Howdy! Good evening!

This will be just a quick, pictureless, blog entry, to get this thing going. A lot of other things are happening right now in my life, so the blogging thing will need to be efficient to work out. Anyway, I’m going to dedicate this inaugural post to give some tips and head-ups of things worth looking at. Also, perhaps, a presentation of some sort could be adequate.

In short, I, Erik, am a 23 year old guy studying the Industrial Design Engineering Masters programme on KTH. I’ve been a journalist and illustrator (to some extent, besides the studies) since 2005, and been running my own business since 2008. In 2013 i started my second company, together with some friends, and as of today we’re just about to launch a Kickstarter campaign, independent to this course. (More on that later on.)

Anyway, I’d like to give some tips and head-ups on different things to have a look at the oncoming days. (And today, but that’s a bit late now, though…)

Earlier tonight, of interest to all you (at least remotely) into design, the Swedish Society of Crafts and Design (Svensk Form) held an evening event at Berns in Stockholm. The event was of a japanese type called PechaKucha, including a larger numer of short, 20 min, speeches. The speakers included Sara Lundkvist, designer, nominee Ung Svensk Form 2014/2015, Mathilda Tham, Professor in Design, Linnaeus University and Johan Molin, CEO Falu Rödfärg, to mention a few. There were also free beer, if that interest you more. 🙂

Also opening it’s gates today were the Swedish Furniture Fair at the Stockholm International Fairs and Congress Centre (Stockholmsmässan). The fair exhibits some great scandinavian design, which every so often is a great opportunity for start-up-business inspiration aswell, and will be open until saturday. I’ll try to swing by on friday or saturday.

On thursday, the fifth of February, the Moment fair (the labour market fair of the machine design section of KTH) is to be held in Nymble. The fair will, amongst other companies, include a stand from KTH Innovation, who act as a helping hand to many start-ups. (Also come by and say hi to me, as I will act as the company host for KTH Innovation, and thus have a limited time to attend that day’s lecture. 🙁 )

Next week, on wednesday the eleventh of February, a start-up meeting called Uppstart will be held in the castle of Uppsala (my hometown). Several of my friends (amongst others Fredrik, the chairman of Entrepreneurs Academy) will attend, and so will probably I. And why not some of you? The tickets are free of charge. The train ride, though, takes approximately one hour (one-way).

So, this became a bit longer than I expected. Duh. But nice to get things going at least. I’ll try to write the next entry shorter.

Erik

Here are my concluding reflections on Entrepreneurship from a personal point of view (for more reflections on the course content, see my previous post). What I liked most about this class, and learned most from, is its hands-on approach. That we were encouraged to participate in events, meet guest speakers and to talk to people: to “get out of the building”. The class was mandatory for me, and as I never have seen myself as an entrepreneur I probably would not have chosen to take it if I had the choice last semester – but now I am actually considering choosing the path of entrepreneurship as an option for my career.

I have realized that the role of an entrepreneur fits pretty well with my skills and ambition; I like to be creative, when the pace is high and to see concrete results of my work. I also liked the extreme enthusiasm that many of the entrepreneurs I’ve met have shown, it is an environment that really catches and increases my motivation (although I’ve also found that peoples’/entrepreneurs’ enthusiasm might be a bit too intense and a sect-like from time to time). This is my major takeaway – that entrepreneurship might be a thing for me. What I liked less with this class was the information that at times was a bit contradicting and hard to access. But with all the feedback we’ve given I think this might work better next semester.

To finish: I actually think about events (in this case the picture above) in a slightly different way than before – I often immediately start reflecting on whether the problem/need/delight is a viable business idea. The picture shows users that are clearly interested in the laser pen in a different context than its usual area of application (it is quite unfortunate that these users don’t have any purchasing power of their own – business model innovation would also be needed to make a venture out of this 🙂 ).

As someone who thinks student literature is hideously overpriced, and who has a limited budget for living, I naturally love second-hand student literature. (Who wouldn’t want to save several hundred kronors each semester to be spent on something else useful?). But for me, finding the right second-hand student literature has always been a quite gruesome process – some people never reply the emails that I send them regarding the book and the majority of those that reply have already sold the book.

