Monthly Archives: May 2016

FuckUp Morning Stockholm III – 17th May, 8am – 9am

The naming of the event certainly brings questions to one’s mind on what exactly it has to do with Startups. It led me to ignore the suggestion by FaceBook to attend the event 3 times before giving it a look. I certainly did not regret attending the event and here’s why.

The event was a short one hour introduction followed by a Q&A for each of the 3 speakers before it was time for the audience to commute to their work or universities.

First speaker – Andreas Vural, Founder and President of Happy Plugs. 

Andreas Vural grew up in the small town Sveg, and moved to Stockholm to chase his entrepreneurial dream of making a mark in the world of fashion. In the city he moved through roles as an Art Director, to create the biggest social network (Pre-Facebook) in Sweden as well as running his own charity company. Andreas soon found the path to combine his biggest passions: fashion, design and music as he realised that there was a gap in the earphone market and his company Happy Plugs was born. Today, Happy Plugs is available at 6,000+ retailers in over 70 countries worldwide. 

The Fuckup: His initial batch of 50000 earphones sold in Sweden fell apart in winter.

It was a disaster for him as the first few customers and products sold are the first impression customers have of the company, and Happy Plugs did not get off to a great start.

However, he managed to get over it and Happy Plugs now sells one headphone every minute.

 

Andreas and his quote – “Try and fail, but never fail to try”

Second speaker – Emilia de poret – singer, author and entrepreneur

Emilia de Poret is a true multi-talent including being a singer (she has been the open act for Katy Perry), TV-presenter, music production company owner, author, blogger, pod-caster and entrepreneur. Emilia grew up in an entrepreneurial family, which has inspired her to work hard and follow her passions. She strongly believes in constantly moving forward and always challenge herself to develop believing that “the worse thing that can happen is that you fail and that failure will make you stronger”.

The Fuckup: She was dropped abruptly from her record label company, and her dream job of being a singer were dashed.

For me, her story seemed to be the most inspiring one, as she managed to turn her life around following her failed attempt to become a singer, and in a big way too.

After knowing that she as dropped, she fell into a 2 week long depression, where according to her she did nothing but “eat ice-cream all day”. Thereafter, what got her out of the depression and starting moving again was a strong conviction that she was capable of turning her life around, being a young and healthy. She decided to become an entrepreneur. What really struck me was her ability to change her mindset to view her situation as one that

From then on, it was a success story for her until she started having doubts that she could balance both her kids and work. However, she managed to do it and realised that having kids made her life even better and thought her the importance of saying no as she started becoming more focussed as well.

She ended off her speech with 2 nuggets of wisdom:

1. To always find a partner in business, as it is always easier to have someone to share the ups and downs with you on the tough entrepreneurial journey.
2. Having a good posture improves ones confidence and look.

Q&A with Emilia

The Third Speaker – Peder Dinkelspiel, Founder and CEO at FoodFriends

Peder Dinkelspiel is a full speed Gyro Gearloose web entrepreneur with a million ideas. He has been involved in a number of digital startups and during the earlier days of Internet he co-founded the leading high-end social network SmallWorld. Peder later moved on to create the premium restaurant booking software WaiterAid and the tennis booking system MyCourt. He believes, that a network dedicated for people within the hospitality business is a great idea and holds the dream of digitizing the restaurant industry- even at times when few agree.

The Fuckup: While working at Nordnet, one of his earlier startups, he realised that the accounts of his users got hacked and their passwords got changed. They did not think of backing up their data at that time as well.

Peder seemed to be the most experienced of the three, having founded and worked at the most startups. What I was impressed by, was his habit of looking out for opportunities and ideas for a new startup in his daily life. For example, he came out with an idea of an app to manage “whose turn it is to drive” in a family while sending his kids to Tennis recently.

Also, he had an interesting management style where he steered away from micromanagement and instead made it his philosophy to to turn his managers into entrepreneurs, where he empowers them to make decisions and take charge of projects on their own.

My biggest takeaway from this event would be that while picking up oneself to try again after a failure might be an overused saying, it is certainly inspiring to see people who walk the talk, and prove that while all may seem lost, it may just be a matter of orienting one’s perspective and adding in the due dedication and perseverance to achieve success.

The biggest Fuckup of the event according to the organiser – giving out too many free tickets for the event which meant some people were left standing outside the room.

On May 17th I went to the monthly Stockholm Tech Meetup #STHLMTECH. Once again, it is an inspiring session to listen to the advice from the investors and watch two startups pitch on stage.

The host asked the investors some interesting questions: like what is the criteria when comes to invest a startup, and what is your favorite / least favorite word in a pitch?

