Author Archives: Nielsweggeman

I don’t exactly remember what I expected to learn at the beginning of this course, but what I do remember is that I was initially very enthusiastic. It was great how we were forced into a different mindset right away, by the assignment of having to sell coffee on the street. I was very ambitious and was trying to think of as effective as possible ways to get people to buy our coffee. That however went wrong when I didn’t undertake action early. We didn’t sell at the firework event because we were indecisive and postponed our group meeting on how we were going to sell the coffee. Our loss. In the end I think we made the second most money, after another team which actually performed awesome because they were thinking out of the box. That’s the way to go.

Pitching your ideas:

The pitching for me was very interesting as well. I knew how to do it, I had done it before. I had even started writing on my pitch the same day we got the assignment. Where I went wrong however was the fact that I only started practising the pitch I had in my mind (an idea in which I still believe but for which I hadn’t had the motivation to figure out what I really wanted to do with it) the evening before the actual pitch was supposed to be held. I’ve been there before, I know that it requires more practice to tell a convincing story and I know that you sometimes are lucky when the mood is right and the pitch goes well anyway, even without the proper preparation. This was however not one of those days; I forgot my story and didn’t manage to bring up my arguments for why this idea should become a success. My loss, this pitching is still a work in progress.

Doing a business sim:

The business simulation for me was not that interesting. It is intriguing to see how a business flows and grows within a bigger market context, but I feel that the application of what we saw that happened in this simulation is not applicable to the level of start-up I am currently in.

Talking about your ideas:

The going to events was by far the most inspiring thing that I have done in this course. This has showed me how talking to other entrepreneurs will get you great feedback, motivation and connections that can be very helpful later on in the process of your work. On multiple occasions I ended up unexpectedly having connections that caused and helped me in taking next steps for my business ideas (see my previous posts, links provided at the bottom of this one). Some sort of natural workflow and progress arises when you keep meeting up with other (actually) interested partners, a flow that would be difficult to sustain on your own.

Developing a business plan and a startup:

Of course, it is motivating and educative to see what others are doing, but the most important thing that I’ve learned is how going out and talking to people gets you the best possible feedback and insight on your pitching skills and idea in the most direct and instantaneous way possible. I’m aware though that the strength here is in quantity, for as people are still people: they are emotional beings and the opinion they display on your storytelling and idea are as subjective as can be. Therefor, the only way to get valuable feedback is to get as much as possible. Soon enough you’ll start seeing the patterns. There is however more to it. Also very important is to keep focussing on the people you are developing for. They’ll be very happy to see the progress in your project and to give feedback in order to make sure that the product you are developing fits their needs best. Be aware however not to merely listen to their demands but keep your brain involved or you might miss out on the best possible out-of-the-box solutions.

On the progress of my idea:

I started of this course with an idea of producing 3D printed lampshades. It felt like a hobby project with potential for growing and I was interested in looking further into that. I was already aware of that this could be a very lean start-up, as I have all the required tools at my disposal in my home universities working space and in the worst case scenario I would have to buy a €300,- 3d-printer myself and start from there. Because of that I have not been looking for that much information on Venture Capital and other investment options yet. That might however be very useful soon and will hopefully also be covered in the courses I am taking next period. By talking to more experienced entrepreneurs I got a better idea on in what directions I could take this product and make it more scalable, by for example building a platform that would allow people to order their own designs. We ultimately decided to even look further into this idea for our Final Venture Project, which has provided me with valuable information on the scale at which customers might be interested in these products. Both through these entrepreneurial feedback sessions and the user research done for the Final Venture Project I now know what my different options are and have a better grasp on where I could take the idea. However, I do not like the idea of working on this product for the next few years; I believe the market is not big and interesting enough for that. Instead, based on the great advice of one of my team members, it might be a very good idea to just stick with the designs that I have now, develop those a little bit further and sell the products online as if they were a side project; it’s easy for me to produce them and earn some extra money with it, without having to put in my entire body and soul.

