Author Archives: Frederik Neble

For the last couple of months I have been on the sideline, watched and advised a new start-up called BodyWay.dk. Body-Way is a e-business which at the current time is selling electrical shakers and nutrition supplements focused to a fitness segment.

Their business plan is very simpel; Buy the electric shakers from a Chinese dealer and resell them in the european market with profit. Their revenue streams is only the initial products and accessories.  As simpelt as it sounds, as difficult i think it is. Because how can you difference your value propositions in a highly competitive marked and how do you convince and create the need for your potential customers in order for them to buy your product?

My experiences with the different e-companeys I have been involved in, is that is always surprises me how fast an e-business can take shape and sell gods with relatively few resources and costs.
Bodyway are not producing any of their products themself and their storage is minimal.
They can also forecast the demand very well, because of their B2C business model, do they have controle of their channels, and know exactly when they launch new deals, advertisements, talk to influencers ect. Therefore they can keep their assets at a minimum and taking minimum risks.  Which also mean they can concentrate most of their energy and profit in branding and advertisement. Then the burning question is; How do you brand your e-business?

There is really no clear and one answer to that, because it depends on vast numbers of variables. The guys at “Body-way” make a great use of the “influencers” which, at least to me, is a relative new term. To the people who is not familiar with this expression it means people with huge and powerful online network and impact. It’s usually bloggers, profession instagrammers ect, –  basically someone who have lot’s  of followers. They make a agreement with the influencer that they get the product or some additional money depending on the influencer and in return the gets a video with the person using their product or pictures showing it with a few hashtags and a link with a call to buy it yourself. Another very powerfull advertisement tool is Facebook. If you is advertising though Facebook you can concentrate and narrow down your advertisement only to your potential customer segment. So if your market analyze shows that only people in a certain agegroup who is interested in certain topics and interested in your product – then tour advertisement, branding videos ect is only shown to the people who matches your criteria’s. That i a great advantage compared to a more old-fashioned advertisement in a magasin or similiar, which is more costfull, difficult to keep track of in order to improve.

The guys behind body-way have a similar business called NonFashion with the exact same business plan. Which just show the scalability of the way to drive a business like theirs if you are good enought. And with both BodyWay and NonFashion i think of the expression You can sell sand in the dessert” which i truly believe in and think that everyone should.

Take a look at Bodyways or non fashions instagram/facebook and see for yourself, and remember never to underestimate the power and importance of branding and advertising

Link to their Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/nonfashion/?fref=ts and https://www.facebook.com/Bodywaydk/?fref=ts

Link to their Instagram; https://www.instagram.com/nonfashion.dk/ and https://www.instagram.com/bodyway.dk/

In may 2015 I applied for a program named EU-XCEL to take my start-up experience further than i had done before. I felt it was time for me to do something, and it seemed like EU-XCEL was the perfect opportunity for me.
EU-XCEL is a Horizon 2020 and Startup Europe initiative which supports aspiring young tech entrepreneurs interested in co-founding new international information, communication and technology startups through scrum training and mentored virtual accelerator initiative with a focus on 5 different areas which is;  

Internet of Things
Health Informatics
Big Data
ICT4Development
Predictive Analytics
E-/M-Commerce

I got chosen as a Danish representative and was invited to to participate in a week long accelerator program in Cartagena, Spain, and here I founded my first start-up “Sproutify” in collaboration with 4 other students spreaded over Denmark, Germany, Poland and Ukraine. We wanted to make a solution that helped people with growing herbs and edible plants in the city. In the past, when thinking about gardening and farming, images of the countryside filled with rows of vegetables is what comes to mind. But the times has changed. More and more of our local food production is going on in our urban centers. In fact, according to the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture)  about 15% of the world’s food supply is now grown in urban centers. And this trend is forecasted to increase as the world’s population rising. Urban gardening and farming are mishmashes of techniques and approaches to growing and raising food in densely populated urban centers. Because of the very nature of cities, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a plethora of solutions and practices that are undertaken by individuals, communities, cooperatives and businesses alike.

We took starting point in the fact that we are getting more people who lives in smaller areas. In European countries like Germany, 75% of the population live in urban areas and this number is expected to increase. Predictions tells us that we are going to be 10 billion people in 2050 and 66 % of them will live in the city. The space in the city is limited though and many people don’t have the space to grow plants. Many people venture into growing their own herbs and smaller edibles in their apartments, but a lot of them seem to experience issues with getting the plants to grow properly indoor.  Therefore created we Sproutify, which is a ioT based all in one solution for growing fresh herbs and edible plants at home to affordable prices with eliminating waste and reducing the environmental impact.

My interest for entrepreneurship goes way back – it probably all began with my father. My father is working in a bank, where medium sized companies will contact him asking whether they can lent money from the bank or not. Because of his job he had a lot of experience about how the financial part of a company should work or be arranged and was daily in contact with different companies. I remember the days where my father would come home from his job and tell us about the exciting ideas he had been presented for doing his working hours. His technical understanding about the companies and their products was not great, when i think about it now, but it didn’t matter at all for me and my brother at that time. We just thought i was cool to make your own money by selling something you had figured out yourself and we decided that one day we should do that.

“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”  
Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance

My parents have a house on the countryside with a big garden. A nearby crossroad splits the main road into to smaller roads, where one of them is running in front of our house and the other one leads to the sea. In that garden grows some very large cherry trees, there annually grows more cherries than we can eat no matter how much you are trying. It mean also that the birds had a annually feast every summer, but for us it was frustrating to see all the cherries getting eaten.  

So one day my father had the idea, that we should pick a lot of cherries, weight and pack them in small plastic bags and make a small stand at the crossroad, so people who was going to the beach easily could grab a bag with them. They money we earned from the selling could my brother and i keep, as long as we made sure that the business was running.

And so it went on all summer. My father on a ladder picking cherries and fighting with the birds about how the berries actually belonged to, and my brother and I on our bikes driving in pendulum speed between our house and our stand, always curious about how much money we have earned since the last time we had been at the stand. We didn’t think about price regulering, bigger signs, competition or any thing, which belonged in the “adult’s way of making money”. We had fun running our own business. We earned about 100 euros that summer which doesn’t sound like a lot, but for two boy in the age between 10 and 12 it was a fortune, and more important than the actually profit; it was money we had earned ourselves.