In the end of the course I think you can look at changing markets in a different way.  This is one thing I will take with me from this course. I therefore found it interesting to dig into changing industries and new innovative services.

Kaashyap shared this on Linked in : https://www.olacabs.com/ola-air

He writes “Ola taxi service in India like Uber here. They released a Video on March 31,2015 promoting that they have started the point to point chopper rides from anywhere to everywhere in India.”

I had never heard of this! I really found this interesting since there is a big room for competitors to take advantage of new innovative services like Uber and Airbnb on the market like now. They have changed the industry climate and opens up for innovation.

Do you think they can be a real competitor for taxi-companies like uber?

So how is Uber really positioned? Is there a chance to compete with them? The economy of scale is probably not that high since the fixed costs are allocated to drivers and individuals. The brand and systems are probably the main drivers so it should be a good chance for competition to grow. Maybe these local solutions are the strongest competition since they can customize the idea.

I think it won’t take to long until we see new businesses like this. Maybe with a local touch to it. Hopefully this can kick-start a new era of services that will revolutionize traditional industries like this.

Our group sat down to discuss what may be the most important when writing this Venture Project Paper and one of the things that we all forgot about at first was the inspiration from the recommended articles in this course, some of them are really relevant when writing your business plan, you get a lot ot tips from people about the structure and what is most important when writing.

My favourite articles from this course are:

Guy Kawasaki- The Art of the start – He gives 5 smart start ups tips that are very helpful.

Paul Graham – Start-ups in 13 sentences – He gives 13 notes on what is important when starting a company.

Coleen Debaise– Why you need a Business Plan – It helps you understand why you are doing this Venture Project Paper.

Go check them out and get inspired!

I have been giving feedback and talking with a start up. The start – up name is LUP and you can find them at KTH (Student Inc). They are three guys that started an app with a map in side where you can see loading zones adjacent to the cargo shipping address. I have been working with them before with our student consulting firm called Cane Consulting.

So what we did was giving feedback on what kind of value this would give to people and who their targeted segment should be.

To summarize it you can say that the targeted segment is not everyone it is all the people who works with driving big trucks and deliver (or more likely all delivery companies). They are the targeted segment because they are the once LUP is satisfying or helping with a problem. For the delivery companies using LUP’s app will save them a lot of time to find the right shipping address immediately.

Since Pernilla Rydmark (Internet Foundation in Sweden ) visited us on a lecture I have been obseced whit Crowdfounding and Kickstarter. I have put a lot of time and thinking in what makes some projects more successful then others. What I have realised is that I do not understand a thing why people think the way they do!!

I mean there is a lot crazy and strange projects among the most founded Kickstarter projects. If you go to Kickstarter you can read about the “toplist” but I am going to meansion some of them in this blogpost, just to explain what I mean by“strange and crazy projects” getting a lot of money.

One popular project is the “Exploding Kitten”, Pernilla Rydmark talked about this project and so summarize it is a card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.

Almost a third of all projects are games like WARMACHINE, Ghostbusters, Robotech etc. What’s up with all this gaming? Is it that important?

One question from the exam was to explain what an intrapreneur is. I did not know this question, it most have missed us talking about it in class or any other time someone mentioned intrapreneur instead of entrepreneur…

Therefor I started googling the main differences and things entrepreneurs need to know about intrapreneurship.

While an entrepreneur should see the company as a vision from starting point to end; the intrapreneur is a facet of this broader vision. The intrapreneur works within the company to solve a specific problem. Intrapreneurs are the drivers of innovation within companies.

Like entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs take risks and find more effective ways to accomplish tasks. An intrapreneur is a skilled problem solver that can take on important tasks within a company.

Saved the best for last:

I really liked this course, and as I told you (Serdar) in the beginning I’m recommending it to my friends who study here at KTH. In general, as said before, I really like the layout of the course and I would prefer if more courses were hands on like this one. I really enjoyed the guest lectures, and I thought it was brilliant to take in people of experience on each topic of the course. Of course not all of them were perfect, but I liked how hard you judged the guest speakers and that you spoke your mind after the Sandbox presentation.

