I’m Ben, a co-founder and CMO of the BESA member Studentnomic, and attended Bett for the second time in January.

This year the team and I were visiting, as opposed to Bett 2017 when we exhibited with Bett Futures. We’re all students too.

The first year we went to Bett, we threw ourselves at the deep end in exhibiting. Doing so was such an amazing experience; it definitely helped set us up and kickstarted the amazing backing and network we have today. A highlight of us exhibiting was defiantly the high profile meetings with influential people, such as Bob Geldof and the Singaporean High Commissioner, Her Excellency Ms Foo Chi Hsia. This helped us set our own personal goals and really drove us forward with a new sense of motivation. The High Commissioner really loved the idea of us doing so much so early on in life. As for Mr Geldof, who could ever forget his own motivational speech, “just do it, just f*****g do it!”.

We always stay after the visitors have gone, to attend some of the events and networking that take place in the evenings of Bett – and this year was no different. The EDUCATE launch was a personal highlight of mine. Hosted by the Debate Mate organisation and EdTech Exchange, it was a lot of fun to watch a live debate take place and hear so many different points of view. The networking that went on afterwards was particularly helpful as it allowed us to introduce different people we knew to one another, and catch up with some great people from Bett 2017.

EDUCATE’s launch event was especially meaningful to us as we are one of the EdTech companies that have been chosen to take part. We will look to researching how integration is the key to the future of EdTech and the ways that we can better integrate with different products and services to ensure everyone receives a better level of education.

Being able to meet other start-ups reminded us of how amazing it is to see small companies and start-ups working together and discussing how they can benefit each other. A company that recently caught our eye was Cikumas because they’re in the same boat as us, looking at incorporating a lot of innovation in a short space of time.

If you feel your company could potentially collaborate with us and would be interested in exploring ways to work together, then don’t hesitate to get in contact with me via email.