“Great people”, answered by one of the investor to the question of invest criteria. I am surprised he didn’t say “Great product” but put a focus on the team. “Global” is one of the favorite words they like in a pitch which indicates that your venture has the ambition and preparation for future international expansion. And among the least favorite pitching words, I am most impressed with the word “Development”. Why? The investor explained that many startups mention their products or services are under development before launching, but he thinks they don’t need to wait until they have perfect products or services. To my understanding, even if your application is not 100% implemented, you can still use it to reach out to your users and collect the reactions, comments and suggestions, and better improve your products and services based on the feedback.

It’s a very good chance to meet the ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs in Stockholm, which also gives me some lessons on the wording during the investment pitch.

By Zhihao Yang

I have been out gathering some feedback about our project (Programming for Kids) and thought I would share some of it with you. For those of you who need a quick reminder: We want to make kids interested in programming by making it easier and more fun with an app and easy-programmable hardware (make stuff happen in the real world, in other words).

 

How did you find these people?

I work as a salesman in a store that sells electronics and home appliances, and I’ve taken the opportunity to talk to a few customers that have bought Arduino-related products (Arduino is a small and cheap microprocessor).

 

Which feedback did you get from them?

All are generally positive to the cause, and acknowledge the issue and opportunity we’ve identified. We can split our product into two parts: hardware and software. The software comes in a form of an app, which parents seem willing to try since it would probably be a cheap and convenient way to try to get their kids more interested in programming. However, the hardware requires more devotion and a bigger cost, so they are less willing to try the product without the kids showing any interest on their own. One parent also commented on how hard it would be to develop a product that was borderline between a toy and an educational tool for our target age. That age is very sensitive, and you could end up trying to sell a product with a “lame”- status if you’re unlucky.

 

How do you think how you found these people and who they are influences the feedback you received?

I specifically asked people who bought Arduino-related products, so they were definitely into programming, electronics and mechatronics themselves, which influences their opinions on the cause. One parent actually worked with the Arduino together with his son, who was 12 years old. He says that his son is really interested in programming, but he probably wouldn’t have been if he didn’t have his dad that could help him, since the Arduino is more advanced than our product.

 

Will you change your idea based on their feedback, why, why not?

The issue is that “an app is just an app” as we concluded during our discussion with Serdar. Sure, you can get people to download it, but making money from it is much tougher. That’s why started thinking of “modular mechatronics” in order to be able to add to our offerings. In addition, our mission is to get the kids using our app excited about programming, and seeing something that they’ve programmed happen in the physical world would probably add to the excitement. This is why we think the hardware is an important complement to our product. However, it is also the most challenging and expensive part of the project. With all this in consideration, the hardware might be in a later release wave if we manage to establish and sustain a customer base for the software alone.

 

 

Summer is coming (thank god), and this year I will be attending the Roskilde Festival for the third time! What happens there stays there, but just let me tell you that living in a tent for about 9 days creates a number of problems. One of the problems is my cell phone, since it can’t survive more than a day without a charger. The festival has 130 000 visitors, all with the same pain. Last year, I found a crowd of people lining up to one large booth with the name “Volt” over it. Examining it further, it turns out that they lend you a portable charger and cable for your phone. You use it until it’s empty, then you return it and get a new charger once every day. Genius! For this service they charged me 250 SEK for the service and an extra 250 SEK for the charger deposit, not cheap but totally worth the convenience.

 

When I talked to my friend Harun Poljo about this, and how it could be scaled up to cover entire cities, he said “Actually, me and some friends are currently looking into that exact thing!” Just one week later, he sent me a link to the webpage BananaCharge and their Facebook page.

 

Harun explains that their vision is to give people electricity on the go, it is not about creating a certain product or service. This way they’re open to all kinds of changes that might help them achieve their vision. This is especially important in this stage since they need to test in what sticks with the customers. When they find a suitable way to deliver their customer value, they might revise their vision to something more tangible. Today, they lend you a charger and cable for 200 SEK, if you return them you get 160 SEK back, it’s as simple as that. If you choose to keep it, you’ve bought it.

 

The pain is legitimate, I’m fairly confident that we’ve all been in need of a charger while we’re on the move. I actually have some own numbers on this as I looked at my own charging habits when I changed the battery in my iPhone 5 for the second time a couple of months ago. It turns out that in 12 months, I had gone through 563 full charging cycles, that’s just over 1.5 charges every day! Modern Li-Po batteries in cellphones start to lose capacity between 300-500 cycles, so just imagine how many poor performing batteries there are out there.

