Homelessness; fast-growth tech; social investment and more – new podcast

Tutora’s Scott Woodley in the Sheffield Live radio studio

Another varied radio show: homelessness; a fast growth tech firm; investment and grant opportunities for businesses and social enterprises and much more. The podcast is below.

Scott Woodley is the co-founder and CEO of Tutora, an online platform connecting people seeking tuition with tutors. The business, which has achieved year on year growth of about 2000% from January 2016 to January 2017, successfully raised £150,000 through an equity crowdfunding raise in 2016 and is now seeking £350,000 in a second raise on Crowdcube.

Scott popped into the Sheffield Live radio studio on on Friday for a chat about Tutora, covering scaling a “sharing economy” business, successful crowdfunding, investment readiness, the challenges overcome to date, and how entrepreneurs might go about finding a co-founder.

Also on this week’s show, Mark Harvey of iD8 Photography talked about a new project, Challenging representations of homelessness. With an event scheduled for 24th February, Mark and project co-founders The Cathedral Archer Project and Bank Street Arts have questioned why visual representations of homelessness so often conform to “a particularly narrow stereotype: the lone individual, living on the streets, dirty, hungry, vulnerable, desperate.”

The radio show also featured updates about social enterprise finance from Big Issue Invest; how businesses can apply for £20,000 to £100,000 from Innovate UK for business projects that use early-stage design activities to help them identify innovation opportunities and generate new ideas; an event about protecting your IP if you are doing business overseas; Doncaster Council’s commitment to “buy local” and much more.

Here’s the podcast:

Timings:

• 0 – 2:09 introductions
• 2:09 – 16:54 interview with Mark Harvey, iD8, discussing homelessness
• 16:54 – 20:43 updates: The Bank of England’s new growth forecasts; impact of Doncaster Council’s Buy Local policy on the local economy
• 20:43 – 35:20 interview with Scott Woodley of Tutora
• 35:20 – end updates about Innovate UK’s design competition (deadline 15 February) with up to 70% of the total project cost available for projects from £20,000 to £100,000; comments from the Treasury Select Committee about Making Tax Digital; an event about how to protect your IP overseas; and a new social investment programme from Big Issue Invest: Impact Loans England, a new £5 million lending scheme aimed at enabling social enterprises to access loan funding of between £20,000 and £150,000.

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