To sum up my lessons learned:

What this course has taught me is the basics of what Entrepreneurship entails and the main topics concerned with it. I have a better notion on how to go through developing a project, getting funding for it and bringing it to the market. I see the value of going to start-up events and meeting and talking to experts on the subject, as it empowers you to take steps in your personal and professional development and I am still doing that right now (and will keep doing that in the future, also when I’m back home in the Netherlands.) I learned by both doing and watching on many occasions what good elements are for using in pitching an idea and I have learned the immense value of talking about your plans with others, because they might have valuable experience or a different point of view. An especially valuable insight on this aspect is the value of practicing storytelling and pitching realtime to others. Also, I am more aware now on how to get proper feedback from both professionals as potential users and plan to use this a lot in the future. I tested and looked into my personal Venture Idea and ultimately figured that there is a potential, albeit not that big and that I’m not actually that interested in fully developing this. Instead my plan is to keep this project going as a side project and instead focus more intently on the development of several software ideas that I have been very eager to start working on.

My posts throughout this course:

And likely more will follow ;)!

Procrastinate no more

KTH innovation: a potential road to success

Spontaneous nights out are the best ones.

To start-up your week

A Sequel and a Shout-Out:

 

This Wednesday the magical story on CityLights continued: I had the follow-up meeting with Zaid and Lisa, about which I talked in a previous post (you can read that here).  After I had reached out to them on Facebook they proposed to meet at a beautiful place called Mosebacke in Södermalm. Apart from the gorgeous view we had a more in depth conversation on their past as retailers, on our ambitions for the future and on the options for bringing CityLights* to the market.

1. Outsource the retail to parties like them, the benefit being that we don’t have to worry about marketing and finding the right target groups, as well as benefiting from their years of experience.
2. Do the retail all by ourself, the benefit being that all the profit stays within our own reach, the downside being that we don’t have any experience in marketing.
3. Or doing a bit of both.

*A prototype for CityLights was already produced and tested. Currently we’re reviewing what the best business strategy would be.

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To round up, a little shout-out to all of you: it is just plain awesome to have a group of likeminded individuals like this. It is refreshing, it is empowering and it motivates you to take the next steps in your business. I would love to have an active network like this surrounding me, to talk about our ideas and projects, motivate each other, share information and valuable knowledge. Maybe I’ll find that at SUP46 – I don’t know, I haven’t really experienced that place yet. But if I don’t find it there, I am really looking forward to creating that network myself and if you feel like you want to continue the kind of lifestyle being promoted during this course, let me know! You can reach me via Facebook, LinkedIn, or email. To be continued…

At the beginning of this course I had a problem: I didn’t have a clue on where to look for start up events. The solution, however turned out to be very simple: just by asking and tagging along with friends from the course I rolled into a lot of different startup events! And I love it. This week alone I attended two successive events organised by STHLM Tech on Monday & Tuesday and could have gone to more of them if it were not so that this is also a busy time at university.

Kevin Armbruster (from Sound Hub) told me about this startup event going on in the Hilton Hotel in Södermalm (STHLM Tech Meet Up, about which already a lot of blogposts have been written). Hastily taking the subway to location I was just in time to see three pitches receiving obliterating feedback on their performance, Dragon’s Den-style. This night must have been very educative for both these companies as well as for the attentive listener, since the companies promoting their ideas (albeit good ideas) made some very unprofessional mistakes in the way they presented themselves. Short summary of the lessons learned:

• First of all: have a product? SHOW IT!
• If mere showing doesn’t suffice, never assume that your audience understands what you’re talking about.
• Make sure you have a clear idea of what you are offering
• Make sure to have a clear explanation of what you are offering.
• Always think twice about the name you chose for your product.

After the pitches we decided to stick around and talk a bit more to the other attendants – good new habit. This allowed us to get feedback on our pitches for our own venture ideas as well as meet some other interesting people: two co-founders from Trayce.io and a VC investor from Vancouver. Furthermore we got word that the day thereafter there would be a startup event at SUP46 (I was very eager to go there after the stories I had heard), which I attended very shortly.