The payment process is also quite awkward, especailly remembering to get the cash from the ATM and having the right change. The last time I bought a second-hand book, the book costed 350 kr but I had only 3×100-bills and lots of 20-bills.

My idea of a better second-hand literature website for KTH students is based on an improved web-infrastructure for the ones that already exist. Online service payments, payment safety regulations and synching services between your courseplan and your account on this book-platform. There will also be a in-programmed function that removes book as soon as the online service payment or that is done, so people don’t get those irritating emails of “Sorry but it is already sold”.

I collected some feedback from people who are still in university and who do need a lot of expensive school books each semester, like one acquintance who is studying medicine as well as two more at KTH. KTH-students felt relevant as I am first and foremost targeting KTH students.

For the medicine acquitance in Poland, she thought it was quite a good idea and that she would definitely use it, but it also depends very much on the execution. Just as the second “feedbacker” pointed out, there are several such apps started by students that haven’t gained as much momentumn as they had hoped for as such a platform does take a lot of time to gain the wide user-base it needs. Such platforms did not become the main or sole base for second-hand literature, but become “only” a complement to many students. So, execution might be key. Not too mention the fierce competition in this industry…

The third feedbacker pointed out that face-to-face cash payments are not as awkward or probelmatic as it may seem to be. It is actually a good chance to meet up and see if the book is in good condition or not. Therefore, some problems may lay in my proposed process of online payments and sending the book via post or meeting up just for exchanging the book… She did like the idea of synching her course plan with the website, as she finds it quite problematic to search for the relevant books on the often messy sites that currently exist.

I also received a thorough feedback form Danny (thank you! 🙂 ). There was a good point he made, and it was that people will meet face to face anyways and pay in cash instead of online to avoid the transaction fee that I will charge them, leading to reduced revenue streams for me and the website loosing stronghold on one of its main propsitions.

I have also myself come to realize that the (product) supply of this idea depends a lot on the already purchased books that are new. Moreover, there are also many new editions of current books, which would further reduce the supply of  relevant second-hand books, thus reducing the demand. This is surely a downside.

All in all, I am not sure if this is an idea I would like to pursue further. Not sure if it is because I am graduating in less than a year or if…hmm, for any other reason. Although it is feasible, it needs a lot of work and time which I don’t have with graduation approaching. But hey, maybe someone else would like to attempt this 🙂

I would like to share my thoughts concerning the course.

I took this course to discover how great leaders and successful persons like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or any men of this kind did to succeed. And for me the main issue that we have been told so many times is to think if the opportunity is big enough. As you know when starting a new business every entrepreneur should be focused 100% on it. I think it is hard to be really convince and invest ourselves to build a product that you think won’t reach, not everybody, but a major part of the people.

The second part I was expecting for is the idea generation. I wanted also to discover how do these persons made to generate the success we all know. And it is more about inspiration rather than a recipe. I expected that one since if there was a recipe everybody would use it…
But the paper on the organic ideas, the ones than grow when you turn off some filters and you pay attention to what surrounds us, is in my opinion, a great recipe for every future entrepreneurs. For the first assignment, I had trouble to find a good or an OK idea but I realized reading the paper that we should never do that again if we want to create something. Sitting in front of your computer waiting for the solution is the worst thing to do to understand that it is good to have done it at least once. This first assignment helped me for two different purposes: understanding how not to proceed with ideas generation but how to proceed to evaluate the merits of one.
In the same idea the elevator pitch assignment helped also to experience what we should not do when pitching. By seeing others’ and my mistakes I realized how it should be built and most important than an advice I understood why we should do it and why we should do it like this. The two other assignments emphasized the importance of not being alone and the need to share our thoughts. Before I thought that when you had a good idea you should keep it for yourself to avoid anyone from stealing it! It seems quite normal to hide your treasure but in reality it usually brings the opposite effects.

We have been going through many concepts of marketing, supply chain, economics but in my opinion it is not the reason why I think this course is important. The link, between different resources that are used for a new product, interested me more than the specific knowledge of how we use these resources. We can learn that in other courses. To conclude I would like to highlight the importance of the articles and feedbacks from others. Reading these articles and experience the real world is not the key of success but it is a good start to know what we should not do. And I said should because there is no recipe in entrepreneurship.

So after realizing how much work had been put in to this blog, I decided I should contribute some too. Even though the course is more or less over for now, Serdar made me realize that this blog lives on.