 

So how should BananaCharge cure the pain? That’s the real question to answer, since they need to be close to the people on the go. They are mostly looking at what people are doing between 16:00 and 20:00, since most of us are on the move during that time. The service could either be delivered at cafés and similar facilities, or self-service at vending machines in the metro for example.  Instead of buying candy, you can rent or buy a charger! But if we’re speaking hardware, we automatically have to talk about patents if we want to protect what is ours. BananaCharge has examined patents, and it turns out that this is not a new idea at all, Motorola has owned an approved patent for renting phone chargers through vending machines for the last 20 years! How many have you seen? A company similar to BananaCharge tried to file for a similar patent in 2012 and it was denied, so a patent seems far-fetched for BananaCharge at the moment.

 

At this stage, it is all about being seen at events and being close to the customers in order to learn from them, so machines aren’t the right thing for BananaCharge in this phase.  Today they rely on human interaction and explain their service directly to the customers as they offer it on a number of events. I told Harun about the “Bootstrap your startup”-event at Epicenter, how Fritjof Andersson explained how most of his business relations have been created by just walking up and saying “Hi” to people. And once they have a reputation, a customer base and a refined product, they can think about scaling up. Maybe you’ll have an app telling you about the closest BananaCharge-machine or -dealer on your phone in a couple of years?

The course ME2062 technology-based entrepreneurship has nearly come to an end. It was a fantastic journey to take this course and develop our project assignments. The course taught us theories about technological entrepreneurship and how to bring a digital product/service to the market.

Business Modelling for an Enterprise

Business modelling is an essential skill for entrepreneurs. Without proper business modelling for a product, an enterprise could fail to deliver the value of the product to the end customers. The theory of business model comes into four dimensions. It defines the value proposition, customer, structure and result for the product in a systematic way. With that, an entrepreneur knows what exactly the product needs to fulfil, who the customers are, how to reach them, how to realise or product the product/service, and most importantly, what the cost and revenue structure of the business are.

Marketing Strategy

Another important lesson I took away from this course is the set of marketing principles. For example, market segmentation, market validation, defining value proposition for marketing purpose, and the 4Ps marketing principles. You can’t create real business success if you can’t sell your product properly. This is why marketing is so important. And yet, it is interesting to learn all of them, because they relate to our everyday life so much that I can always find real life examples for the theories and principles.

Development of a new venture

The most interesting part of this course, I would say, is the group project which requires us to come up with an innovative idea and develop a business plan for it. It was so funny to see all the different ideas proposal by each classmates and how they pitched the idea. I really learnt a lot from them. Within our own group, we went through the process of selecting an idea amongst five different ideas and finally identify the most feasible and innovative one. After that, we set off to discuss and refine the details of the idea, followed by the creating of the pitching video. We put in a lot of efforts in the video since we think in a real life scenario, the success of a pitch will determine the success of your business development since you will get the required funding, support and most importantly, the feedback from your potential investors. Indeed, in the final presentation, the panel judges pointed out several points from a professional perspective that we neglected while pointing out that this was a business idea with great potential.

What I hope to take away from this course

It is quite interesting and fulfilling to see the actual product we developed coming out from this course, at least at a functional level rather than a marketable level. Currently, most of the project ideas are still in the prototyping period. It is good to have a comprehensive business plan for the idea, but implementing it would be a different story. It involves team dynamics, technology development and feasibility assessment. However, I understand that due to the time constraint of this course, this is not possible to do that, but it could be put into a higher level course in technology-based entrepreneurship.

Stockholm is often referred to as ‘The unicorn factory’, it is currently home to seven tech companies that are valuated to over $1 billion and its known for being a great environment for startups. Every year, an event known as ‘Stockholm Tech Fest’ is taking place at the Waterfront congress center, where they gather startups, investors and inspirational speakers. It is more or less an exhibition, where the startups are the main attraction. But there is also a twist to it…

What differentiates Stockholm Tech Fest from other startup events is that the participants are not allowed to bring any material in terms of banners, rollups, projectors or suchlike. The startups that are going to exhibit are given one big blank piece of paper and a couple of pens upon arrival. They are then supposed to communicate their business idea through these tools. The idea behind this is that everyone should have equal changes of attention.

I had the privilege to join this event and represent the startup that I work with. I have been a part of Gourmetli since three years, from the very beginning. We are developing an order management system for food vendors online, automating the entire process from order to delivery.
During Stockholm Tech Fest, we had the opportunity to meet with a lot of investors and pitch our idea. We met different people from different industries and it was very rewarding. It also gave us the chance to explore other startups and discuss ideas.

At the end of the event, some startups were awarded prices for their ideas and advancement. All the participants were gathered in the big assembly room and the ‘winners’ went up on stage and pitched their idea.
We managed acquire the price for ‘Food Tech Startup of the year’, it was an amazing experience.

The link to the events webpage → https://sthlm-tech-fest.confetti.events/