Pivoting with Purpose: The enVibrant Story
Looking Back at Our Footprints
Team Memories
Here are some fun snapshots from back when we met in person as a team to shoot some clips for our M.E.C. roadshow video!
Christine (Team Member)
I’ve enjoyed being part of the enVibrant team (VentureSketch, formerly). I joined ACF in eighth grade, starting with making a study website like Quizlet. I loved how it allowed me to implement my art and coding skills. I decided to continue as a part of the ACF community, and I met my other team members.
Sharing our common interest in art, we started as the VentureSketch team, where people could share their artwork freely. I loved the process of making the website since I got to design the website UI, which required me to consider users’ points of view and use creativity. On the other hand, I found backend parts difficult, especially when I worked with MongoDB and node.js. Moreover, I believe that we could have planned out better before actually building the website to make a stable and unified website. Still, these were all valuable experiences for me.
We pivoted our focus from “artists and NPOs” to “students and environmental NPOs” after forming a relationship with 360.org. To be honest, I was a little sad that we were removing art from the main focus. Nevertheless, I enjoyed brainstorming for a new idea — connecting students to environmental nonprofits. Although art was not a major topic anymore, I still managed to implement my artistic skills while working as a part of enVibrant: creating a promo video, designing the web app prototype, and working on the monthly newsletter.
After becoming enVibrant, we participated in more competitions, which forced me out of my comfort zone. I was capable of presentation aspects, but I was afraid of any Q&A sessions. I feared receiving any unexpected questions and giving “dumb” answers to judges’ questions, affecting our team negatively. Nevertheless, I was able to answer — while going through internal panic — the questions with my best effort, and my team members supported me as well when I struggled. I may still experience anxiety if I participate in another competition and do Q&A, but I’m sure I’ve made a step closer to being a better speaker.
The last several years of my journey as a part of enVibrant (also VentureSketch) is definitely an unforgettable experience in my high school life, and one day, I will be thinking of enVibrant nostalgically — maybe as an entrepreneur or not.
Smera (Team Member)
Being part of enVibrant for the past three years has been a deeply enriching experience. Throughout our journey of developing and expanding enVibrant, I’ve had the opportunity to learn and evolve significantly. The most impactful of these lessons stemmed from challenges we faced as a team.
From the beginning, there were numerous uncertainties surrounding our product’s concept — questions about its viability and whether it was worth pursuing. I was concerned about our ability to execute our idea effectively and whether we were being unrealistically ambitious with our plans.
Participating in various entrepreneurship competitions was a turning point for us. It forced us to address these uncertainties head-on and refine our project. We sought feedback from judges, a crucial aspect of competitions and important for shaping our product. Preparing submissions for entrepreneurship competitions was also a very hectic and challenging process; it was a period when everyone was in a frenzy to compile detailed metrics that effectively communicated our product proposal and made it compelling to judges. Initially, managing all the components of these submissions was challenging, as we discovered gaps in our idea that needed careful deliberation to address. In retrospect, while these times were incredibly stressful, I also had a lot of fun creating all the material, and learned a lot about the iterative nature of entrepreneurship.
Our journey was also guided by invaluable advice from key advisors, who helped us gain clarity on our project’s goals and provided direction on how to achieve them.
Overall, while our journey has had its fair share of challenges, it has been transformative, filled with growth and learning, and I’m so grateful to have gotten this opportunity.
Our Final Prototype Preview (on FIGMA)
Student Modules:
https://www.loom.com/share/0b87c9b5fca540cc9243e3133d6806ba?sid=8b394805-aa04-463a-8800-9fae82e77611
NPO Modules:
https://www.loom.com/share/c9c2d4fbed5648119bdbb5981531ea6d?sid=43617a05-8859-41c7-a3f7-7d8e4a458c7d
Swatilekha (Coach)
I started our journey with team enVibrant (formerly known as VentureSketch) in July 2022, when the team was still working on their previous product. I extend my heartfelt thanks to Coach Jungmin and Coach Winbert, who have built a fantastic team together since its inception with good camaraderie, communication, and community outreach skills!
Right since the beginning of our enVibrant journey, we have had a lot of on-ground entrepreneurial firsthand experiences, be it pivoting midway through our development journey, dealing with disappointment, making difficult team decisions, and real-life pitching to advisors who believed in our product (sometimes, more than we believed in it ourselves), both in person and on Zoom. Throughout the team seasons, the students were steadfast in their determination to work hard and make a difference, be it through working long hours on our social media posts, making clear product flows and bringing them to life through FIGMA, back-to-back advisor meetings, or grinding before the deadlines during competition season.
One of my favourite memories about working with the team is those final hours right before the deadlines, sometimes encompassing four different time zones, like the summer of 2023. There was this fine late evening back in Jan. 2023 when Smera returned home just after her long basketball practice, Christine and Lian from their subject classes, Jinny from her dance lessons, and me after a long morning of meetings. We were on a crunch as the Conrad Innovation round was in less than 2 hours, and we had a LOT to finalise and complete right before the deadline. One of these impact-critical items was getting a team photo, and being an entirely remote team (highly burned out and tired but enthusiastic), we decided to take a Zoom picture then and there. As established by the pretext, it wasn’t the most glamorous or professional picture, but it was still “us” in our natural habitat. We might have been tired, but we were still smiling and laughing over one of the links we had added to the “References” we had added before returning to work.
It was a humbling experience and a pleasure to watch all the team members bloom beautifully into empathetic, thoughtful, confident, and talented individuals and leaders! Authentic leadership comes from making responsible decisions (sustainability-driven), being resilient in the face of failure, and listening to people (namely, your key stakeholders, advisors, and a community that trusts you), and enVibrant breathed that essence in all they worked on. Smera did wonderfully in terms of being the face of the company by speaking up and presenting the product confidently to our advisors. At the same time, Christine took the driver’s seat when it came to designing and bestowing creativity to all our team’s deliverables, including the most stunning promo video in ACF history and our cute T-shirt enVibrant mascot. I cannot wait to witness all the amazing things they achieve together as alum startup team members: empowering themselves for the rest of their high school (and later, college) and mentoring junior startup teams through their past experiences.
It had become my routine to wake up at 5:00 a.m. IST every single Mon. for the class, and looking forward to beginning the week with Christine, Jinny, and Smera, which helped me feel energetic for the rest of the week! Personally, this was the first ACF startup team I led as a Tech and Business Coach, and I learned a lot throughout the process. I wish the team members all the best for their future endeavours! ❤️
☘️ Special Thank You to Our Advisors! ☘️
This wonderful journey wouldn’t have been possible without the wonderful support of all our advisors, who provided us with valuable feedback, insights, and advice to do better. This list is in no way exhaustive, but we would love to dedicate a special thank you and acknowledgement for our following advisors:
- Michael Gibson
- Ahva Sadeghi
- Zach Laberge
- Blake Ruschman
- Ameerah Eaddy
- Amos Langsner
- Tondalaya Shepard
- Hilario Castillo
- Juandro
Thank you for believing in enVibrant’s cause and helping us do better! ❤️
ACF
enVibrant has been the longest-running ACF startup team, going up to 9 seasons in total! Both team members have also been making invaluable contributions to being confident leaders outside their enVibrant class, such as leading the Monthly App Challenge and “ACF Startup Newsletter” teams.
We wish our dear enVibrant team members all the success and fulfilment for the rest of their entrepreneurial journey and their golden future. Keep making the world a more sustainable, kinder, and better place! 🌎