ImpulCera, here we come!

We have not given a lot of news lately. In fact, after we submitted our application for ImpulCera, we decided to wait and not be carried away. One can be convinced to have the best idea ever, it’s always a good thing to step back for a while. We didn’t do that for Seedcamp with TagSpot, and when the result came in, it was like a penalty.

This time, we were not carried away, and the jury just came back: we’re ON! Next step: we’ll meet people from SAW-B next Friday to know more about the Impulcera process.

If I got it right, the next step will be to prepare a file for the “Feasability Grant” jury. And they will give this grant based on 3 criteria being entrepreneurship qualities of the team (that’s us!), innovation and social impact of our project.

The easiest part will be innovation. betRway is innovative on at least 3 very distinct aspects. First on our objective, that is to define and demonstrate the efficiency of a new economic system that puts at the same level all the forms of energy that you can inject into or get return from a business, be it financial, work, skills, experience, etc. Then on the means: ease, clarify and accelerate information exchange and collaboration between contributors and entrepreneurs thanks to the Internet. Finally on our values, since innovation and progress will underlie the objectives of all the projects promoted on betRway. Now how is that not innovation everywhere?

Entrepreneurship qualities of our team will be harder to demonstrate with sound logical arguments. They will have to see that in us.

About the social impact of the project, it all depends on what you mean by “social” and “impact”. Our primary objective is the creation of a new investment model, and our bet is that this economic system will encourage people to create innovative companies that put human beings at the center of their concerns. From that point of view, the biggest social impact will probably be the most indirect and the toughest to evaluate with numbers. On the other hand, “social” also means “community”, “participative”, “collaborative”. And by creating a real social network around contributors and entrepreneurs, this social impact will be more obvious. In addition to that, considering the fact that many promising startup projects never see the light of day, and that tens if not hundreds of job opportunities are then killed in the egg because of a missing investment alternative, our social impact gets closer to the definition we all have in mind. But I think what really matters to me is the opportunity to raise consciences, to insufflate a new motivation into all the participants of our platform, a desire to learn, to progress, to evolve, to understand, to take risks, to take matters into our own hands… instead of being satisfied with a choice between possession and suffering.

So there we are. A first step is behind us, and if we get that “Feasibility Grant”, we will be able to devote ourselves to finding answer to the numerous questions still on hold:

• How can betRway map itself onto Belgian law?
• How will the investment and retribution system work, so that it remains both simple AND fair?
• How to communicate with potential entrepreneurs and contributors in order to bootstrap the network and make it grow in a balanced and controlled fashion?
• How to set up a technical solution that is both flexible, performant, easy to use and extensible to ease and encourage collaboration?

As you can see, the “what” is not really a problem at this stage. The feasibility study will make it possible for us to clarify the “how to”, and we hope that many of you will be involved in this process.

I can’t wait for next Friday.

Defining a New Economy

There seems to be two kinds of reactions to the ongoing crisis. Those who are entangled in the current system can’t think of anything else but the usual recipies. They talk about growth, credit, consumption, employment. They want to reboost those in some ways, lowering VAT and interest rates, removing enterprise taxes. Nothing very revolutionary. And so far, the success of those measures is mitigated at the very least.

Others think (like we do) that the system is broken beyond repair and that it is time to rethink the way our economy works. In my humble opinion, we can’t rely on banks or even the government to initiate this movement. We have to innovate, stop undergoing the crisis and consider it as an amazing alternative to build something better, a new economy. And it’s not only an idealistic dream anymore: smart growth, social economy, more and more people are thinking about what values and principles could become the foundation of a fairer economy.

As you may know if you’ve read our objective, we would also like to create a new economy and we believe that progress and innovation should be at its heart because they have led us this far, have created enormous opportunity for employment, education, and they have the potential to buy us some time to focus on real-life concerns like hunger, diseases, environment and so on.

Two Languages and a New Opportunity

Who said that news watch is not important? This morning, Eric listened to the radio and heard of a new Belgian initiative aiming at encouraging entrepreneurship around what they call “social economy”. The initiative is called ImpulCERA and presents itself as a set of grants given to innovative projects who fulfill the definition of social economy, that is to say:

1. The finality of the project must be to serve the collectivity or the members, rather than to make profits
2. The project must be autonomously managed, outside of the frame of public or traditional private companies
3. The decision process must be democratic
4. Individuals and work must be favored over capital and revenue sharing

As you can see, these criterias have numerous similarities with our values. In fact, our initiative looks a lot like theirs, except we’re adding the notion of a web-based marketplace and the concept of collective micro-investment (or “crowdfunding” as they call it). So we will present a file for this grant, even though our project is somehow atypical since we propose the creation of a meta-structure to facilitate enterprise creation. But all this notion of social economy resonates too much with our vision, and we cannot let this go. And more importantly, the support of their structure can be a great asset to set up ours faster, to add some credit to it, and this grant would allow us to free up some time to work on it 100%.

For the record, since we had to think in French to fill in our application form, et since we notived that some of our supporters would rather use Moliere’s language, we decided to translate this blog in 2 languages and to publish all our content in both English and French. Why keep English? you might ask. Well, simply because we allow ourselves to dream of the globalization of our initiative, and because communicating in a language understandable by most people (no, I won’t learn Chinese) is a form of transparency. So French-speaking friends, let’s hear your comments.

Hello New World!

This project started with a post on my blog titled “There’s gotta be a better way“. A better way to turn your ideas into real products. A better way to invest money in stuff that really matters.

The next step was to find a name, because even though it doesn’t seem that important, it’s still necessary to identify many things related to a project: email addresses, a website, package names in the code, and so on. And finding a name is hard nowadays: it has to be easy to remember, convey a message, it must sound good but more importantly, the .com domain should be available. But with domain parking rotting the whole place, I was missing ideas. Until I realized the power of this “better way” concept. betterway.com was taken, so I added a little bit of Web 2.0 lingua in there and BOOM! betrway.com

After that, I needed to find a quick and generic way to implement the concept. I wanted to avoid waiting weeks or months for a custom app to be ready. I’ve done that before, and it’s frutstrating. I figured the main thing we needed was a way to rapidly create communication channels for individual projects. The most common form of communication channel is a blog, so Eric pointed me to Wordpress Multi-Users as a way to create one blog for each project, with a common user base. And since we both run our personal blogs on Wordpress, it was rather easy.

So that’s where real things happen now: welcome to betrway.com, the next-generation marketplace for software startups and collective investments. Now there IS a betrway!