2019 saw three winners of the Innovation Award at the SETsquared Bath Innovation Centre. We have asked the winners to write their own blog posts so that we can hear all about their entrepreneur journey as it develops. Read George Griffiths’ blog about his winning business idea ‘Expo Education’. Scroll down to the bottom of the page if you would like to read from the beginning of the journey.

#9 June 2020

A potential scalability challenge?

A potential limitation of pursuing the university revenue stream is the total number of relevant conferences in the UK.

We class a conference as relevant if it has more than 250 attendees, contains topics related to university courses, involves a minimum of 1 of the following: exhibition floor, roundtable discussions, seminars and presentations.

We used website scraping on meeting event databases to create a list of meeting events happening in all major cities within the top 40 countries by population. The result was 66,000 events happening worldwide, with around 3,250 in the UK. Of those 3,250, we only found around 250 taking place during academic semesters at Bath, outside of exam periods that were in the scope of events that we would look to send students to.

250 events split between 5 universities would be 50 events per year each.

A low-ball average of 10 students at each event, would mean 500 students would benefit from the events each year.

We’ve been asking questions about how these numbers would affect the scalability of this business-model.

An example of a data visualization dashboard of events happening in one of the 40 countries we looked at: Australia.

#8 May 2020

Thoughts on the Higher Education market for Expo Education

The idea to point our company towards an Educational Technology company came from working with the Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at the University of Bath; getting insights in to the mechanisms behind how the university’s student experience strategy links to data collection on students.

The Office for Students (OfS) is a regulatory body of the UK government’s Department for Education. The Office for Students play a large part in the strategy of UK universities as they have strong regulatory powers over universities that they use to mediate how much revenue universities spend on developing aspects of their community that are in line with the UK’s economic and ethical expectations.

Every year, UK universities are required by OfS to spend a certain amount of their revenue on improving the access and participation (A&P) for less represented groups of young people, as well as required to create Access and Participation Plans (APP) every 1-3 years. APP reports detail how the university intends to allocate this compulsory percentage of revenue to improving A&P.

The annual APP budget for universities is expected to be split between ‘Access’ and ‘Outcomes’ for students. The money spent on matters concerning Outcomes for students is expected to improve student employability, attainment, and satisfaction.

Each year universities are required to spend money on improving the employability, attainment and satisfaction of their students – I believe that this represents an opportunity for EdTech companies to create products that can be offered to universities that provide a measurable impact on improving these metrics.

We believe Expo Education has the potential to be molded into a company that provides such a service through the following products:

· Quantitative insights into how various aspects of the student experience is improved by attending conferences.

· An option to choose which student demographics should receive priority access to attend conferences.

The overall value that we believe Expo Education has the potential to deliver would help universities to see an improvement in the key metrics that paint a picture of how good the university is. Since these metrics are used universally across the UK and often overseas, universities subscribed to Expo Education would gain a competitive advantage over other universities from a Student Outcomes standpoint.

#7 April 2020

London in lockdown

Looking back to the end of February, we were planning to place over 150 students at cutting edge conferences throughout March and April, after investing a large percentage of our available funding in to a prototype mobile app, in order to, demonstrate our commercial value to universities as a new EdTech company with a compelling offer to enhance student experience.

Unfortunately, all events in our calendar have been either cancelled or postponed.

This is a harsh setback for Expo Education; forcing us to explore other options that we have to demonstrate our new technology and move forwards to market.

#6 March 2020

How does Expo Education generate massive opportunity for students?

The AI & Big Data Expo is a leading Artificial Intelligence & Big Data Conference & Exhibition that showcases the next generation enterprise technologies and strategies from the world of Artificial Intelligence & Big Data, providing an opportunity to explore and discover the practical and successful implementation of AI & Big Data for business growth.

1.0. Industry Knowledge & connections

By volunteering at this event, students are given a free premium ticket worth over £500, to access all aspects of the event. In their free time, students have the opportunity to explore and debate the advancements in Artificial Intelligence & Big Data with forward thinking enterprise brands, market leaders, AI & Big Data evangelists and hot start-ups.

