureka Investment Readiness Programme delegations to Web Summit in Lisbon and Switch in Singapore, all four due by 31 May. As I’m sending this out in June, we’ve already heard back from the PMF Method, and although we didn’t get accepted to that programme, I’m more optimistic and have higher hopes for our Halcyon and Vinnova applications, which I’ll keep you updated on.

Lastly, in early May we began our search for a new Product Designer and posted the role on Wellfound, our recruitment platform. The response was amazing, with over 140 applicants showing interest in joining our team. After careful consideration, we shortlisted 7 candidates for design tests, and we’ll be progressing to final interviews with most of these candidates throughout June. Most likely, we’ll introduce our latest addition to the team in the June newsletter!

What’s in the pipeline for next month?

Our top priority in June is to achieve what we set out for in May – securing at least one pilot project. Despite the delays caused by the issues of some key features in our prototype, we’ve been working tirelessly to address these shortcomings. The feedback received from interested customers has been incredibly encouraging, fueling our optimism for the coming months. We already have 15-20 demos scheduled, showcasing the significant interest in and demand for our product. Furthermore, we’ll submit our application for the 4th cohort of Supercharger Ventures edtech accelerator, and we expect to finalise our decision regarding the recruitment process for our Product Designer.

Thank you for your continued support, 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

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