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The world is a big place, but we’re starting to make it smaller.

Since starting Yena as a community, movement, whatever you’d call it before it was a business, I’ve wondered just how far we could grow this thing. Originally, my albeit naive suspicion was that the problems I was solving were local ones, but the reality is that people all over the world experience the challenges of loneliness, cost, learning curve and general camaraderie when starting & growing a business.

So as we started to grow throughout the UK, the question arose: What if we could do this on a global scale?

The thought of that was rather exciting – not only because it was a great box to tick, but for a few reasons:

  1. Yena is famously (well, to me at least) a very bootstrapped business. We do a lot with not a lot, and are doing more now thanks to our sponsors & members powering our growth (big shoutout to Agility in Mind and 9 Spokes). Being able to achieve global growth of a brand from a humble start in Bristol would help us lead by example and show that it really is possible to grow a business from the proverbial (or actual) cupboard under the stairs.
  2. Doing business on a global scale is difficult. Barriers that humans have built make it harder for us to connect as a species. What if we could break down these barriers as a community at the very least, creating personal relationships across countries and continents? What positive effects would that have on startups who want to grow far & fast?
  3. With our social aim of making it more accessible for anyone, anywhere to start & grow a business being core to our mission, expanding to new territories allows us to start to deliver on this whether you’re in Tottenham or Timbuktu.

 

It’s no surprise that these new regions hold new challenges for us, such as ensuring that our content & benefits are accessible to all, all over the globe, so there’s an ironic shift happening that means hyper-local content will take a less prominent focus now, moving to more of a global stage. We hope to bring this back in due course but it will likely need to be delivered in an automated way. We’ll keep you posted on this over the coming months/years.

 

For now though, here’s the big announcement: 

We’re launching in Melbourne (Australia)!

…and we could be more excited!

The meetup will be hosted by Michelle Akhidenor, the founder of The Peers Project, who will also be our headline event sponsor.

Based in or around Melbourne & want to attend? Sign up here.

Expansion isn’t over yet though… watch this space! 😉