I am humbled that you reacted really positively to the TimePledge.org idea I wrote about just a few weeks ago on LinkedIn.

Here’s what has happened since then:

(1) We have a logo and a website (which I hope will be live by the time you read this post)

(2) We have some 20+ coaches who said would support the pledges. It means 20 high skilled professionals willing to give their time for free to help young entrepreneurs with their projects

(3) We have the first TWO pledges going, and this is how we played: I am speaking at the African FinTech Forum in Kampala, and we (FinTechstage) also run a meeting with a team of EAC representatives in the context of our program for Africa.

I took this opportunity to organise a “Pitch Your Idea” session and one of the local incubators, OutBox, stepped forward to help and host it. My business partner, Lazaro Campos, will be there with me as well. Since Nairobi is only an hour away, I decided to stop by before Kampala to organise the same session there.

Another incubator, the Garage, in Killimani, had also wanted to make this their event in collaboration with TimePledge, using their channels to promote and host the session.

(4) Meaghan Johnson, one of my co-hosts at Breaking Banks EUROPE (stay tuned on this) is going to Lagos to speak at a KPMG event on 24-27 November. She reached out and asked if we can organise a Timepledge session there on UX/UI design. The best date for this will be 25th November.

I would love to top this up with a pitch and/or investment workshop in Lagos. For this, we need a sponsor to get me and/or eventually another coach there. The sponsor gets a free private session on innovation and I might also present my book which is coming out this week, at the event.

It’s so amazing how fast this idea picked up.  The mission is clear: we want to build the largest free coaching platform for African entrepreneurs, to start with. Then, once we fine-tune the model, we will expand.

Click here to subscribe to the Time Pledge “Pitch Your Startup” event and here to subscribe to workshop on “How to deliver a pitch investors can’t turn down.”

Matteo.