I know that you wanted us to get out of our comfort zone and get up off our asses in this course. This I also liked, because you should push yourself to do new things every day. Nevertheless, maybe for the future, this part should have a set deadline, so procrastinators, like myself, do not end up doing them at the last possible minute. Even so, I really liked going to the events, and to be honest I wouldn’t have gone to these if I didn’t have to. And perhaps I’ll go again, especially to Sup46, I got a lot of great connections and I think just going there could lead to something great.

In a way, I also liked that we didn’t get all the information right at the start of the course. Sure, it got a bit stressful sometimes, but it also taught me more about real life issues involved in a venture project. Everything else in this school is so structured, and if you want to work with a venture, it really isn’t. This made me think more critically and therefore I also enjoyed Serdars emphasize on us having to believing in our own opinion.

Even so, I have some suggestions of improvement: I have tried to use Linkedin more and more, but still I missed a lot of course information because (in my opinion) Linkedin has restrictions, such as notifications. Therefore, I would have preferred information being put up on some other site. I cannot really think of a site of my head, as bilda neither is the best. A possible solution could be a Facebook group as this course is so dynamic, but I am not sure that this would agree with everyone.

This course has thought me a lot, probably more than the rest of my courses here at KTH combined, because now I know I want to pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur!

Thank you Serdar!

Hey again guys!

Yesterday I tried Spontano, a Startup from Stockholm, created to be the interphase between customers and events. I got in contact with the company’s founder Ludvig Linse through email. The venture itself is a platform/marketplace for events that haven’t been sold out and therefore have tickets left, which are then offered on the platform for a better price. Like any type of last minute booking sites its target audience is spontaneous, hence the name Spontano. The Website itself targets mostly young active people, therefore the founder was excited to try his new ideas and interphase on me. First we got to try a different website layout, and gave him so pointers why it was good and what was less good.
After this I tried Ludvigs own website which was different in many ways. He wanted me to give him feedback of the customer experience. So what I did was more or less playing around with his sight for 20 minutes and went through all the steps.

And I was impressed. I myself have worked with startups trying to create good working websites, and it always sounds easier than it is. There are always things that the creators haven’t thought about because they are too close to the creation themselves, but in this case I was not able to find any big glitches. It is impressive to have created this in such a short time and I believe that this venture could be very successful if they get its product out there even more.

After trying this I contacted an acquaintance of mine. Who I remembered had created something similar. I did the same for my friend as for Ludvig, I tried his venture as well. It is very similar to Spontano in many ways. That is why it got me thinking of it as I reviewing Spontanos website. It is called Heyeventand it is a platform for events in general. It connects all Facebooks events and enables you to easily find those close to your location. This Startup is the same age as Spontano, but instead the founder, Jonatan Heyman has gotten a lot of traction abroad. The Startup is really successful.

This is also obvious in the customer interaction on the site. You notice right away that the person that wrote the code behind the sight has worked on venture projects before and has created many websites. Here as well, I could not really be of that much of help as I had hoped in the beginning, as the products themselves were already so good. The layout is very modern. The only negative feedback I gave was that the website was a bit to crowed. That it is similar to the new Facebook, too much happening, advertisements everywhere. This compared to a favorite of mine, apples website. I know they cannot reach this completely as Jonatan has a very different product. Nevertheless, I said that he had consider changing the layout a bit earlier and therefore though my feedback on the matter was interesting.

I gave Jonatan as well as Ludvig the feedback about signing up with Facebook. This is just a laze man’s way to solve a coding/interaction problem. I am not a fan of signing up with Facebook, because it only empowers Facebook, no one else earns money or gains anything form this. And it creates a deeper, ‘Big Brother sees you’ issue. All the information that these two sites and many more, give to Facebook is then stored and sold. Nevertheless, I know that many of their customers are lazy and like this feature. So therefore I also understand why their websites carry the feature.

Something that struck me is that both this websites are into delivering events. Spontano those it towards a niche market and HeyEvent towards a broader mass market. It might be beneficial for them both to meet up and discuss merging. I believe this would probably be hard to convince them to do as they have worked alone with their projects, their ‘babies’. Nevertheless, they aren’t really competitors. Hence a merger could empower them both in a growing new market.

https://www.spontano.se/tour

http://heyevent.com/