StartUp Albania Grant 2024: Where It All Began

Every coworking space has a story about how it started. Ours begins with an idea, two co-owners willing to bet on it, and a grant from the StartUp Albania Grant 2024 programme that came exactly when we needed it most. We registered N’Zon Creative Industries in March 2024 and opened our doors a few months later. By mid-2024, the space was already up and running, but the digital side was still mostly a wishlist. A coworking space without a proper website is almost invisible online, while one without an internal management system often relies on goodwill, notes, and memory to keep things moving. Both needed to change, and they needed to change quickly. StartUp Albania Grant 2024 helped make that possible. Run by the Startup Albania Agency under Law No. 25/2022 on the Support and Development of Startups, the programme was created to support early-stage Albanian businesses with ideas that need the right push to become working products and services. Our project ran from July to December 2024 and focused on three main areas: building a strong online presence, creating a basic internal management system, and supporting both through digital marketing. The first deliverable was backup.nzon.space itself. The website became our digital front door, giving members, freelancers, and curious visitors a clear place to discover the space, our philosophy, services, and booking options. The second deliverable was an internal system designed to organise reservations, track how the space was being used, and coordinate many of the small operational tasks that make up the day-to-day management of a coworking environment. It was intentionally built as a simple first version, with the understanding that it would evolve as N’Zon grew. The third part of the project was digital marketing, which helped turn the new website into something people could actually discover and engage with. For a business in its first months of operation, none of these were small improvements. They represented the difference between improvising every day and starting to operate in a more structured and professional way. Everything we have built since then — from the reservation app and administrator system to the freelance platform — stands on top of that first digital foundation. There was also something less tangible, but equally 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 that it was worth supporting. For a young business, that vote of confidence mattered. It meant we were no longer the only ones believing in the idea. Thank you to StartUp Albania and the team behind Grant 2024 for supporting us during those first months, when the space was already open but we were still finding our footing, and for giving us the opportunity to build the digital side of N’Zon properly from the very beginning