How StartUp Albania Grant 2024 helped us bring N’Zon online
Every coworking space has a story about how it started. Ours starts with an idea, two co-owners willing to bet on it, and a grant from the StartUp Albania Grant 2024 programme that came right when we needed it most.
We had registered N’Zon Creative Industries in March 2024 and opened our doors a few months later. By mid-2024, the space was up and running, but the digital side was still mostly a wishlist. A coworking space without a proper website is invisible online, and a coworking space without an internal management system runs on goodwill, sticky notes, and overworked memory. Both of those needed to change, and they needed to change quickly.
StartUp Albania Grant 2024 made that possible. Run by the Startup Albania Agency under Law No. 25/2022 on the Support and Development of Startups, the programme is set up specifically for early-stage Albanian businesses with ideas that need a push to become working products. Our project ran from July to December 2024 and focused on three things: building a real online presence, putting in place a basic internal management system, and supporting it all with digital marketing to get the brand out there.
The first deliverable was nzon.al itself. The website became our front door, where members, freelancers, and curious visitors could finally see the space, the philosophy, the services, and the booking options laid out clearly in one place. The second was an internal system to organise reservations, track how the space was actually being used, and coordinate the small things that take up most of the day in a coworking environment. It was a starting version, deliberately kept simple, with the understanding that it would need to grow as the space grew. The third piece, digital marketing, helped us turn the new website into something people could actually find.
None of these were small things. For a business in its first months of operation, they were the difference between running professionally and improvising every morning. Everything we’ve built since, the reservation app, the administrator system, the freelance platform, sits on top of that first foundation.
There was also something less tangible but just as important. Being selected by an external programme meant that someone outside our own team had looked at what we were trying to build and decided it was worth backing. For a young business, that vote of confidence mattered. It meant we weren’t just convincing ourselves anymore.
Thank you to StartUp Albania and the team behind Grant 2024 for backing us in those first months, when the space was open but we were still finding our feet, and for giving us the means to build the digital side of N’Zon properly from the start.
