CPD Perspectives: The Year Nothing Glamorous Happened

CPD Perspectives: Three Years In — Part 3 of 4

Year two had no breakthrough moment. No single thing I can point to and say: that’s when it changed.

What year two had was work. Mostly the kind that doesn’t make a good story.

We tried pay-per-click. We tried agencies. We ran campaigns that half-worked and some that didn’t work at all. We switched systems more than once, looking for the marketing engine that would finally click. None of them clicked. Each one taught us something, but none of it was the answer.

I’ve heard founders describe years like this as the trough of disillusionment. That’s probably too dramatic. It wasn’t despair. It was more like a sustained lesson in the difference between doing things and building things.

The one thing that actually worked

The best outcome of year two had nothing to do with marketing campaigns or technical infrastructure. It was a person.

Sinem joined as our customer service lead. She turned out to be exactly what that role needed — someone who genuinely cares about the providers using the platform, who brings warmth and precision in equal measure, and who is still very much part of the team today.

I’ve learned, across three years, that the right people matter more than the right tools. Sinem in year two is the clearest example of that.

Building something that could actually scale

Alongside the marketing experiments, year two was when we did the serious infrastructure work.

We completed a major cloud migration — moving the entire platform to AWS and, in the process, passing the AWS Well-Architected Review. That’s not a vanity milestone. It’s a structured technical assessment that forced us to examine every layer of how the system was built: reliability, security, performance, cost, and operational excellence. Coming out the other side with a clean bill of health meant we weren’t just scalable in theory. We had the architecture to prove it.

That same year, we started to see real traction in Africa. Providers on the continent were finding us, signing up, and using the platform in ways that confirmed something important: the problem we solve isn’t a UK problem. It’s a global one. The infrastructure we’d just built was going to need to carry more than we’d originally imagined.

Showing up where it matters

Year two also took me to Paris — to the EPIC Open Recognition Conference, the same community I’d connected with in Vienna the year before. Open CPD sits squarely within the open recognition movement: the belief that credentials should be transparent, portable, and meaningful wherever they’re used. Showing up in those rooms, as a small UK startup, and being taken seriously as a voice in that conversation — that mattered. It still does.

What year two taught me

Not every year has a headline. Some years are about keeping the commitment to the niche, doing the unglamorous work, and building the foundations that make everything else possible.

The infrastructure we built in year two — technical and relational — is what year three was able to stand on.

Next week: Year Three — when it finally became clear that this is a company.