1.1. Speaking to interesting companies on the exhibition floor

The figure above shows the floor-plan of AI & Big Data Expo, detailing the features that will be present during the event. Each individual white section represents typically 4-6 different companies that will be attending to promote their products and network with delegates. I find the exhibition floor to be the most stimulating aspect of attending the event for a number of reasons: the team members representing exhibiting companies are very enthusiastic to interact with people interested in their stand, a favourite question I love to ask companies is simply “Your stand looks really interesting, can you tell me a bit more about what your company does?” This always gets a great conversation going.

One student can easily approach over a dozen companies in one day, and in doing so is certain to dramatically expand their professional network and industry knowledge.

1.2. Conference Tracks

The floor-plan also contains pink, blue, green and orange sections around the periphery of the conference space. These sections represent the auditoriums within which leading professionals from multiple industries will deliver highly exclusive insights in to how artificial intelligence is moulding a variety of industries:

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough hours in a day to attend each and every talk as a volunteer, so you will have to be selective. Each event will have an agenda on their website which breaks down each track and the gives a description of the talks within:

Before I volunteer, I review each of the talks via the event’s website and note down which talks interest me the most.

1.3. Speakers

This figure can be found on the event’s website, and gives an overview of all speakers delivering talks across the two day event. Students can create a list of speakers they wish to connect with at the event, and with access to social networking tools such as LinkedIn, can perform extensive research on the professional background of speakers beforehand in order to generate some insightful questions that could be highly engaging for a speaker to talk about.

The exclusive opportunity to network industry leaders, innovative companies as well as gain first hand insights into cutting edge industry developments, makes conference volunteering one of the most stimulating experiences for a young professional.

#5 February 2020

Deal Breaker?

Having agreed on a final, complete deal, I went ahead and signed the contract.

My time working on the business from the end of January into February has been spent on two things:

1. Reaching out to conferences happening in March of this year and partnering with them, in order to line-up events for students to volunteer at in Semester II.

2. Working with the agency’s product development team to deliver a fully-functioning app that students can download.

I’ve managed to line-up two major events happening in London:

· Future Health Expo, who want 40 volunteers (https://www.futurehealth.global/).

· IoT Tech Expo World Series, wanting 40 volunteers (https://www.iottechexpo.com/).

However, a greater number of challenges with product development have arisen, which amongst additional contributing factors, have clouded my decision to go ahead with the app development deal.

Recent meetings and product development sessions with the agency have been frustrating with regards to performance and getting things done to the specification that I was expecting. If you refer back to December’s blog, I describe a requested feature of my specification that I need the agency to build for me: allowing administrators to track and assign attributes to user data profiles in order to paint a picture of how individual users are navigating and interacting within the app. Getting the agency to physically create this for me in the way I originally envisioned has been a challenge. When you consider the specification as I whole that I provided to the agency, all of the features I asked for were relatively simple apart from this one.

The main thing causing the roadblock is this: the agency believes that in order to create this feature for us, it would require a large digression from their normal architecture, and given the cost and time constraints of the agreement, they cannot allocate enough resources to deliver the feature in the form we posed it. In order to resolve this, our sessions and conversations have been dominated by a single discussion: how can we use what features the app has already to create a precursor/prototype of the feature by piecing together different tools that already exist within their system.

I want to monetise the data that shows how students are benefitting from the events. In order to gather this data, we need to measure what activities the students are doing. In order to measure what the students are doing; we need a system of delivering information for them to react to. In order for the right information to be delivered to the right student, we need a system of delivering that information – and my idea was to create an automated posting system that delivers pre-designed posts to student users on the app, sort of like a game.

Personally, I don’t think a prototype of the feature would work for us. The original idea was to have something automated. The proposed prototype would consist of too many individual parts that in turn, would incur too much manual work for me to handle when the conferences are running.

With this feature, I personally think that it transforms the app in to a more holistic invention. It gives us a branded app, that is technically simple in most areas, but has a unique feature of doing something unprecedented in the education industry: providing a quantitative measurement of how a professional development opportunity improves student experience – but we just can’t quite get there with the deal we’ve got on our hands.

