Keeping Up With Edventures: November 2024

Photo by Alexander Zahari

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Dear Edventures community,

November saw the conclusion of the Startup Conference Tour 2024 and brought with it some stark reminders. Aadarsh got up to speed and settled in well, while Zhen Hong didn’t have the same experience.

If you’re in a hurry, below are the things you need to know from November.

TL;DR

• From Singapore, I went to Greece for a week, before heading to Lisbon
• Attended Web Summit in Lisbon between 11-14 November, to then head back home to Sweden
• Mentioned in the Monaco Tribune as one of the promising startups at Web Summit 2024
• Started on an application for the Social Tides Grow AI Accelerator, a programme for European social impact startups with AI at the core of their solution
• The Product Designer role still open as we couldn’t reach an agreement with the intended candidate lined up
• With Aadarsh on the team, we have a fresh set of eyes on our backend and application infrastructure, to which we’ve started making improvements

November: Lessons Learned From the Edventures Startup Conference Tour of 2024

I started November by spending 10 days in Greece, outside of Thessaloniki, to recharge and to collect all the impressions gained from the trips to Singapore, Malaysia, and Dubai. I spent some time following up on connections made, and while settling in, I was also shaken up by a 5.2 earthquake at the beginning of my week in Greece.

The Edventures Startup Conference Tour 2024

From Greece, I moved on to Lisbon and Portugal, to attend Web Summit which was a great experience overall. Compared to SWITCH, the impression of the whole event felt more organised and smoother, and the support for startups was leagues ahead. The opportunities to gain visibility were good, especially considering how many startups attend Web Summit (+3,000), whereas at SWITCH those chances were scarce - nearly non-existent, to be honest. Web Summit offered different types of startup activations which stood out to me in comparison with SWITCH and GITEX. The app was miles ahead of SWITCH’s and GITEX’s versions in terms of usability and user experience—better search tools, filtering options, intuitive navigation, and detailed profiles for both visitors and exhibitors.

I’ll admit, though, that I expected Web Summit to be larger. With all the hype about its scale, I thought it would feel massive. But after attending Dubai’s GITEX, my perspective has shifted; it seems everything else now feels a bit smaller in comparison. That said, SWITCH was by far the smallest of the events, which should work to their advantage in being able to curate more intimate and relevant events. A smaller event has the potential to be more curated, offering more meaningful opportunities for attendees and exhibitors alike. Although I haven’t been myself, people say that Slush is very much like this - small but highly curated.

The results from Web Summit reaffirmed something I’ve been grappling with since the start of the tour: our focus needs to be solely on customers right now. From Web Summit, we secured around 20 strong leads for potential customers - a solid outcome by any standard. However, on the investor front, the response was less promising.

Reflections, Reminders and Lessons Learned

Over the past few months, I’ve been more proactive in reaching out to investors - starting around mid-September. While some responses have been encouraging and promising for 2025, most investors we’ve engaged with focus on later stages of funding - mature pre-seed or early seed at best. It’s been talked about, in many different startup communities, how angel and early-stage investors have become more prudent about their investment, and shifting their focus to startups that have come a bit further on their journey. And truthfully, Edventures is not there yet. However, this also creates a gap between startups like ours, who are fully bootstrapped and are slowly making progress, but who need that capital injection to fully take off, and the ones who are at the stage we’re aiming for, who already have a little money to spend. That gap of a few hundred thousand (no matter dollars or euros or pounds) in funding has never felt bigger to me.

That said, I’ve often found myself torn between chasing venture capital and focusing on bootstrapping through customer funding. As potential customers have been more receptive to, and aligned with, what we’re offering, it’s just foolish not to prioritise them. Now that we’ve got a tangible product to show, the feedback from customers has been far more concrete—and much less “vaguely positive.” Customers are engaging with real interest, which is energising in a way that investor conversations haven’t been.

Reflecting on this, I realise I’ve been guilty of putting investors ahead of customers in my focus, especially during September and October,…

Reflecting on this, I realise I’ve been guilty of putting investors ahead of customers in my focus, especially during September and October, albeit for a short time. Maybe it was optimism, naïveté, or just wishful thinking, but I’d hoped that securing funding from investors would fast-track us to going full-time as a team and that we would’ve managed to do that by the end of this year. In theory, it IS the quicker route - but the time, effort, and persistence required to land investment are immense.

And let’s be honest, for an early-stage startup like ours, the odds are often stacked against us in the VC world, so investing that time and effort feels much wiser to spend on our potential customers. While working with customers might mean slower growth, it is more sustainable, and the rewards are longer-lasting. Customers not only bring in revenue but also offer valuable insights and validation for our product.

