Change — a brave new phase for Yena

I’ve wanted to write this for a while but it’s been tough to know where to start.

The truth is, when you’re 6+ years into a ‘startup’ it’s sometimes difficult to know if you’re at the beginning, the middle or the end. I’ve questioned that a lot over the past couple of years. Yes, years. You’ll find no overnight stories here. This is the story — and the plan — of a company with big ambitions, being founded atop of solid foundations, built over years of struggle, hustle, stress and success — all balanced (most of the time) for good measure.

Changes? What changes?!

As with any startup — especially a bootstrapped one — change is constant. However, some days there are bigger changes than normal. Sometimes, those days all come at once. For us, that’s right now.

As of January, Yena won’t be ‘Yena’ anymore. We’re adopting a new name.

Most of the people I’ve spoken to about this have questioned why, after spending so long building a reputation around a brand that has become quite strong, would we change that?

Well, for those who aren’t aware, our name began as an acronym — from our origins as a network for young entrepreneurs but we removed that age-focus a long time ago. We’ve since been supporting businesses of stages, sizes, sectors and geographies, in line with our mission to democratise high-quality entrepreneurial support for all.

Yet, people still unwittingly miseducate others about what we do and who we do it for. So, call this a line in the sand, if you will. We’re making a stand with a new brand to show the world who we really are and what we’re really about.

Not only is the name changing though, we’re also repositioning our whole business.

One of the superpowers of a founder is to see the business as no other person can. I can see the past, the present and the future of what we’re trying to build. Trying to communicate all of that though in an efficient-yet-effective way that makes you sound inspirational, rather than delusional, is hard. For now, I’ve taken to breaking it down into phases, which seems to be working so here’s an overview of phase 1 (the past), 2 (the immediate future), and 3 (the vision).

Phase 1 — everything until now.

What started as one meet-up, eventually grew into a community of people connecting at events all across the globe. Along the way people often asked what we sold and, while we had nothing to sell initially, we began to create something to help them & their business; thus our product was born.

What we built was a ‘startup ecosystem by subscription’ powered by an accidental global community. It’s essentially it’s everything you’d hope to get in an accelerator, without needing to fit any particular criteria, live in a certain city or apply countless times for a human to judge if you’re worthy or not. What we’ve built is needed. People use it and they value it. But no one has ever googled “startup ecosystem by subscription” which is annoying. So it’s time to change.

Phase 2–2021 and beyond.

The big changes coming are powered by the recognition that we know what we do is much needed and valued, yet hard to communicate. We need to simplify it so that people could see where it might fit in their own personal journeys & experiences.

As such, we’re renaming, rebranding and repositioning.

The new name will be announced shortly (stay tuned!) to help us renounce ourselves to the world and give ourselves a fresh chance at a first impression. Everyone who’s been on the journey with us until now will be duly thanked for being so, and we’ll be calling on a lot of earned social currency to spread the word.

We’ll take up the position of ‘business benefits by subscription’ powered by a ‘global community of creators’. A proposition that’s hopefully far easier to understand and tell friends about.

We see our place in the market — in the short term at least — as a brave competitor to the outdated trade bodies and membership organisations of old, such as the FSB in the UK, for example. While we appreciate the work they do and have done for decades, we think the world needs a better experience, with a more contemporary brand, and a product offering to match, without the geographical borders that limit the support currently on offer.

One key factor for my excitement about our new direction is that until now, our go-to-market strategy has been purely via our well known meet-ups and word of mouth. It works but it isn’t the most effective. We’ve mostly been limited by resource and budget in marketing in new ways but over the past 6 months, while testing our ‘business benefits’ narrative, we’ve realised that other communities such as universities, coworking spaces, venture fund portfolios, etc are all trying to provide a value add for their cohorts. They realise how much of a task it is in building a comprehensive package of benefits and want to use us to power their offering to save time & money. This is great news for us too as partnering with such organisations can allow us to support a huge number more people, much faster while generating revenue along the way.

Phase 3 — the big vision.

While I don’t want to give the whole game away in one long essay of a blog post and so will save the majority of this for another day, I should give you a glimpse, at least, into what I’d like the future of this business to become…

Simply put — starting a business is the only job in the world you don’t get onboarded to. That is insane. Running a business is one of the biggest learning curves you can experience and the failure rate is unacceptably high. We want to fix that.

As a gamer, whenever I load up any game, I am told how to play it and essentially how to win. That should be the business experience too. I believe it can be. Doing so will take [more] time and capital, but we’ll get there. With your help along the way. The plans I have for this are actually quite mature but as per the ‘sounding delusional’ comment earlier, I’ll save those for now and talk about them in a later piece.

I think that’s probably enough for this first post in a bid to become ultimate transparent, showing you everything about the business and the considerations that go on within. I’ve got some more absolute bombshells to drop soon and will be sharing all our metrics too, so keep an eye out for those.

In the meantime, thanks for reading and stay tuned ;)

P.s. If you’d prefer these kinds of musings/updates in video format, let me know? I’m trying to figure out the best way to bring this transparency to the world!

Thanks for reading!

- Ash