On the one hand, it may seem like I’m walking away from a great app deal because we can’t get just one feature we’ve asked for. However, this feature was part of a bigger picture to create an early-stage prototype app that generates unique business value for a university in the form of student experience data. Without this feature, it seems like a lot of money for some tools that I could use elsewhere for free.

Looking back to when I was providing the specification, I think it was naïve of me to expect the agency to create the features that I envisioned without iterations. In addition, it’s making me question whether I should have made extra effort to clarify what feature I need and come up with a way of creating it effectively off-the-cuff. I also think it was naïve of me to not push harder to tie our specific product requirements more tightly to our contractual agreement, to simply reduce any ambiguity in what was to be built.

Moreover, I think it’s also worth mentioning some other thoughts I’ve been having about contracting/agency work. As a client of an agency, the amount of attention, resources and effort that’s put in to your project by the agency is directly proportional to the monetary value of your contract and the total number of days given to complete the work. From the agency’s point of view, I think it makes sense for them to put more effort in to the companies that are paying them more, because they want to make sure their big customers are happy. I would also assume that this is the case at most agencies.

I’ve learnt hard lessons and realised a bleak reality about inventing new technology: being a solo founder with limited technical experience AND limited money is a tough nut to crack. It’s at times like these you wonder how much more effective things would be when you’re part of a well-curated team of founders with a balance of business and technical experience... rather than just one person trying to take everything on.

#4 January 2020

Trying to drive a hard bargain

After sending the user requirements specification to the development agency in December, my next challenge was to negotiate a price to pay for the work to be completed by the end of January. ‘Clutch.co’, a project management directory, conducted an interesting survey that contacted representatives from 12 leading mobile application development companies to determine the cost ranges of building an iPhone app and the key variables of cost:

The figure’s y-axis shows the total development cost.

The x-axis which isn’t labelled, shows two bars that represent the complexity of two contrasting app development projects: low and high, that consist of 7 traditional stages of app development.

The prices quoted above the bars are totals derived from a combination of development stages that the agencies charge a flat and fixed hourly cost for, which Clutch quotes as $150 per hour.

The ‘high’ bar is based on the same unit of price as the ‘low’ bar, but is larger due to a greater quantity of development stages.

Both ‘low’ and ‘high’ costs were calculated from the average number of development stages in app development projects collected from the 12 agencies surveyed. What this figure is essentially suggesting is that the cost of making something versatile and unique is very substantial, and the cost of making something less functional is still very high for a small start-up [$38,000 = £29,302, $171,000 = £131,858].

After pitching my idea to the agency at their co-working space in Manchester and submitting a product specification, they proposed an initial offer of just under £10,000 (incl. VAT) to create the app, in addition to a revenue-share in-app advertisement deal to countervail spending their resources with an early-stage start up. From an average app development costs point-of-view, in light of Clutch’s survey it’s fair to say this is probably the best I’m going to get given the amount of money I have. But it would still be too expensive for me and the company, as most of my funding is allocated to my personal expenses, leaving a very tight budget for developing tech. But I wanted to make this work, because I have no technical co-founder to create my own apps and software in-house, and I have no other agencies willing to work at such a low price.

I had been presented with an extra-favourable offer by industry standards, but due to my very limited financial resources and strict time-constraints, it still wasn’t good enough for me. So, I was simply honest with them: this agency was my first (only) choice and their white-label model offers great synergies for Expo Education’s prototype, but in order to wind out extra-extra-extra-favourable terms, I had to shine a very strong light on what the potential market opportunity for Expo Education could do for them, and ultimately assert that I could not afford £10,000 at the stage I’m at. I managed to negotiate the price down to just over £7,000 (incl. VAT), which is something that I could afford to pay and still have enough money to pay myself a wage to work full-time on the business until the summer. Tackling new obstacles in addition to the challenge of negotiating and justifying the need for a lower price, I also found myself on the receiving end of a thrillingly extensive terms and conditions contractual agreement for the first time! The T&Cs contained legal clauses belonging to many aspects of a business contract that I’ve not explored in the past, such as:

· Intellectual property rights.

