And… we’re off!

First up, some good news: we’ve filled our first investment round, hitting our target of £50k! Thank you to the new investors who came on board, and to our existing investors who increased their support. It’s no small thing for a new business to achieve, and we are so proud to have raised the money to build the first version of the Encounter app. Further investment rounds will follow so that we can add more features, reach more users and connect more people to nature, so if you’re keen to join us on our journey, watch this space.

Since our last update we’ve been deep in the process of choosing a team of developers to create the app, which has also meant focusing in on (and carefully costing) our feature list. It’s very rare – and often a bad idea – for an app to launch with a complete set of bells and whistles; usually, a launch version is created with enough under the bonnet to be beautiful and useful, and more features are added as people ask for them, and when the budget allows. Encounter is no different, and it’s been a tough but really worthwhile process working with developers to whittle down our ‘must-haves’ from the ‘nice-to-haves’ and adding the ‘not-yets’ to a wishlist of future updates.

As part of that process we’ve had to choose between developers who said yes to everything on our list (very tempting!) and those who said no to some of it (or ‘not yet’, anyway). I went into the process wanting to work with the people who promised us the most, but soon began to feel cautious – and in the end we chose a team who had carefully costed everything and showed us why we could have X but not Y. There would have been nothing worse than getting into an ambitious build and then finding ourselves out of money because some aspect of it turned out to be much fiddlier than anyone had thought, and hopefully we have avoided that possibility. Now the exciting bit starts: the actual build!