Hello everyone!

This morning we (Josephine, Rosita, Rasam, Shiva, Mussa, Vishal, Menno) sold coffee at the KTH campus at the V-building. We first thought that this would not be a great success. However, it turned out to be a real niche in the market, because there is no coffee store nearby in this building! Some people even told us that we were heroes! 😉

Our goal/strategy was to make as much profit as possible. We tried to do this by keeping our overall costs low and selling coffee at a location where we are the only supplier. This worked out perfectly.
We decided to sell instant coffee (pretty cheap) together with a cookie. Additionally we bought milk and cups. In the end the variable costs were 125,- SEK. Our fixed costs were 0,- SEK, because we did not made any capital investment and there were no labor costs. So we managed to keep our overall costs low.
Since the costs were so low, we were able to sell the coffee against a competitive price of 10,- SEK per coffee. Next to the coffee people got a free cookie.
We promoted our “coffee company” by contacting the people directly and by hanging promotion signs around the building.

Lets have a look at some micro economic stuff:
– Total costs: 125,- SEK
– Total revenue: 365,- SEK
– Total profit: 240,- SEK
– Total output: 36 coffees sold
– Average costs: 125/36 = 3.47 SEK
– Price: 10,- SEK
– Profit mark-up per coffee: 10-3.47 = 6,53 SEK

So, if you want to make money on a Monday morning when everybody is desperately looking for coffee, go to the V-building and sell it.

Thanks for reading!

Menno Koens

Tyler Crowley has spent years working with hundreds of early-stage startup founders to refine their ideas, determine which problems to solve and develop compelling pitches.

This afternoon event in collaboration with Stockholm Tech fest and in collaboration with #SUP46 (Startup People of Sweden) he held his first pitch masterclass in Stockholm.

The session was about the specific techniques that get the audience attention and make them stay engaged and remember every detail about your pitch.

The event was really intriguing and provided several useful tools to be successful in your own pitches. So in this blog post I’m going to give some example of these tools and maybe forward some knowledge from Crowley.

• First he mentioned that is all about the audience, not you! And the first 30 seconds is the most important, to be able to create the wanted connection with the audience.
• Be really clear about ”What is your end goal?”
• Be Memorable and Likable. Not just one of them, you have to be both to be successful in your pitch.
• Create a character and a drama. This will make you more memorable with the crowd.
• Try to take your data and information and narrow it down to simple fractions. For example if you show numbers, don´t use thousands, millions etc., instead use 2/3, percentage or smaller numbers.
• Don´t forget the ”wow” moment. It you get the crown to say ”Wow!” you have made an success, because that ”Wow”-feeling is a psychological factor, a person will not say ”wow” if it doesn’t feel the ”wow”.
• Try to focus your pitch on how the customers feel when they use my product.

With the last two bullet points you can see that we make our decision emotionally, so try to connect and engage the customer with your product. Make the pitch about them and in the end make them choose you.

For the course Business Development Lab a team decided to create an app for finding bars, pubs or other places with cheap beers. They aim to engage mostly students, since they have a more adjusted budget so they would require this kind of information. One member of the team asked for my opinion about the app so I decided to blog about it as well.

The app is called Near to beer, and is still on the development stage. They have a testing version for android that is the one I tried. This version has the basic functionality: a maps showing all the places where beer is bein sold in stockholm, and three buttons for selecting three different price filters (30, 40 and 50 kronor). For it uses google maps showing the places with a beer icon with different colors according to the price of the beer in it. This map can be zoomed, rotated, etc. in the same way than the google maps app. Once the icon is pressed it will show a small section with info about the place: the name, description,the distance from your own position, etc.

The second screen is the feedback one and it can be accesed directly pressing the orange button in the upper- left corner. This makes a whole new screen appear with a small form por sending feedback, suggestion or prices updates.

As we can see, the app is pretty basic (for now at least) but it complies with its objective that is showing the places with the cheapest prices. Considering this I analized it, using the Nielsen’s 10 general principles for interaction design, for highlighting some components that could be changed/improved for better interaction with the user.

The first thing I noticed it is that the filters can’t be chosen just by itselves. When selecting the 50 kronor places the app automatically choses the 30, 40 and 50 kronor too, showing basically every place. This can fullfill the whole screen making it more difficult to read the map. Even though, I like the way of having buttons instead of slider as a filter (as many other apps have) because makes the design more minimalistic.

