Author Archives: Amir.marandi

As many other have said, this was not a usual academic course where you just need to write down what the lecturer says at the lectures and then go home and memorize stuff for getting good results at the exam.

First of all, I think it was a great idea to invite people from different stages in different companies. Of course some was more interesting than other, but you could snap up something good from every each of the presentations.

Second, I liked how we were forced out of our comfort zones at the lectures and also outside the school. We did activities where you needed to talk, discuss and in a small amount of time cooperate with each other. This made me to socialize and start networking. I also liked the thing with going to two startup meetings. It made me think about networking even more than before and I saw that there are plenty of potential out there for creating great stuff with great people.

Often, we get to know exactly what we need to do in school. Like when you were a kid and you mom and that always told you what to do, you didn’t need to worry about putting up your schedule, because other people were making it for you. This course, was the opposite. It was showing us how the real life works. We won’t have teachers telling us what to do and how to do things if we want to create our own startup. As Serdar mentioned before, you need to listen to yourself and that could be a scary thing to do sometimes. But everyone need to practice on it.

Something that could be improved is the selection of the invited guests. The most interesting guest we had I think was the man from Fyndiq. Because he had gone down that entrepreneurship rode himself and his experiences really touched me. At the same time, it is hard to get that kind of persons to appear. Most of them are pretty busy and might not have the time.

Im now even more enthusiastic about some day becoming a real entrepreneur, with all its good and bad times. I would also like to thank Serdar for the energy and effort he put on the course, and of course all the students.

 

When I was busy with my startup “ListFix”, I came in contact with Ludvig Linse. Both me and Ludvig was developing an app for the entertainment market so of course we knew who the other guy was. Ludvig is one of the founders of Spontano. The startup I choose to help.

Spontano is a digital platform for last minutes tickets to different events. They want to make people “spontaneous”. So why not put the unsold tickets of different events on a platform where spontaneous people can buy in last minute?

This time I wanted to test their web service. So I choose a free event. I tested the whole user experience chain, from how you find a event to order a ticket.

I think they have made great improvements from the Spontano I knew two years ago. The design is user friendly, the navigation is cool and modern and also easy to understand. When you click on an event, you easily find a description of the event, time and place. You choose how many tickets you want to get and then you need to login or register an account. However, people today are getting more and more lazy so its good that you can register easily with your Facebook ID instead of filling a form and then go back to your mail for confirming the sign up.

What I would like them to improve is their list of events. If they could work on to show a list of events that I actually am interested of, then I would get a better feeling of entering Spontanos website. Because right now, there are a lot of different events and most of them are not in my area of interest. So, make a more customized event list for different kind of market segments.

Also, many events are repeating ones. For those kind of events, I would like to see what people who went to this event earlier through Spontano, thought? I would like to see their rating on the event, before I Spontaniously buy a ticket.

Otherwise, I think their business idea is great and I wish them good luck. Ive also sent mail back and forth to them with my suggestions and got positive responses.

Hey Guys,

I went to my second startup meeting at SUP46 the 19th of October. It was a seminar and mingle about “Why developing a Minimal Viable Product is the key to success when you want your company to grow fast”. It was interesting to listen to discussions similar to what Serdar has talked about in the classroom.

I mingled a bit and also met some new people. Always interesting to meet people with different skills and ambitions, because it gives you different goggles to see the world with.

The hard question is though where to draw that line about which product is your MVP. As we have talked before, it is easy to discuss such things in academical matters, but in real life you need to draw the line of where you MVP actually is. Otherwise it could be a game changer, and maybe put you out of the market if your MVP isn’t what the market craves for.

Most of the time when startups are making any product they often focus on doing something new, something innovative. And that is for sure a good thing. But if we just take a step back and analyse the successful companies and what they have done, maby we can use their experience.

Apple, big company. Very popular. Not the best phones, but still making the biggest profit of their cellphones compared to their competitors. There are many reasons why apple have succeeded, but the most important thing they have put a lot of focus on accordingly to me, is that they have created an unnecessary need.

The need of having an iPhone. Totally unnecessary. But still they have put a lot of effort to make it feel like a need for you. They don’t just try to make the best cellphones in the world, they even don’t try to make it the most innovative phone either. Its 2015 and the iPhone is not even waterproof. But they put a lot of energy to make it feel like a need for you, which actually is totally unnecessary.

