Keeping Up With Edventures: September 2024

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

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,

September was honestly a tough month. Unforeseen challenges popped out of nowhere which required the majority of my time and focus. This delayed our progress, but despite these events, I’m optimistic that we’ll regain our momentum in October and onwards.

September: A Blown Tire, But Not Blown Off Course

I’m gonna be very open, and a bit vulnerable, in this month’s newsletter.

Abreham dropped a bomb in early September, saying he wasn’t longer able to continue with Edventures for financial reasons, having to help out his family, and to be honest it did break a piece of my heart. He was by far the best (so far) engineer I’ve worked with for the past years, as I’ve been working with various developers to build a prototype for Edventures that captures my vision. Not only was he a great engineer with a solution to every new problem, he was also a great team player, showed excellent work ethic, and always found a solution to a problem.

Our rapport was excellent, and we both worked great together. His personal experiences as an entrepreneur, having been part of building and launching two previous startups in Ethiopia, shone through. We had great alignment on what needed to be done, and the effort needed to get us to where we wanted.

BUT somewhere along the road, he faced the same issue as many other developers and other team members before him - “reality” caught up and he found himself in a situation where he needed to secure more paying jobs, to support himself as well as his family.

The thing that hurts most is that I can’t do anything about it right now, as Edventures (and myself, for that matter) isn’t in a position to pay salaries just yet. We’re close, but not quite there.

Why this hurts, more than when previous times team members have left, is because I believed the fit was excellent, both in terms of skills, personality, and endurance. But, once again, our bootstrapped situation was hurting us, in terms of retaining great people and thus our pace of development. This has been a long thread throughout my journey with Edventures, ever since I had the first idea in 2017, and the first developer I worked with in 2018.

To add to the shitty feeling (pardon the language), is that we’re just picking up momentum. Yes, getting the pilot projects confirmed and started has taken longer than we hoped, for various reasons, and some out of our control, but we’re very close to confirming at least 2-3 pilot projects with organisations we’ve been in talks with for some time. To have such an excellent team member as Abreham leave as we’re on the verge of reaching this key milestone does dim the excitement of being so close to achieving this milestone.

For the same reason Abreham had to leave, so did Chukwudi shortly before Abreham. Chuk’s impact on our technical progress was great, as he rebuilt our AI framework and presented something that took us closer to the vision of an AI capable of fluently coaching and guiding entrepreneurs, tailored to their unique context, needs, and goals.

These events made me wonder: is bootstrapping a privilege or a punishment?

Privilege in the sense that to be able to bootstrap, you presumably need to either have a decent amount of savings, a high-paying job/projects that require little of your time, a support system around you that can “invest” in you as you build your startup. Maybe a combination of all of the above.

Or is it a punishment, in the sense that your inability to pay people and retain good talent will hurt your timeline and extend the runway you require to launch your startup successfully. I usually think to myself “What you don’t pay for in money, you pay for in time” which is very true in this situation.

I’ll explore this thought more in a separate post, both on the blog and on LinkedIn. If you haven’t connected with me yet, please do so here!

However, MAKE NO MISTAKE: I’m still as relentless in my belief and determination that Edventures is building something amazing, something that is needed by users and customers, and something that will be of great value and impact for both users and customers around the world. I see how my vision, a global platform that amplifies the entrepreneurship support ecosystem and bridges the gaps that exist in today’s inequitable and inaccessible ecosystems, is slowly becoming a reality.

I have no doubts that 2024 will be the year when we finally reach the milestone of going to market by initiating the pilot projects, and hopefully also securing an investment to provide us with a runway of 24 months of full focus and undivided attention to continue building a platform that will shake up the world of entrepreneurship support, and enable millions of potential entrepreneurs to realise their ideas.

Due to this team reshuffle, my main focus throughout September was spread across multiple parallel tracks. The top priority was finding a Flutter Engineer to fix the bugs and keep the pilot projects on track, while also ensuring we gained traction.

Following the team reshuffle, recruitment kicked into high gear—not just for a Flutter Engineer, but also for an AI Engineer and a Product Designer. Simultaneously, I began outreach to potential investors to get on their radar and spark interest in our mission and vision.

On top of all that, a significant portion of my time required planning and preparing for my upcoming travels to Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Greece, and Lisbon. With so many moving parts, September was a hectic month, to say the least.

On a positive note to wrap up this month’s newsletter, the recruitment process for all three roles has progressed well, and I’m confident we’ll have new team members signed on by early October.

What’s in the pipeline for next month?

In October, I’m starting the “Edventures Startup Conference Tour of 2024”… jokes aside, I’ll be away for about a month, travelling from place to place to attend startup conferences, meet with existing and potential customers and investors, and see a bit more of the world. I’m SUPER EXCITED, as you can imagine!

I’ll start in Dubai 🇦🇪, at GITEX Impact and Expand North Star between 13-16 October, to meet with INJAZ UAE (a part of JA) and hopefully some investors. Then I’ll head to Kuala Lumpur 🇲🇾 between 18-24 October. There I’ll meet up with JA Malaysia, some JA alumni, and take the bus to Singapore 🇸🇬, well in time ahead of SWITCH which takes place 28-30 October. While in Singapore, apart from maximising the experience at SWITCH, I’ll make the most of the time to explore the city, as well as meet with JA Singapore, potential investors and customers, and make some time to hang out with JA alumni I met in Porto in August.

After Singapore, I’m heading back to Europe, more specifically Greece 🇬🇷 where I’ll spend some time collect my thoughts and go through the impressions and connections made in Dubai, KL, and Singapore. From Greece I’ll head to Lisbon 🇵🇹 to attend Web Summit between the 11-14th November. Both these trips (Singapore and Lisbon) were made available by the Eureka Investment Readiness Programme, which is one of the projects funded by the European Union to support startups. As a bootstrapped founder, I would honestly not be able to travel like this without their support, so I want to send a MASSIVE thanks for selecting Edventures as one of the startups to join both delegations to these tech conferences.

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