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.
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!
Time for our very last blog post in this forum as the group Key Notion! Lately we’ve been discussing the relevance of this course, what we have learned, and how this will affect our future. Our first thought was that this was like any other course, but then we actually realized that a few things were very valuable! Maybe the most fun and interesting thing was our increased appreciation of the concept of networking! While many might consider it the boring necessity of business and entrepreneurship, this can actually be very fulfilling! We’ve all expanded our network and considering the diversity in this class, we’re sure that at least a few of the new connections will be relevant, both in our future fields of work, and even to our social lives!
We also realized that we’ve been given a plethora of tools to structure our ways of generating new ideas for entrepreneurial start-ups. We’ve learned the why-why-why-why-why method, and learned to really get to the core of what is important for the target customer! And we’ve also learned how-how-how-how-how to effectively sell our idea! Especially the means of bringing in capital through pitching and creating an effective business plan. We now feel more confident in our abilities in these fields, and the world of entrepreneurship no longer seems as intimidating!
Next up is Assignment 5, picking an idea and creating a new business venture concept! We will now quickly go through some individual thoughts about our five product ideas, and at the very end, we’ll announce the winner! Let the excitement begin!
—————————-
Katarina Allmér’s thoughts about “Can I crush?”
Living in a small student apartment, I realized how often I was annoyed by not having anywhere to put empty cans and bottles since they took up a lot of space that I wanted for other things. This made me think that if I could compress the cans I could easily store them without having to go to the store and deposit them as often, which led to the idea of a new product doing just that. When I talked to other people about my idea and asked for feedback, most of them were very positive and said it was something they might want for themselves. However, some did not think they had a need for it, and a general concern was the cost and how much space the machine itself would need. Therefore, some challenges in pursuing this idea would be to make the product both cheap enough and small enough for customers to think it was worth it, and since I don’t have much expertise in this field, I would need a lot of help with the development of the product. It is not unreasonable to think, though, that this product might have a place in the market of gadget-collecting people, if not for the average person. Emma Bednarcik’s thoughts about “The Campus App”
As I saw the new students arriving at KTH and thought back at my first time at this university, I remembered the difficulties of finding all the scattered lecture halls, and also of finding a good place to eat. I then came up with the idea of creating a smartphone application with easily accessible and relevant information, helping new students with just these problems! The idea was to bring in revenue through making the app widespread and allowing restaurants to promote themselves to these relevant customers. The feedback I got when talking to students – both new and senior – was mostly positive; an app is so easy to download, and they’d all been in at least a few situations where this would have saved them from barging into the classroom, 10 minutes late. A requirement, however, was that it would have to be free. Due to the limited amount of new students (who would be the ones using this app the most), and the low market value of ad space, the revenue guesstimate , however, turned out unfavourable in relation to the work that would be required to start and maintain this business. So even if this is in theory a good and well received idea, it is unfortunately not a venture worth pursuing.
Sofia Feychting’s thoughts about “The Fall Watch”
My grandmother is 97 years old, sharp as a nail, and constantly winning at bridge. I am still worried that if she were to fall down she would not be able to get up by herself. Since she lives alone, this is a real problem. My business idea is a “Fall Watch”; a nicely designed watch that also functions as a fall alarm. If you fall down and can’t get up, you just press the button on the watch and it will send a signal to the cell phone of a relative. Some people might feel ashamed of buying a fall alarm but if the product is also a really nice and useful watch that will be less of a problem, and this differentiates the product from the competitors. I talked to several of my relatives and their friends and they confirmed that this product would definitely decrease all of the worrying and make the elderly person feel more secure in their home. Some of them requested a greater function with an automatic fall alarm and some of them worried that they might miss the phone call and leave their relative stranded. Adding more functions and services to the product can solve all of this, but this might also result in a hefty price tag and that could scare off customers. Will it be possible to combine great design with practical functions or will one of these aspects have to suffer, they wondered. There are some obvious founder-issues with this product. I have no design experience so I would have to gather a large team of people to develop this product for me, as well as the many possible add-ons. One way to solve this is to start simple without any of the add-ons, just a good design-team and hope that people still want to buy the product. If successful, the process can be iterated but with a larger team and more functions added to the product.
Martin Listén’s thoughts about “The Digital Map”
Living nearby my grandmother, who has started to become a bit confused, and seeing the pains which she experiences when she no longer feel fully safe about leaving home, even to do the simple things like going to the nearby store, and the pains which my mother and her siblings feel when a lot of their energy goes to helping her, I came up with the idea of The Digital Map. This would be a very simple GPS, showing the tracked movement of the user at all the time it’s turned on, and have no confusing functions for the user. The feedback I received when talking to my family, as well as other students who find their grandparents in similar situations, was positive in that the value proposition was enough to justify buying it even if it is not extremely cheap. However, the paradox in putting all responsibility on the person with dementia was not lost on people, and concerns about this aspect may end up being a deterrence for the target customer, and may have to be solved by adding, for example, functions for external tracking. Giving the large and growing numbers of people reaching dementia, and the fact that a decent profit margin might be achievable, I believe this idea might be worth looking further into.
Marina Vitez’s thoughts about “The Colour-Changing Thermos”
Text is being updated!
—————————-
These products are all fun or useful, and we would like to see them on the market! When picking one, however, we also looked at their ability to turn into a successful venture, and how big the pain they try to solve is. After careful contemplation, we came to the conclusion that the idea we would be the most passionate about pursuing, especially because of the lack of existing solutions, is *Drumroll* The Digital Map!
I have recently asked around for feedback on my idea och the silver coated handle bars and poles for public transports. Two people helped me out, one female 26-year-old and one male 23-year-old.
Both liked the idea very much and underlined that it would definitely make the public environment more healthy. But the male thought that it would be difficult to pinpoint the customer. Who would buy it, he said. It is a valuable piece of input since a lot of people wants it, but who would take the bill? So, to pursue my idea further, it requires revising.
This has been an interesting course, quite the contrary to the common “feeding”, where you simply get fed with information. I like it!