Right now they have released their apple watch. Very basic watch. If you use it all the time, the battery will die after 4 hours.  Still, people are buying it like smart watches never have been bought before. Because when you have your entire life in your iPhone, many people feel like they need the apple watch for making life easier. Still, totally unnecessary.

That strategy, is something every startup should think about at times. When people feel like they need something, even if its not necessary, they will be a loyal to that product/service. The tricky part is how to make them feel that need.

Hello dear blog,

As my fellow students have written, there was a SUP46 event yesterday ft Atomico. To start with, there was a lot of people at the event. The floor was almost full.

Before I attended to this event, I promised myself to mingle when I arrive, which resulted in a couple of new LinkedIn & Facebook contacts. First I talked to Nikhil. An exchange student from India who had this “open-lab” startup in India which is top rated. Right now, Nikhil is taking his master in KTH at the mechatronics department. We talked a lot and decided to meet for further discussions.

Later on I met Per Bergström, co founder and Product Director of Nova Sweden. Nova is a student talent networking company which brings in the “top students” for connecting them with high status companies. Interesting talking to Per because of his humbleness.

By this time, I had a few beers and continued the mingle. I met Arish. He was developing an “Uber” kind of app for people who wants to “övningsköra”. In Sweden, not everybody has the opportunity to practice driving with someone, and I think this app will be used by many young students who want to take their drivers license.

To make this post short, I will jump to the last person I talked to. It was Alon Kuperman, Vice President at Investments for Atomico. Alon studied business in London, and is originally from Israel. Me and Alon talked about a business idea I had, which he thought was interesting. We also talked about getting investors, and that Atomico just makes A and B investments, and no seed investments. He gave me his visit card and told me to keep in touch with him.

As summary, this kind of events are really good to attend at. Not only for getting connections, but also for practicing your own social skills. At the end, it all comes to how good you are att selling yourself to other people and how good you are at convincing people that YOU are the right person for the job/investment/what ever you need. It can seem weird to just go and talk to people who you have never talked to, but that is necessary.

In most courses, you get specific information on what your project should be about and some information on what you have to do for reaching different grades. What I like about this project is that nothing is given to us. We don’t have any specific “problem” to solve. We have to come up with an business idea by ourselves, we have to agree on that idea as a group and form the project group together.

I think its a great exercise for real life situations. Entrepreneurship is not all about getting a great idea and earn money. This stuff are things all entrepreneurs have to deal with. You need to formate your group. There is no teacher who will tell you what to do and there is no facit.

You could have a great mind, but if you are not able to lead the company of yours, you will not succeed.

Stockholm, 08/09-2015

Today Micael Widell, the co-founder and CPO of online marketplace website Fyndiq held a very interesting lecture at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). I was caught up with his presentation. Not because of his charisma, but more due to the entrepreneurial spirit he was breathing.

His main focus at the presentation was the 6 different phases his startup had made through. Here is some of the notes I took from the presentation:

Diffrent phases when building companies

• Phase 1: Decide to do it
Going in full time is important.

• Phase 2: Find a project and co-founders.

• Phase 3: Get serious
Think big. From PowerPoint to MVP
Finding first investors
Launch!

• Phase 4: Build and iterate product
Launch means nothing, the work starts here
Need for more money
Bold Decision to expand organisation
Lots of spent learning money
Good API +  good Marketing+ Key partnership resulted in traction.

• Phase 5: Early traction
Trying to keep up with growth
Strain on organisation
Paying off technical debt
Putting up processes and workflows
Trying outsourcing of key functions

• Phase 6: Expanding the organisation
Hiring department heads and HR ppl
Find people who reflect founders’ spirit and personality
Shift focus from exit to building great organisation
Founders less and less essential to daily operations

The most interesting phase according to me is phase number 1. Decide to do it. I think that many people out there have had some kind of idea they’ve believed in and wanted to go for. But at some point, we feel insecure. We don’t want to take that last step out of the airplane before free falling. We have our education, job, house and maby family. Risking so much, for something you really can’t forecast the result of, would just be stupid in a rational world.

But the world is not rational, and if we don’t take risks, we won’t achieve anything. With this sentence I don’t mean that one should jump of school, quit his job and sell his apartment for the first idea one thinks will be “it”. But think about how many other great companies there would be today if more people with great ideas just would dare to take that phase 1 step.

/Amir Marandi