For full transparency, my name is Nick Norvell, and this is my Linkedin profile – I’m the guy you can chase in the event you want to make sure your invoice gets paid on time, or any other question or concern you may have.

As I mention in the video, and as you can see from my profile, I’ve been almost the archetypal nomad working on projects around the world, mainly for international aid donors such as the EU and UN agencies.

I live in Barcelona and the UK, when I am not away consulting. I love sports (hiking, tennis, table tennis, volleyball, cycling to name a few), music (guitar, harmonica), and I am pretty average at all of them. I love film, languages and pretty much anything that enriches the mind!

In 2001, Nick had just returned from serving as a volunteer on the USAID funded project in Chipata, Zambia where he was placed with an NGO called the Cooperative League of the USA (CLUSA) which helped create a company for over 10,000 farmers.

Back in the UK, and blissfully unaware how the world of international aid consulting worked, Nick sent off 1000s of emails to apply for jobs and projects. After responding to a tender with Lux Development for a livestock project in Mongolia, to his surprise he won and hastily established a company Hubconsult Ltd in 2002. It went on to provide TA to other bilateral donors and was part of an EU Framework consortium under Lot 1 for Agriculture and Rural Development. It was not until 2013 that Hubconsult was formed in HK, which is the company still in use today. Recently this has evolved into the current Incub8 service to broaden the scope to include fundraising and crowdfunding and tools to grow your business. The future will see all of these tools being strengthened for your benefit you as well as your beneficiaries and clients.

We feel there is so much which needs to be done in the fundraising and crowdfunding space. (This is never more true with the funding cuts sweeping across the aid sector and its ramifications for NGOs, relief, environmental agencies.)

The sort of users who join our Incub8 community are motivated to make the world a better place in their everyday work. That is why we bring together these services under Incub8.

Many business incubators provide advice and support. Ours does that too but we believe the real value is providing the essential practical tools such as funding, invoicing and tools to grow your business or project. In developing Incub8, we didn’t want tools to be restricted to just developed countries.

Incub8’s uniqueness is its accessibility and flexibility to those in some of the most remote and poorly-served parts of the world. As well as some of the most poorly served people of the world.

Incub8 helps bypass the complexity of the company registration process in countries where it is too burdensome and expensive, or for people who have been through forced migration and disasters or are stateless. Finding all the right paperwork for us lucky ones can already be challenging enough! But for many people, having a fully-maintained company in the cloud is far more attractive than the hassle of managing your own company, when all you want to do is invoice a client or bid on a project.

This is an exciting path for our community in so many ways. We feel our solution is applicable to so many sectors – some we have indicated on these pages, but there are many more…and you can help us find them.

Wouldn’t you like to join us??