About us.
CES is a business design studio that brings new propositions and ventures to market. We specialise in de-risking new offerings by validating key assumptions around desirability and viability to solve real customer problems while delivering exceptional experiences.
We partner with all businesses from early-stage concepts through to established brands while also running and launching our own in-house ventures.
How we do it.
Portfolio.
Making student discounts more rewarding.
What’s Happening On Campus (WHOC) was the studios first internal venture back in 2019. The app was a student discount loyalty platform that focused on increasing spending in local independent retailers by creating a collective loyalty program across all parters on the platform.
WHOC was acquired by a private international induvidiaul back in 2022.
Taxi marketplace, connecting smart riders with all taxi services via one app.
Ridenear is the ride hailing aggregator to compare & book from multiple taxi providers in real-time, in one app with partnered with companies like Bolt, Gett, Jyrney, I’way, Gazoop and more.
We supported RideNear through the ideation, validation and GTM process until launch in mid 2022. Ridenear is currently active in London and can be downloaded from the apple & google app store.
Community governed venture studio building Web3 products.
Launchboard.studio was built by combining the growing trends of community lead growth and the rise in the venture studio models. All each project built through Launchboard, a % is given back to the community contributing members’ shares in the upside. The platform is currently operating a closed beta with over 200+ curated members of Web3 founders, builders and investors.
* Merged with Tessellion Ventures in 2023
Exploring Web3 opportunities for UK's leading football e‒Commerce brand
Collaborating with one of the UK’s leading sport e‒Commerce brands we focused on exploring the opportunity of “How can we leverage our current assets to benefit from the emerging Web3 trends?”
We developed multiple ideas and validation experiments to define what the propositional would look like alongside defining an initial business model.
The startup is currently being built and incubated internally in stealth mode by an externally hired executive.
Chris Starns