Dffrnt
Business benefits for creators ⚡️
We're preparing to fundraise our first round of funding.
In the process, we've discovered that as quite a long-running bootstrapped/hacky company, we've ended up being judged based on what we've been rather than where we're going.
Until now, we've been describing ourselves by explaining where we've come from (proof of life/traction/validation), where we're at right now (product, growth) and where we want to go.
The problem with this is that people switch off by the last part (no matter how short) due to thinking they know what we do already.
So we decided to change this around and talk first about our mission + the problem that stems from, then the huge vision of what we want to build, then what we are right now and where we came from.
This shows the big vision, gets them excited about it and then goes onto tell them we're not mad chancers as the doubt starts to creep in that the mission might be too big – hopefully making people think "oh crap, they're legit, this could be big".
Publicly though, we still can't describe Yena as the ultimate version of what we want to build as it would likely baffle the general public right now. So we've amended this too, which albeit slightly undermines what we think we are, to what everyone else thinks we might be, before surprising them with more value later. This is currently "a modern membership organisation for startups" providing "benefits for businesses via an affordable, flexible subscription" a little "like the FSB/IOD (UK based membership org) but not old and with more value" -- that last bit was someone else's words, not mine 😅
Thought it worth sharing! Big stuff to come and a fundraise to get on with. More on that soon...
Thanks all!
Launched the second version of our membership product. We think we've got it right now! Hit a sustainable revenue, started onboarding sponsors.
After 2.5 years of providing free meetups, people seemed to feel like they owed us – we quickly signed up 5 members paying whatever we could get (around £10 each) and got our first revenues...
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How do meetups work?!?
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Hey!
Firstly, so sorry for taking so long to reply to this. Didn't see it in my inbox and don't log in often!!
To answer your question: Simple :)
They're 8 times a year in each city we're active in. You can see all our cities via our dashboard at http://meetup.com/pro/yena.
Oh and they're all free. Because we believe that events shouldn't be gated with a fee, if you can afford to make them that way. We've spent time creating a very low cost model to our events and use them to deliver impact to people who can't afford to attend otherwise expensive events, and those who can, alike.
The events are now rebranded as 'Rebel Meetups by Yena' in order to differentiate them from our product and now operate in 15+ cities worldwide (we launched in Berlin last month) growing at a rate of 1-3 new cities per quarter.
While our product is age agnostic, our events remain as they originally were set up to be – a safe space for the next generation to connect, with a guide age of under 35s only (not policed but we expect people to respect the guidelines and it works).
The format is a simple 'sandwich' as we call it. Networking, fireside chat, networking. 6:30pm-9pm. In a bar-type atmosphere or v cool coworking space.
Hope that helps! Any other questions feel free to ask or email at ash@yena.co.uk.
Thanks for reading & asking!! :)
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Thanks
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Didn't expect anyone to turn up, didn't think about it becoming a business. Just wanted to find some people like me (Ash)!
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