Investor Update: 7 Quickfires including Funding
Here’s a quickfire update for you, sharing some of the most interesting happenings at Agility Scales. Read on to find out about:
- Crowdfunding Results (1)
- Recent Progress (4) — authoring, app, enterprise, pilots
- What’s Coming (3) — face to face, extending beyond Android, revenue streams
Crowdfunding Results
Our agile crowdfunding round closed 31 March, 2019. We raised a total of Euro 289,950 thanks to 63 investors from 15 countries across 3 continents.
This brings our total investors to around 450. It’s an impressive global group of people and organizations that care about agility and are inspired to grow agile mindsets from the bottom up!
We learned a lot from this experiment to try a more agile funding process, but I’ll save details for a separate post. Our CEO Jurgen Appelo is continuing with ‘just-in-time’ funding for Agility Scales (explained here) so the team can forge ahead on our mission.
Progress
4 areas that saw progress over the past few weeks include:
Authoring Portal (screenshot above), Database Migration
We have a working version of the Mind Settlers authoring portal (CMS) available to authors and players. This begins to “make it easy and fast to contribute your own content — and ensure a continual flow of new ideas.” We also are in the process of migrating content from Contentful to Cloud Firestore, which will provide more flexibility and growth paths in the future.
App Releases
Since the progress outlined here a month ago, we’ve also:
- Delivered Team functionality — shared content Collections
- Restored the community activity stream and expanded it to include ratings/reviews
- Improved the user experience on tablet devices
- Adjusted Guides step by step layout and removed unused step page views
Enterprise Licenses
This month we have a commitment for a 10-user enterprise annual license for the MindSettlers app. While we are not actively targeting enterprise accounts at the moment, we will communicate this possibility more widely to our community, in case others want to acquire Mind Settlers for groups.
Pilots Underway
Three group pilots for scrum masters and agile coaches continue to run. They have been invaluable for us, generating insights, feature requests and app improvements.
The Shiftup initiative (sparked by Jurgen’s new book) is trialing our MindSettlers platform to facilitate group activities during its innovation workshops. The feedback generated so far has fueled our improvements for ‘live training’ scenarios.
Remember our Q2 Roadmap? You’ll note that progress aligns with our intentions…
Coming Up
Team face-to-face meeting
As a remote team we are very productive, but periodically face-to-face meetings are necessary. We’ll meet in Paris from 22–23 April — a key investor Wemanity is based there, and Jurgen Appelo, our CEO, has a Shiftup Workshop there that same week.
Extending beyond Android
The team will hone strategy, finish planning for platform developments through July, and make a decision on how we will expand app functionality beyond Android. (Yes, the time has finally come! I know many have been hanging in there waiting — thank you.)
New Potential Revenue Streams
If you’ve followed our communication over the last few months, you’ll know we’ve been exploring potential group and training/learning scenarios for the Mind Settlers platform (see here and here and here). New potential value propositions and revenue streams are coming into focus as a result. After the Face-to-face meeting, we’ll communicate what this looks like and the implications for the Mind Settlers platform.
Thanks (for Making it this Far)
The more I write, the more I want to share with you! I’d better save the remainder of happenings and ideas for another day, as this is hardly a quickfire update, is it? I trust you found interesting stuff here regardless.
Finally: we all start out with the same 24 hours in a day. Thank you for making it possible for the Agility Scales team to spend many of these hours building the Mind Settlers agile adventure platform to support teams and individual’s agile growth and capacity to innovate.
Cheers,
Paula C. on behalf of the Agility Scales Team
