OurGen

I have spent the last 3 months analysing the feedback we got from our beta and making the new platform. We have come to the end of the Unrest accelerator who has helped us with an amazing rebrand, and so, we launched OurGen v2 on the weekend!

I published the site and within 24 hours I got a stripe notification! I thought it was an error as we haven't launched any campaigns yet...

We got our first paid customer. They came bought our Week Pass (£2.60 for one-time week access). I put a bit of JavaScript on our Webflow site that tracks the link the users last went on before signing up and we found that our first customer came from a Placement year Insight from Goldman Sachs - a popular one!

Not only do we have a paid customer - but the last 2 years had paid off. We refined our product after feedback, developed a pricing model and mechanic for our B2C audience and we now know where we converted customers. 2023 is off to an awesome start!

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Now we are preparing for Demo Day - January 12th - pitching for £620k and this big win will be great momentum to close investors...

We have just onboarded 2 new members of ourGen's Strategic Leadership Team. Firstly, Dr. Dawn Nicholson who was amongst the senior ranks of Morgan Stanley and PwC leading HR operations there. She is currently a lecturer at University of Kent so she has the best of both worlds and will be joining us as a Board Advisor.

Secondly, Ian Ratcliff, who will be joining us as an NED. Initially we were pursuing the route of him becoming our first investor but after a 3-month process we found that him joining more objectively and in support-based role was better suited. His son had a difficult time transitioning from university to EY and he has connected with ourGen's mission strongly.

Ian has already put in place guidance for structured board meetings and I am feeling much more confident in uniting the team as we prepare for Demo Day at the accelerator.

Next steps is to have our first call together with all of the NEDs and advisors in early December to share the game plan for our next raise.

After 2 months of interviews, ourGen has been accepted on the Unrest Accelerator Programme for 2022/23 which has bolstered our strong valuation and sets the company on the right track to raising it's first major round.

Over the next 16 weeks, I will go through their workshops, programmes and sessions to develop the business in marketing, sales, hr and investment areas. Our first session is in-person down in London where I finally get to meet Tom, my angel investor after 2 years!

The team are really excited and this is a big motivation boost we needed after a slow start to raising efforts. I am now starting to think we might not need to raise and bootstrapping is the way forward...

Before our Micropivot, I found it impossible to coordinate all the other teams and the development side and conversations on the future were confusing and inconsistent.

On the "public-facing" side of the business, we were painting this picture of a fancy B2B software for universities to use for data insights, communication, events hosting etc. But throughout that process, we were massively overlooking the real reason why I started this, for the students. Meanwhile, my 1-1s with our Tech NED was very much focused on the end-user, and the students, and we began developing a product roadmap which was more B2C.

I was naive, it took me a long time to realise the misalignment that I caused, but we spotted it and took action to fix it. The B2B dream we were focused on, required a huge amount of development time, cost and expertise that we did not have or prepare to have with investment.

After going back to the drawing board (my previous post here) we are now aligned as ever. And so, after the new business plan and ditching the B2B university focus, we will focus on building a no-code B2C platform which delivers our amazing content well, presents it in a relatable way to our users, and has the foundations to slowly collect data and users for our future plans.

I am really excited to explore this new idea of no-code. Throughout my entrepreneurial career, I scraped a living together building new, basic websites on Wix, WordPress and Webflow and it was amazing, I loved it. Now I have the chance, support and vision to enjoy the same process on a much bigger scale, with amazing teammates, on my own business... I think we've got it now.

Before launching the investment campaign, ourGen achieved considerable B2C traction with £0 marketing spend and built internal systems to scale content for students. It was assumed that universities (large groups of students) would be the ICP to monetise the platform. It was decided that in order to sell to universities, a technical product must be built alongside the current student offering.

So, it began its investment campaign in May 2022 with the ambition to digitise university career services. Its primary model was to sell directly to universities on a B2B2C model by providing access to the platform for £0.2 per user per month.

As an opportunistic team, the company took new business where it can explore models and get a better understanding of the market. Whilst building a pipeline of deals, the sales team experienced typical industry barriers, such as long sales cycles and low CAC/LTV ratios. After reporting to our board, other partners and potential investors, the general consensus feedback was that the current model is high risk and low reward for a startup of ourGen's size.

After reflection, it was realised that the company's business plan had adapted to the opportunities explored ad-hoc, and not with the core vision in mind. The management team went back to the drawing board and assessed the company's current strengths which were:

• Extensive partnership network with vast student influence
• Agreed distribution partnership which covers 525 cities
• Proven sales strategy that scaled effectively to acquire societies
• Extremely high engagement rates vs average industry in events

After 4 weeks of internal preparation, ourGen is raising investment to deliver the following plan:

Phase 1 - B2C (1-12 months)

• Build multiple acquisition channels for free B2C users
• Achieve critical mass and switch on monetisation to convert into paying users
• Launch B2B an monetise from B2C data collected previously

Phase 2- B2B (13 - 24 months)

• Adopt optimised B2C strategy and scale users
• Explore the best B2B channel for monetising data
• Build B2B products to use data

Phase 3 - Scale (25 + months)

• Build Career AI
• Reduce B2C CAC
• Increase revenue and profit

We have been working with a course based e-learning platform that uses some AI to help students develop professional skills like email writing, and interview preparation. They mainly focus on Eastern markets. They wanted ourGen as a sales / "frontend" platform to approach universities and we have been working on ways to make the user journey seamless between platforms.

We have officially integrated court first API for user logins and details so they can create an account on ourGen and seamlessly enter our partner's platform. Student users can now discover skills, access the context of why they are important and how they can be applied to their career, and then practice them!