· Data Protection.

· Limitation of Liability.

· Effect of Termination.

After reading through the T&Cs for the first time, it was clear that the document had been crafted heavily in the interest of protecting the agency from what seemed like almost every possible hostile situation that we could incur on this deal, which is fair enough. But, as I focused in on the details, there were certain clauses in particular related to what happens to our intellectual property in the event of termination because our parties, that were threatening to the business model we’re trialing. Basically, if we had to terminate the agreement, numerous data-points generated from within our platform would have been deleted. We’re planning to sell products of those data-points. Therefore, I had to propose changes to the terms and conditions as I wasn’t willing to sign the document within further clarification around these clauses, especially given the amount of resources I was pledging to this deal. I was happy when they agreed to work out a lower price and agreed to my clausal adjustments in the contract.

It became apparent to me how little business experience I had heading in to these negotiations. I ventured into territory I had not been in to before. What was equally as valuable as working out a deal that worked for us both, was being able to practice assertiveness and standing my ground in a business negotiation; personal lessons I want to keep close to my conscience in future.

#3 December 2019

Getting in to shape for the New Year

After positive talks with the app agency, I produced a product specification detailing the features I would need to have in a prototype app that could be used as a general hub for students wishing to volunteer at events, as well as event organisers wishing to recruit volunteers for their events. In addition to these foundational functionalities, I also included details for a special functionality that would allow an administrator to have unique control of the user interface. Creating this document was certainly a challenge. It’s my first time writing a document explaining my desired in-app features, as well as how the user interface would change depending on a variation of user interactions. The product offered by the agency was classed as a ‘white label’ app. White label apps offer a pre-built digital environment with an array of existing features already built in to the app that can be easily tweaked, stretched and twisted to fit one’s desired in-app features. These apps offer various advantages: approximately 85% of the core-features that I needed to support a prototype of Expo Education were already built in to the white-label. Therefore, creating the product specification involved describing how to adapt these existing features to fit our desired functionalities, rather than the customary approach to writing product specifications, which involves describing how to build a product from scratch. Consequently, going with a white label ensured a high number of existing functionalities analogous to what I was looking for were built already, allowing me to achieve my goal of building an app quickly with limited resources and a tight deadline with conferences approaching imminently going in to the New Year. I split my specification in to 5 sections, each containing multiple subsections detailing each of the functional requirements that I require for my prototype:

1. An Executive Summary.

2. Admin Users.

3. Student Users.

4. Host (Conference Organisers) Users.

5. Milestones and Conclusions.

I included a subsection in section 2 (Admin Users) that detailed a unique feature that I requested to be added to the app via the desktop version only. The feature was a back-end breakdown of user profile data in spreadsheet format reserved solely for administrative access. I designed the spreadsheet to contain individual rows and columns referring to users and various in-app actions that could be tracked respectively as well as a feature allowing the user to add columns and assign external alphanumerical attributes to each user at will. A key revenue-orientated aspect of Expo Education is that we want to track the attributes of different students that attend conferences, in order to then present those data insights to universities which are highly valuable (e.g. which courses the students are on). We would also like to give universities the option to prioritise conference access for students with specific attributes. In order to control which students are accepted to volunteer at conferences, we need to assign attributes to student-user profiles, which are clearly visible to admins. By assigning attributes to student-user types, we can in theory set up a system to isolate individual members of an event-group based on their unique attributes, and direct custom posts for their eyes only, for example: a ticket to the event. All students signing up to the platform must specify their 9-digit student number. The reason we ask for this, is because we can relay this information to a university’s student record database that holds all personal attributions for students. We could then convert explicit attributes in such a database (such as Course of Study) from text in to a simple code from 0 to N, with N being the total number of different varieties of that attribute (for example if there are 50 courses at a university, N would range from 0-49). Finally, we could then assign these anonymised attributes to the student number held in our Expo Education database, therefore assigning these external attributes to the data profile in our system, like so:

I designed a user-experience wireflow to show the app developers the feature needed I was fortunate to receive guidance from a pro bono business mentor with extensive experience with software development projects. When starting from scratch with no experience, having a helping hand from someone who’s seen many examples of product specifications is a profoundly beneficial and will certainly speed up your progress. Other entrepreneurs looking to build an app quickly through an agency, should definitely consider reaching out to experienced people familiar with software development. Presenting a concise document to the agency was important for me, as it’s comprehensibility aided my efforts to negotiate a fair price for the work; imperative for a start-up with little cash to spend on product development. I enjoyed learning about how to write a product specification, as it opened my eyes to how many different aspects go in to creating software. I read numerous articles before diving in, because I wanted to learn some best practices. This article is one I’d recommend reading before creating a product specification for the first time – it gives the reader a clear development roadmap which can be followed with little previous technical experience.

#2 November 2019

Throughout the second half of November, we’ve placed 105 students across 6 world class conferences in London.

Alongside these efforts, we’ve also been developing a fully integrated mobile and desktop application.

We’re creating an online, data driven career development platform that students can use to find volunteering opportunities at cutting edge conferences.

Heading into December and the New Year, we’re now focusing on getting the app up and running, securing more conferences in the calendar and preparing for a full technology proof of concept to demonstrate the potential of the app we’re building to create unique value for students, events and universities.

See you next month.

#1 October 2019

George Griffiths, founder of Expo Education (R) joins the other 2019 Innovation Award winners at SETsquared Bath’s First Tuesday Networking event.

ADVICE FOR YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS: EMBRACE HONESTY

Looking back over the last 12 months, there’s one thing I wish I learnt earlier about entrepreneurship.

My name’s George, I’m 21 and I’m a BSc Biology graduate from the University of Bath. I grew up in North Wales which sits in the beautiful Snowdonia mountain range and borders the Irish Sea, and despite being a great place to grow up, it’s never really been a thriving hub of professional opportunities. Networking and “who you know” fascinates me, and being able to build relationships is part of my core personality. During my 2nd and 3rd years at university I created a project that helps students get free tickets to world-leading conferences through volunteering. The project has now helped 73 students at the University of Bath gain access to cutting-edge conferences in London, in areas such as artificial intelligence, cyber security, biotechnology and finance.

Bath Students at Elevating Ideas Conference 2018. An event that supports tech start-ups.

Rather serendipitously, we began to take notice of how providing young people with an opportunity to gain instant industry contacts seemed to fulfil a rather large strategic goal for the university; the need to provide all students, regardless of background, with an accessible and impactful opportunity to network with leaders in their field, in order to contribute to providing a great student experience on a level playing field for all student demographics.

Using our traction, in my final year I applied for the University of Bath Innovation Award, where I pitched my idea to create a platform that enables students to attend high-level conferences through volunteering as well as assess the viability of conference volunteering becoming a permanent part of life at universities – and to my elation, we secured an award. This award enables me to spend the next 12 months working full-time on developing an idea that I love, in to an online service-based business. People build businesses, therefore people are important.

Over time, it’s become increasingly clear to me as a young founder that from a start-up standpoint, the more honest you are about yourself, your idea, and the fact you’re someone with no real business experience – the more people will believe in your story and want to help you realise your vision. So, the one thing I wish I learnt about entrepreneurship earlier on is that it’s very likely you won’t have the answers to most of the questions that users, investors and advisors have, and instead of succumbing to the “I can’t do this!” mind-set, it is the very fact that “you don’t know yet” which makes the journey of building a business exciting, and once you learn to draw excitement from that uncontrollable inevitability, every…

1. Sales call

2. Meeting with a mentor

3. Product demonstration

4. Product feedback meeting

5. Brainstorming session

6. Marketing campaign

7. Pretty much everything

…becomes part of a highly enjoyable and productive iteration process of building a business.

Here’s to the next 12 months.

George

Alumni Innovation Award Winner 2019 | Expo Education