Yesterday I had a Skype conference with Mr. Torstensen and we talked a little about their start-up venture Aalberg Audio. We spoke for about 40 minutes about different topics regarding entrepreneurship. I have decided to post the first 8 minutes as a video where there is a brief explaination on what they do and how they got started. For the rest of the 30 minutes I have decided to just sum it up in words, mainly to make this blogpost as informative and brief as possible, but also to save me some time, so please enjoy.

https://vimeo.com/109221692

After the story of how they got started we began to speak about his role as CEO and how he ended up in that position. Rune who is the inventor and had the initial idea was a friend of Aleksander and when they decided to start a venture, Rune knew that his interest lied in the product itself and not so much on the management of the venture. Therefore Aleksander who at the time was studying entrepreneurship at NTNU in Norway joined in as CEO. With an interest for project management and the product idea itself he started to lead on the venture which is now known as Aalberg Audio.

To date they have gone through several prototypes in their five years of existence. We spoke about how that process had been and how he looked back at it in hindsight. The Lean Start-up was something that came up during the conversation and eventhough they did not begin with TLS explicitly in mind, Rune already had that way of working in him, meaning that gathering feedback from the end user (guitarists, like himself) was something that came natural during the development process. They had an iterative design process where each step was one step closer to a finished prototype ready for mass production. In the early stages they would have an engineer to improve and optimize the stability of the very first setup, however, no focus on industrial design at this stage. When they had managed to get the functionality down and it worked more or less like they wanted, they hired an Industrial Designer to make it look good and refined. There were some challenges in regards to how they should design the product (which color to choose, should the controller be visible etc.) given the fact that design is very subjective and especially if you consider how many types of guitar players there are.

This was something I found very interesting given my background as an ID myself, but I can surely agree that they landed on a very nice and clean design that should be able to accomodate their potentialial customers.

We went on to talk about how they had managed to stay alive for 5 years and one of the answers was soft funding, meaning government grants to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. They had received over NOK500000 from various state-owned companies like Innovasjon Norge and others. From the begining and to this day the team had not received a single paycheck from the business yet, so bootstrapping was very familiar. However we did also talk about the transition to entrepreneurship and that they were accustomed to the student life, and its tight budget, when starting out as entrepreneurs. This is something to consider, it might be harder when you have to give away a fixed monthly salary.

Just recently, around 1 month ago, their Indiegogo campaign for crowdfunding ended, however they did not reach their funding goal and had to return what they had managed to gather. I asked how the process will be from here and thoughts about the campaign. The first thing he mentioned which was a very valid point is that it is important to consider, the target segment and their buying behaviour. As it turns out, guitarists are not the kind of people who buy gear without haven tried them out in person first. Most of the guitar players out there carry pride with their equipment and it is something personal that shapes their sound. Therefore, even if the product is very appealing, not enough people bought or funded them based on their webpage, videos and descriptions only. So their next step now will be to partner up with physical retailers and start selling their products in store, where customers get the chance to experience the product before buying, I think this is a great idea.

We spoke a little about their plans of expansion and it turns out that the ideal would be to be born global, meaning that they target several international countries to begin with. This is something we see a lot in software start-ups like for instance Skype and given todays technology it makes it easier and makes more sense. However, funding is a huge factor here, especially since they have a physical product, logistics might be harder to get in order. Therefore they would try to globalize as quick as possible and stepwise considering their financials. This is also known as The Uppsala Model, when you expand your company gradually.

Towards the end we wrapped up with speaking about the journey till now and what he had experienced so far. It turns out that entrepreneurship is all about doing and necessarily knowing all the theory, the theory is there to help, but not an answer for sucess. He pointed out the importance of seeking help from other people with previous experience and knowledge about the game and the fact that things are never the same. Situations and circumstances change all the time, therefore it is important to make decisions based on the situation. Then it suddenly made more sense to me that it is the people around you (contacts, advisory board, network etc.) that will help you the most, and not books.

That’s it for this post and I wish Aleksander and his team the best of luck. I admire their progress and I think the product is really cool.

If you want to get in touch with Aleksander or interested in the product, please check out their website: www.aalbergaudio.com

I hope you enjoyed the read and please feel free to comment!