The Fall and Rise of NimBees

In 2012, the startup Gloin began to develop a new social mobile application, called BeeFun, allowing users to communicate with each other based on their contextual information, i.e., their history, location, preferences, etc. For two years the company invested a great amount of resources to develop the idea, to specify the business plan and to implement the product. In the last phase, seeking funding to launch the product, Gloin was finalist of the 2013 LaunchPad Denmark Business Plan Cup. The finalists won the access to an acceleration program to get funding and launch their products in Denmark. In this process, some flaws in the idea and in the business plan that endangered the project success were detected. In this paper, we detail the process of developing BeeFun, the major failings, the lessons learnt and how Gloin pivoted to develop a new product called nimBees. A product that is currently getting the attention of medium and large enterprises. In addition, some of the barriers that the promoters of the idea, as researchers, had to overcome are also detailed.