Another problem (or feature) it is when someone wants to see the description of a place, it is necessary to drag the information screen to the top of the display and keep it there for showing the information, making it more difficult to read if the text is long. Just pressing the icon once for showing the information would be a better option.

In general terms the usability and speed are good, and the app it is intuitive and easy to understand. However I would like to give some suggestions as well for improving the experience. In the description doesn’t appear the opening times neither a star rating or something similar. That info could be get from google places, foursquare, etc. and it would help a lot at the moment of chosing. In the same line I would add a filter for the time, allowing the user to see the places that are open at the exact same moment or during or the times of the day. In this way the user doesn’t need to check every place and its description for knowing if the place is open. Another interesting feature would be to search just in the place being showed in the map, because the user could not be planning on seeing the places on the whole map and just be interested in certain areas.

For concluding, i would say the app looks really interesting and has potential for becoming something bigger. Maybe it would be necessary to add some extra features like discounts for frequent users, the option of checking the most crowded places or the ones more chosen, connection to social networks, etc. for turning the system from one use app into a multiple use one user thus becoming a more interesting business for developing.

Two days ago I went to Mavshack’s hackaton at their headquarter. There was one thinbg that me and Mavshack had in common, hackathons were new to both of us. Oftentimes, hackathons have felt a bit intimidating for me – as you have to show off your capabilities and deliver. The fear of not contributing enough has been one of the reasons for not going to hackathons for me. I am not sure if people agree with me, but sometimes it is difficult knowing yourself and what you can do since most things we learn as students are theoretical skills.

However, I have to say that my first hackthon impression was really good. Mavshack was an unknown company to me, but it turned out to be more intruiging than I imagined. Their main business area was within movie and live stream subscriptions (similar to Netflix) for Indian and Filipino viewers, with appr. 1.2 million sold subscriptions in 2016. Another part that made the event very fun, was that all the participants were from our Business Development Lab class. We spent a couple of hours designing and developing two concepts:
– Local content based on trends (my team)
– AR advertisement strategies

My Mavshack team

My reflections on Business Development Lab

The goal of the Business Development Lab course is to create a business from scratch during the spring semester. I had high expectations for the course because I am an entrepreneur at heart and was hoping to finally get so far that one of my startups would actually get customers. Before this course I have been working seriously on three other startups. Visibike, the latest startup I founded is still going strong, albeit without me. I didn’t find a way to work on that startup during this course because of so many team members outside of KTH. Last year I have also had the opportunity to attend a similar course in Aalto University called CSE-E5888 Design Project, that course was perhaps more focused on the value proposition instead of business model but in the end we also had a demo gala with a pitching competition. I will now tell you what I learned during the journey of the NearToBeer team.

I’m a fan of the lean startup philosophy. Always when constructing a pitch or filling in the business model canvas I start questioning what parts I can really prove. One challenge with validation is that most of the time the results will not be promising. You often get a lukewarm response to your ideas, so it can be hard to decide which ideas to pursue.

We did a lot of validation and pivots during the first month trying to find painful problems in many user segments and markets. We tried to solve the housing situation in Stockholm, that proved too difficult. We were looking at problems of immigrants and to make a long story short the ones with money didn’t have any problems worth solving and those without money have a lot of problems, but we won’t get any money from them. It is always a good learning experience when you get out of the building and interact with potential customers, but we may have overdone it because of hesitating to move forward. It was apparent on week 9 that beer prices are too high in Stockholm and non-locals like ourselves didn’t know the bars we could get an affordable beer and have a good time.

On week 12 we finally settled on the idea of creating an app that lists the cheapest beers nearby. We had already spent 2 months just to come up with what to do so it was high time to start creating our product. This is where we got lucky and I got to experience again how important a good mentor is.