On a regular Wednesday night after a day of hard work, it was six ‘o clock in the evening and I was on my way home. As I was walking down the street towards the Tekniska Högskolan Subway station I realised that I actually didn’t feel like going home yet at all. That’s when I realised that I had completely forgotten about the Start Up Bar event that our teacher Serdar Temiz had warned us about.

So, instead of going home I decided to go the other way and grab the train to where the action was: Scandic Continental, a hotel situated right next to T-centralen. On the 8th floor this hotel has The Capital, a luxury rooftop bar (free entrance!) where tonight’s Start Up Bar event was taking place. The event had a very nice but professional ambiance; it was clear to see that this was not an average wednesday night.

But after the two colleagues from the Entrepreneurship course I had been talking to about their venture idea’s left, the real magic happened. I had been standing alone for no more 10 seconds before two enthusiastic young entrepreneurs came up to me: Zaid Jarges and Lisa Rosén, asking me what I was going to start my business in.

• Now I am going to interrupt my post here for a second: for those of you who don’t know yet, I am currently working on the development of CityLights, an early phase startup focussing on customisable and on-demand produced lamps through the use of 3D-printing. Also, I had a sticker on my chest saying that I was thinking about starting my own company—

And believe it or not: turns out that Zaid and Lisa were both online retailers specialised in the sales of interior products, more specifically lamps. Apparently they saw potential in the proposal of CityLights and after an elaborate and energetic discussion of how I could go about realising this idea we decided to grab a beer next week and see how we could do for each other . To be continued!

Attending payed off! With our project group (Frederik, Wesley, Safia, Nadia and I) we attended a lecture organised by the Nobel Nightcap (SNNC) on innovation. Håkan Borg and Daniel Carlsson told us about KTH innovation, a university based organisation that provides early start up coaching entirely for free. KTH recognises the fact that employees and students are in a valuable position to make new discoveries and doesn’t want to capitalise on that. The opposite is true: in order to stimulate future development based on these insights, they allow the inventors to retain their intellectual property. This agreement is called the Professors’ Privilege. And because there is this desire of KTH associates to further develop their ideas, there is also the free coaching service by KTH innovation that helps making these ideas reality. No equity, just good promotion for the support and quality that KTH provides.

On a different note: after the lecture I grasped my opportunity to speak to Håkan (who has experience as a IP lawyer) about how to further develop CityLights. He told me that KTH innovation is there for the very young ideas like these to help figure out whether there is a market for them and if so help them on the way to success. They have the experience in house to help you (in a bit of a soft money way) to realise the future you are dreaming of. An arrangement I feel I could only dream of ;)! If you’d also be interested to find out more on this, check out their website: KTH innovation.

When I started my studies, I sincerely believed I could prove the world wrong on this common consensus: that it’s impossible to do many things at the same time, without compromising in quality. Naive as I was, I have been taking on project after project, never saying “no” to an opportunity when I thought it would contribute to either my personal or career development. Now, three years later, I find myself struggling to fit everything I want to do in a day and rarely, if ever manage to achieve that level of satisfaction I imagined years ago.

These difficulties can actually be attributed to a number of bad habits. Of course I am a perfectionist and a procrastinator (duh, cliche). But these habits of the mind can be countered if one knows to use the right tools. Last week, I got some valuable new insights to help with this during a lunch lecture called Great Habits, Great Students. In this lecture, Björn Liljeqvist shared a clever, three phase learning strategy that should make you a better student, a better entrepreneur – heck, maybe even a better human being if you gave it the chance. Although his talk was aimed primarily at studying, I think these lessons can be useful in every aspect of our daily lives and am therefor sharing them with you in this post.

The key three phases of his model are Before, During & After, words connected to a set of habits that will help you to study, work and live a much more efficient life.

