CPD Perspectives: The Decision I Never Regretted

CPD Perspectives: Three Years In — Part 2 of 4

The first year was noisy. In a good way, mostly.

I was networking hard, joining accelerator groups, talking to anyone who would listen. The energy was high. The customer list was short. The direction was still being found.

But early in that first year, I made one decision that I have never once questioned since.

I decided not to build a VC-ready business.

Not because I didn’t believe in the potential. But because I didn’t want to build something that needed to be enormous to justify its existence.

Show me one thing that works first

I’ll be honest. I get frustrated with founders who set out to build a platform, a community, an ecosystem — for some problem that nobody has quite defined yet. I don’t know how to do that. I’m not sure anyone does, not really. Maybe there’s a way, so I’m happy for them to try, but that’s not for me.

Before you build all of that, just show me you can get one thing to work.

That’s not a lack of vision. It’s how I’ve always built businesses. The vision starts with something that actually works — one real problem, one real solution — and that becomes the stepping stone. Even Facebook started as a way to rate college students. Google started as a better search box. The implications came later. The platform came later. First, one thing worked.

For Open CPD, that one thing was a problem I knew training providers had. They needed a way to issue credentials that meant something — verifiable, professional, affordable — without it taking over their lives. That was the problem. I didn’t need to go any further than that to get started.

The insight that followed

Once I was clear on the problem, something else became obvious.

For this to work for SME training providers, it had to be simple. Not just affordable — simple. No bells and whistles. No feature overload. Just the thing they needed, working cleanly, without requiring a manual or a support call to get started.

That sounds obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious at the time. And it’s the reason the VC track never made sense for us.

The VC model assumes you speculate. You hire developers, build features, expand the product surface — all before you’ve proven that enough people want the core thing. You’re working on steps four through seven before you’ve got steps one through three right. I find that genuinely baffling. Not because ambition is wrong, but because it’s entirely unnecessary.

Yes, Open CPD may have a global TAM worth hundreds of millions. Maybe it does. But the first step to capturing that is still the same as the first step to capturing a small one: get the thing to work, get people using it, then ask them what they actually need next. You don’t know what features matter until real customers tell you. And they can only tell you once they’re using something.

You cannot build a fleet of self-driving cars without a lot of capital upfront. I understand that. Those are different businesses, with different shapes of risk. Open CPD is not that kind of business. Its value is that it does exactly what it needs to do, simply, and nothing more. That’s not a limitation. That’s the product.

That decision — niche over everything — shaped every other choice that followed. It’s the reason we’re still here.

The unexpected discovery

Almost by accident, through LinkedIn, I stumbled into the Open Recognition movement. A global community of educators, technologists, and thinkers who believe credentials should mean something. That learning should be recognised wherever it happens. That the old infrastructure was overdue for reinvention.

I realised Open CPD wasn’t just a certificate platform. It was part of something much bigger.

That realisation led to Vienna — to presenting at the EPIC Conference in front of an international audience who cared about exactly the same questions. No revenue came from it. But credibility did. And in year one, before the product was mature and before the customer list was long, credibility was everything.

By the end of year one, we had our first international customer. From South Africa. Within twelve months of generating that first certificate.

What year one taught me

Choosing a niche isn’t a limitation. It’s a commitment. The clearer you are about who you serve and why, the easier every subsequent decision becomes.

Credibility compounds in ways you can’t predict. Vienna paid dividends in year three that I couldn’t have seen coming in year one.

And sometimes the most important discoveries happen by accident, on LinkedIn, on an idle afternoon, when you’re not looking for them at all.

Next week: Year Two — the unglamorous middle, and why it mattered.

CPD Perspectives is a series exploring accreditation and recognition from every angle. Three Years In is a sub-series following the Open CPD journey — for founders, for training providers, and for anyone building something in a space that matters.