Summary: Q1 2025

Committing full-time to the journey which had been consuming evenings and weekends for nearly two years felt like finally removing the shackles. This first quarter has been a mix of excitement, discovery, uncertainty, and clarity.

Product Clarity

The most impactful milestone this quarter was strategic. We defined what stable looks like. Not unusual with startups, with Peerdweb we'd been fixed in the product development cycle of 'just one more feature'. The next feature was always the one that would elevate the product, that would tick more boxes, open more doors. And analysing, designing, and building new features is our bread and butter. But new features burn time, add complexity, and, despite confidence, don't necessarily move the needle.

The product roadmap became clearer: features can wait, stable is now. Identifying this early in our transition to full-time really unlocked us; this was no longer business-as-usual as we'd known it, we were now in the business of business.

Connections & Confirmations

With the Peerdweb product roadmap stabilised, we could focus on building the right connections. Thanks to our partnership with Evalueserve IP and R&D, we'd previously engaged in a mix of research calls and sales demos with a dozen large companies such as BASF, Nokia, Wella, Hewlett Packard, and Omya. These engagements were highly valuable and affirmative, and the signals reinforced our confidence that we were on the correct path. But nearly all concluded with us doubling down on our 'just one more feature' mindset.

Now, with a clearer decisive product vision, we could approach conversations with a more strategic focus—our roadmap and our narrative. We could ask ourselves: what do we want to get out of this? What are we trying to achieve? We knew we had to change our researchful, approval-seeking approach to a more direct sales approach, along with defining a tighter target audience segment.

Events and Networking

As founders, we specialise in design, build, deliver—that's our 10,000-hours-done comfort-zone stuff. What we hadn't fully experienced was the business of business. Bookkeeping, marketing, advertising, funding applications, insurance, networking, pitching; the previously-thought-secondary bits that don't show up in our Git commit history!

Serendipity had MENTA and BIPC events on our doorstep early in the new year aimed at startups and IP, double tick. Those events provided a leg up understanding on the business functions which had quickly become our primary concerns. The BIPC IP Day in February was particularly valuable for us, with the relatively new IP-backed lending use case a direct map to our product. There's one or two features that would really round off the use case within Peerdweb, which we'll action straight away roadmap, of course.

Grant Pitching

Pitching for, and securing, the UEA "Grow It" Grant was a fantastic highlight this quarter. Receiving the grant from a respected institution was a great vote of confidence for us—not to mention great experience for us to time-box pitch to a panel of judges and field questions.

We're also through to the finals of Tech Nation Rising Stars East of England set, researched a dozen other grant opportunities in both the tech startup and web3 / blockchain spaces, and tried our luck reaching out to Steven Bartlett and Daniel Priestley.

Looking Ahead

Q1 was formative—we consciously prioritised events and networking, which have immediately helped reshape our thinking. Personally, without them, I suspect I may have defaulted back to what I know best: coding. Instead, I learned to ask myself: what's the strategic value? How can we get a resolution without writing a single line of code?

Q2 is shaping up to be another busy quarter.