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Before you start your day at work, at school, or whatever you do, prepare yourself (± 20 minutes). There are two things you should to do: make a planning for today or the days to come and prepare yourself for class. You can do that by looking at the literature before going to your lectures that day, by looking at old exams, googling the subject or by just going through your agenda if its not a day at school. Think of it as planting a seed: it will help you to relate better to whatever is happening during the day.

A typical example of what happens if you don’t do this is when the lecturer introduces a new and difficult topic: people who didn’t prepare will be caught off guard and you will hear questions like these: “Is this topic going to be on the test? Do I really have to know all this?”. Coming to lectures prepared will give you the peace of mind to really take in what is being told and it’s been proven that people learn much better when they are not stressing all over.

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During your day there are often millions of little distractions that keep you from doing the things you set out to do. Don’t worry, we all have it and it is a very human thing. A clever way to deal with this problem, helping you to learn, work and live more efficiently is to use the Timebox Technique. It is as simple as it sounds: set a certain time for yourself to work on a project (e.g. 25 minutes) and say a loud and clear NO to everything distracting you. I find this very useful, as it helps me to distinct between all my everyday tasks and spread them throughout the day! The key to success here is to have a lot of short sessions, not one long session.

“Studying is like personal hygiene; it doesn’t depend on how long you shower, but on how frequent you do it.”

As long as you are consciously working on achieving these timed sessions you should be fine. To help you with this, at the end of this post you can find a set of good tools and links for you to try out when implementing this in your life!

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If After a day of hard work you finally sit down for a rest, take your time to reflect on what you learned. Or even better: talk about it! Because only when you express the knowledge you gained in your own words, it really settles in your brain. Take another look at your notes, or try to solve that difficult exercise explained in class on your own. Crucial here is to do this reflecting the very same day, as your brain has a “big reset button” that gets pushed every night when you go to sleep. You might remember it the next day, or maybe the day thereafter, but if you don’t actively readdress your gained knowledge you can count on forgetting it sooner or later.

A good way of doing this in a systematic way is to use a Study Journal. Quite obviously, this is a little booklet or document in which you write down everything you learned today, every day. Here-within you put three page markers: one for yesterday, one for last week and one for last month. This is an implementation of the so-called Spaced Repetition System: if you reread what you learned today, you’ll remember it tomorrow. If you reread what you learned yesterday, you’ll remember it for a week. If you reread what you learned last week, you’ll remember it for a month, and so on. Take ten minutes everyday to test yourself on what you learned today, yesterday, last week and exactly a month ago and I can promise you you will be a much better and more efficient learner.

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Hopefully you will give these methods a shot at helping you organise your life as a student, an entrepreneur or human being. Good luck, thanks for reading and please share your thoughts on this subject in the comments!

Regards,

Niels Weggeman

List of links:

Organise your day:

• Workflowy is a website and app service that helps you split all your big tasks into smaller, and smaller, and smaller ones. Very handy when you, like me, have difficulties creating overview of everything you have to do to achieve a project.
• Chains.cc helps you to stay on track with the things you want to do daily. Say, if you want to spend an hour working on your company everyday (or exercise, or homework) this app gives you the drive to achieve that goal everyday and “not break the chain”. – this scheme could also be done on a big sheet of paper on the wall: make a big table with your different goals and set a cross everyday you achieved a specific goal. Give it a shot!

Timebox Technique:

• 30/30 is a very nice and simple app that allows you to set such time boxes for everything you want to do.
• Pomodoro* is a proven technique saying that 25 minutes is the best time for a session of doing really anything.
• Focus booster is a simple browser implementation of the Pomodoro technique. (Of course a smartphone would also work, but it’s best overal to avoid digital distractions whenever possible.)

Get rid of distractions:

• Freedom.to is a blocker-app for your smartphone, laptop and tablet if you think you need that some extra help to stop yourself from being distracted. And if you REALLY think you can’t manage, there is
• GetColdTurkey: an app that completely blocks access to self-specified programs or websites on your computer. Beware that, once installed, you can’t deinstall this program before the specified time-limit is over. This one is for the real diehards.