Hannes, Thomas and Johan are the people behind Beers Under Thirty, an app that lists the cheapest beers in Stockholm. We didn’t know of their existence before Michelle Maffei told us about their app and I reached out to them. They were very helpful for our team. They gave us access to their bar listings and gave us free reins to start developing our service under a new brand. We developed the app from scratch and worked on the business model, which proved to be the most challenging part. With the help of our mentors we got the app up to standard and their feedback helped us shape the NearToBeer brand and thinking about our go-to-market strategy. I have similar experiences from my earlier startups. Getting a good mentor or coach may be the only way to get focus and direction for inexperienced entrepreneurs. That’s why organisations like KTH Innovation and Aalto Entrepreneurship Society are crucial in creating innovation hubs. New entrepreneurs need guidance and very often a firm push to the right direction.

A good personal lesson I got was how hard it is to work in a large team. I think the greatest challenge is to activate every member and let them have something meaningful to do. Maybe a mistake our team made was not to give clear roles and responsibilities for each team member. With the available workforce we should have been able to get much further and even avoiding the crunch time towards the end of the course. Clear milestones and firmer deadlines would have been good for avoiding the last crunch time. We were not the only ones struggling with time management. It was apparent that many teams were very tired during the final pitches. We created milestones, but they were slipping all the time. We should have been able to release the app a month earlier and spent the rest of the time growing our user base and get in touch with potential customers and partners.

Working for almost half a year on a project proved a good reminder how hard entrepreneurship really is and how much work it takes to successfully launch a business. It’s funny in a way that the pitches in the 48 hour workshop during the autumn semester were not that different from the pitches we saw during the final presentations in Business Development lab. Only a few teams could really boast with their traction after 6 months of work. Congratulations to the Breasy team for the funding they secured!

The reason I think why entrepreneurship is hard because of the total freedom you have. You can feel that the company needs to branch out in thousands of directions to cover everything. I feel that focus is the single biggest issue for me as an entrepreneur. I don’t know what is the best course of action and what should be prioritized. That is why step-by-step approaches are great. I think this is a good time to start comparing my experiences between Aalto university’s Design Project course and KTH’s Business Development Lab.

The Design Project was arranged in two weeks sprints. The sprint started with a 2-hour lecture on Monday that gave us the theoretical framework and usually a guest speaker that gave us the best practical tips to get started. Every team also got a biweekly meeting with their mentor from the course’s industry partners, they did invest their time in us because mentoring is a good recruitment channel. Every sprint had a set of deliverables that every team posted to shared folders before the end of sprint pitches. The pitch sessions were held on the last Friday of the sprint. The format was a five minute pitch per team and 2 minutes for feedback and questions. So the pitches were over pretty fast and after a short break the one-to-one feedback sessions begun. The teams rotated every five minutes through the teachers, mentors and a peer feedback station where the teams had the chance to guide each other. It was a very structured way of working towards a minimum viable product and it suited my way of working very well. I also think the regular deadlines with clear goals helped keeping the teams on track. You can judge the end results for yourself by looking at the final pitches of the Design Project course at http://areena.yle.fi/1-3480439. Curio, Uutiskylpy and my pitch for team Fura won the competition and got a grade raise.

I think Business Development Lab gives a lot more freedom to the teams. Some teams will thrive because they are able to work on the aspects that really matters to them. Then again some teams will fail because they get overwhelmed with all the things that needs to be done. I think the Beta Submission in Business Development Lab was the wake up call for many teams. Talking with most of the teams they all thought they did a poor beta submission. But after that failure the rebound effect was strong and every team had something worth showing in the final pitches. The course compendium had homework listed for every lecture, but because there was no imperative to submit anything the homework was mostly ignored on my part. So my recommendation for the next year would be to increase the amount of deliverables, at the very least adding an Alpha submission. I would also like to have more pitching in the course. Several final pitches didn’t get their point across and had unrealistic projections. For many teams it was the first real pitch in the course and I’m sure that the next iteration would have been significantly better. Pitching will improve your communication skills, but I also think that crafting and giving a pitch is a lot better way to poke holes in your idea than filling a business model canvas.

I will continue working on NearToBeer as a hobby project that may become something bigger in the future. The first step is to keep on polishing the app and introducing more user interaction. That is something I enjoy doing because I find coding a good way to relax and it makes me happy to think that the app will create value to its users. I’m also betting that the technological expertise I gain by working on the project will prove useful for whatever future ventures I will pursue. So I didn’t yet manage to get customers for my startup as I had hoped for in the beginning, but I still feel the course was well worth the effort.