Dancing alone & starting a movement… again…
Back in 2005 I had an idea as to how we could help students save money and help business promote themselves to the student market. Together with my brother we launched a company that has grown to employ over 30 people and has helped millions of students over that time. The Beans Group today comprises of Student Beans & Voxburner.
Over the last 11 years I’ve learnt a huge amount over the coming weeks and months my aim is to share some of those lessons. Very quickly into the journey of Student Beans there was the realisation that we needed to do two important things. Firstly building connections with businesses and secondly build a following amongst students, both of which needed to happen simultaneously. The classic chicken and egg scenario, we needed deals to engage students and without students and an audience why would companies work with us.
Looking back this video related to the journey well. Initially it was myself dancing alone, then Michael my brother joined me, whilst we grew up usually telling me my ideas weren’t very good however this discount website he liked and with him on board he named it Student Beans. With Baked beans being a staple diet for students, the idea of Student Beans becoming a staple website for student life.
We grew our following reaching millions of people and there’s barely a day that goes by when someone I meet doesn’t have a frame of reference for Student Beans. What Michael and the whole team are doing is amazing -but what made me leave day to day to stand up and start dancing alone again?
11 years is a long time, running and growing a company vrs setting one up are two very different things. Deep down I had this idea that kept coming up that I couldn’t ignore.
In 2015 I spent a huge amount of time travelling, some for work and some pleasure speaking at events from Madrid to Athens, San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas often finding myself being delayed at airports or eating alone with time to spare.
Whilst I was in San Francisco Uber Pooling I kept meeting amazing people and it got me thinking more and more why do I need a car share to make these types of connections. What if there was a way to help people connect more easily, a platform based on location, giving people context for who’s near by to enable connections that would other wise be missed. It was this and a number of other stories that opened up the idea behind my latest venture… Causr.
Causr is a location based App helping professionals connect on the go. Our vision is to create millions of meaningful connections for people nearby, all around the world everyday. Download the App to see who’s nearby and start connecting today. Now available on the Apple App Store.