Sometimes, you need to experience things for yourself to truly understand their meaning and importance. Even when you think you’re doing the “right” thing, you still always need to be open to refine your perspective. This tour was one such experience for me.

On that topic, I want to share a quick, value-exemplifying sidenote - I want to share with you a fundamental belief that I have: there’s no “right” or “wrong” at all, and especially not as you walk through life - it’s all just a spectrum of choices that range from “better” to “worse”. Unfortunately, what society - and especially schools - teaches us as children and adolescents is the opposite. We’re trained to think in terms of right vs. wrong, spending years stressing over the “correct” answer on the next exam. This mindset, ingrained over time, leads us to believe there is a binary way to approach life, whether conscious or unconscious - a right way and a wrong way to do things, to see things, and to live. I believe this is a harmful perspective because it limits our worldview and restricts the opportunities we can recognise - whether big or small. By seeing life as a spectrum of possibilities rather than a binary series of “right” or “wrong”, we open ourselves up to richer, more diverse types of experiences and choices. And this is the root of any entrepreneurial activity.

Team News

Regarding our Product Designer recruitment process, we had a promising candidate lined up after our final selection. However, with eight years of experience and a family to support, we couldn’t reach an agreement on the terms, especially since the role here would be unpaid for an uncertain period. Despite some back-and-forth twisting and turning, we ultimately acknowledged that it wasn’t going to work for either party, so we decided to move forward and continue our search for candidates who are in a position to work with us under the current conditions. The search for a new Product Designer therefore continues into December.

Having team members who align with the conditions we can offer at this stage is crucial and something we require in any candidate. I’ve compromised on this before, in the earlier days of Edventures, and it’s something I’ve learned the hard way to no do again. Anyone joining Edventures under these meagre conditions will set the baseline for a team that is on equal terms and can collectively focus on securing the funding we need - whether through paying customers, investors, grants, or a combination - so we can start working on Edventures as our paid, full-time roles in 2025.

On the topic of funding, one such chance of securing some funding in 2025 is the Social Tides GROW AI accelerator. This is a 6-month equity-free accelerator programme for European impact organisations and social enterprises applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) at the core of their solution to create meaningful social impact. If accepted into the accelerator, we are eligible for a grant from the Google Foundation of up to 250k USD, which would scratch our funding itch for a substantial amount of time.

Another such funding opportunity is the Eureka Innowwide application that we submitted in October along with our pilot customer in the Philippines, JA Philippines. This market feasibility project also runs for 6 months, about the same period as the GROW AI accelerator, and would add another 90K EUR to our coffers, with two thirds of that amount being a grant.

How both these applications will fare for us, we’ll learn during Q1 next year. I’ll keep you posted. Pinky promise. 🤙

On the team side, I’m really excited to work with Aadarsh, as he’s not only a very talented engineer but he’s also brought a fresh set of eyes to our backend and application infrastructure. Thanks to his contributions, we’ve made significant strides in modularising our code base. This restructuring has allowed our key features - BMC, Action Points, and the overall Business Project - to function more independently, rather than being tightly coupled as they were previously, which caused usability issues. Now, Action Points can be assigned to a specific Business Project as well as assigned to an individual user regardless of a Business Project, and multiple entrepreneur users can now access and collaborate on one Business Project, which wasn’t possible before.

To enable this, we needed to refactor some of our backend code, work that will continue into December. These improvements are necessary, however, as they not only make our app more efficient and scalable but also enhance the core user experience for both entrepreneurs and coaches, offering a smoother, more intuitive interface and functionality as they navigate their tasks.

And on that note, it’s time to wrap up November — here’s to embracing the lessons, big and small. Until next time!

What’s in the pipeline for next month?

December will focus on getting more of the app’s functionality sorted, and make sure it’s fail-proof. Some functions have slipped between the cracks, and we’ve now picked them up. We’re 80 per cent there already, and the final 20 shouldn’t be a big push. Still, since Aadarsh is leading this work in implementing it all, taking care of unexpected bugs, and juggling some studies in parallel, things don’t move at full speed, but at a steady pace.

Hopes are high to secure a Product Designer before the year ends so that we can start redesigning our Alpha version and MVP into a more “market-ready” product, a Beta version of our app, along with designs for native applications as we plan to launch apps for iOS and Android during the later half of 2025.

We’re also replacing Zhen Hong with a new AI Engineer, and the recruitment process is underway. Application for Social Tides was submitted, and a new one, for Startup Qatar, was initiated.

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

Stay foolish, stay ambitious!

Alexander and the Edventures team