A few words about methodology and education, which according to the evaluator is missing. That’s one of my favourite topics of discussion. In short, our methodology is that we never use one single method, but always blend a combination of the ones that have demonstrated their efficiency. Moreover, we have created our own methodology: gamepreneurship. One of the mistakes that we made was to hire a university professor for the first pilot. We let her go because the university approach goes against everything that the game is about. Our users don’t have 5 years to waste on theory. They come here to get tangible results in days or weeks. Not years. They build a website instead of learning about building a website. They get their first users instead of learning about getting them. They buy their first crypto instead of learning about crypto. They get shit done instead of learning about 10 best ways to shit. How’s that for a methodology? No wonder that rigid organizations don't like it.
This was not to complain, but just to demonstrate our journey and to tell ours users to be ready that people will bet against them because they are just a nobody (even after 3 years of running a legaltech startup with a massive R&D component and a proprietary tech) and because innovative and creative people don’t follow the crowd, they lead.
A data-informed serious role-playing game for future female entrepreneurs that is fun to play just doesn’t fit into a box. Add a tokenized internal economics, 24/7 availability, certification of all skills on the go and the government doesn’t believe that you can do it.
It’s not all that bad, we did get support on the way. Malta Enterprise liked Fe/male Switch and we added it into the business plan for our Maltese R&D base. Moreover, we got a substantial grant from a private company and a few individuals made smaller donations. On top of that we got some money to create a Bias Score algorithm, based on the data that the users accumulate by creating content in the game. By the way, the users will co-own that data. But that’s a different story.
So, here’s to all of you who:
- never worked for Google, Facebook or any other company with a big name,
- don’t have a fancy (often useless) degree or any degree at all and you learned everything by yourself,
- don’t want to do what your university taught you so you learned a new profession and are good at it,
- don’t have any previous startup experience,
- don’t have deep technical skills but “no code” sounds fascinating,
I’m warning you, you will piss a lot of people off with your contrarian approach, but you have to stay true to yourself and in the long run that’s what matters: if you no longer love doing what you do because you have to do it a certain way, you will quit. If founders are not happy in their work, the startup will fail.
And another important point that I want to make and I am integrating this into the game: feedback from an anonymous person is a pile of crap. Feedback in general is rather useless as it gives you no chance to explain yourself. Applications, homework, reports and whatenot cannot be handed in without a mandatory follow-up where both parties sit down to discuss all the misunderstandings and to request more information.
More information to follow soon. Meanwhile sign up for the newsletter not to miss the updates.