BudgetBro October Recap: Progress, Problems & Lessons Learned

October's Recap: Lessons, Wins, and Wakeup Calls.

For the past nine months, our focus has been within one thing, development. October brought BIG changes. Last month introduced new mile stones, new excitement, new people, and new issues (obviously). I'm excited to spend the next few minutes opening up to you about some of our Octobers highlights.

New Faces

We’ve been lucky enough to welcome Nathan onboard in to the BudgetBro family. He’s running marketing and fits right in with his experience and sarcasm. What Nathan has accomplished in 2 weeks makes me realise that I had no chance of doing this myself like I once thought... being humbled in this way is worth its weight in gold. In a strategic move, Nathan is now here in Thailand with us, being together is really fuelling the momentum and I'm lowkey feeling really good about it.

Issues

October opened with difficulties - having to replace one of the dev team. Initially I thought this would add additional time onto the project, time I knew we couldn't really afford to lose, I was also concerned introducing a new member into the dev team at such a late stage would have been problematic, however, I couldn't have been more wrong!

We've also faced many issues with the website, these issues aren't because of usual causes like bugs but issues caused by myself. If you've read my previous blog Crowdfunding: The Founders Perspective you'll already know how good at I am at causing issues, it's kinda my niche. The wording, the placements, everything in the website was decided by me and it ended up being wrong. The amount of hours we've spent correcting this is laughable (well not me, Nathan, I'm no longer trusted lol) but it's all progress. When I look back I see any mistake as a paid lesson, this keeps me at peace with my decisions.

New In-app Addition

Since Nathans approach was anything other than what I expected, I'm now a blogger-boy. With this, Nathan came up with an idea to hold user retention: in app blogs. This isn't just any ordinary in app blog, these blogs can be also published by UGC creators which strengthens the Bro community. Now users can arrive in one area and not only see Bro's Local Picks and Bro's Local Tips, we now have Bro's Blogs.

With The addition of in app blogs, the BudgetBro ecosystem is feeling premium, I can confidently say we're building the future of responsible travel and our overall goals moving forward to implement other ideas set BudgetBro apart drastically compared to any other app in the market. Go Nathan!

Soft Launch on the Crowdfunding

This is one of the most exciting parts of October's recap, so much work has been put into getting to this moment and it finally came. Although it's only a soft-launch it's a mile stone accomplished, remember we're not doing a 100m sprint here, we're running marathons in each country.

Launching did come with its issues: no real vision for people to back. Nathan recommended we redo the crowdfunding page, include a table for visual representation and include perks for small donations. This is exactly what we did and will be completely implemented by tomorrow, Sunday 2nd of November 2025.

If you'd like to see our new layout and potentially even become a Founding Bro take a look around our crowdfunding page. We're currently on 8.7%!

Marketing

More great news, we've started posting on our Instagram and TikTok. Like anything this'll take time to grow and we're happy with taking the long road.

Here's an epic fail for you to hear - we set some random follower goals for Sunday across all platforms:
Instagram - 150 (currently at 88)
TikTok - 100 (currently at 17)
Threads - 50 (currently at 3, 2 of which are me and Nathan 😂)
Facebook - 50 (currently at 2)

So across the board EPIC fails but thats ok, we set these targets amongst a few beers having a laugh, building team moral. I'm sure tomorow when we look at these stats together we'll set more realistic targets... The marketing is live which means one thing, new goals. We've still got a lot going on in development which is obviously super important, as is marketing which is in Nathan's hands. I'll update you in my November blog on how we did moving forward.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I couldn't be happier with October's progression, we've shown resilience at our weakest points and shown our strengths at our strongest. I've been humbled, I've made countless mistakes, I've paid twice for several things because I always get it wrong on the first but this is the definition of a startup and I'm fluffing loving it. See you in Novembers recap!