Since direct customer feedback is incredibly important for any upcoming business, we were asked to interview several people about our own venture and also to help two startups by testing their service or product and giving them feedback on it. So here is all of that in one post, to keep it short and sweet.

46elks

46elks is a startup that I got into contact with through SUP46. They act as an interface between the worlds of programming and telephony. Which means that you can send and receive SMS and also send voice messages, in an automated way, controlled by code, written in any programming language you like.

It took me quite a while to figure out what exactly it is that they do, which is basically my first feedback to them: The website could really use a short video, showing the need for their service in everyday life and then also showing how their service can fill that need. They do provide some examples of what other customers did with their service, but I could still not imagine what I could use it for personally.

Also, I was very confused about what I’m supposed to do on their website to get started. They kind of assume that someone reading their instructions knows HTTP, which is not the case for me. So a tutorial video for absolute beginners would be really nice. They do provide sample code, but since I didn’t know where to execute it, I felt a bit helpless.

After some searching, I found a Plug-in for Excel. In that Plug-in you can choose a displayed sender-name, write a message, select a phone number in the Excel Sheet and click send. That worked very nicely, so the service itself is completely functional.

Two more nitpicks I found are that the website does not allow for changing your password and when clicking on “API docs” while in the dashboard it takes you out of the dashboard, which makes navigating complicated. It would be more convenient if the Link opened in a new tab.

I’m sure their service is really useful for many businesses, but as a rooky user, I felt the need for some more explanation and guidance for the start.

Simply Events

Also from SUP46 is the Startup “Simply Events“, which is a platform that lets you easily design an event page and set up tickets for sale. You can add images, videos, maps and much more. They charge a small fee on the profit you make. The website is very straight forward and I immediately understood how everything works.

There is really just one thing that might need improvement, which is the fact that there are only two fonts  to choose from for the title and description text. Besides that, the service is super easy to use and does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Sound Hub

While beeing in SUP46  I also took my time to tell several people about the Sound Hub Idea and the feedback was generally very positive.  The people said they can see an application for it, although some of them did not personally own a Bluetooth speaker. Since none of them were students it was interesting to see that also people outside my original target group are interested in the product. This means that we could also offer it at a higher price since young people who already have a fixed income are able to pay more. Many people proposed to expand the functionality to a surround sound system or to be able to play different music in different rooms in the house. While this will probably not be implemented in the first version of the product it might be a goal that I can work towards in later stages. The price they were willing to pay was somewhere around 60$, which again reflects on the fact that these people earn a good income and are not bound by the financial limitations of a student. I also got advice on which technology to use for my prototype, which was useful since I was not really sure on how to start  at that time.

Thank you to everyone who took their time to listen to me and give me their opinion!

The mandatory submission,

During the course I have learned what necessary step it takes to become an entrepreneur. I have also learned what a few of those who call themselves entrepreneur do on a daily basis. Moreover, I learned what the key concepts that are used in the every day environment in this type of business.

For my personal gain I thought the Game simulation was the most interesting part in the course. It was a intuitive way to form a overall understanding on how to “run” a business. In addition, it was nice to work within a group where the decisions made by the group influenced, and gave an output that in the end was compared to the classmates’ output. However, I thought it was weird that we didn’t get to participate to all the course slides that were presented during the lectures. I also found it weird that alot of the main tasks in order to a achieve a grade in the course was not presented in the course PM.

Other than that it was an inspiring course.

So about 2 weeks ago me and Tanvi went to SUP46 Fem Tech event. The whole idea with the event was to inspire and motivate women to take a step forward and become better entrepreneurs or take the step and become one. There were three successful women that acted as kind of a panel. They talked a bit about themselves first and then they gave feedback on three different pitches from other women. One of these women were Jane Walerud, an angel investor, who is very impressive and for example invested in Klarna. Jane talked a bit about how it was to be a successful woman in the US trying to climb the “ladder”. She said that she got offers to sleep her way to the top and that the men weren’t really comfortable with her presence. But she also said there has been improvements and the environment is better.

Jane Walerud

Before the event started we talked to two women that were supposed to pitch during the event. They were in their younger years and both had long blond hair. They said that it was really difficult to talk to potential investors if they were male as the men often talked down to them and treated them like little girls. The two other women didn’t have this problem as one of them worked at a company that was owned by a woman and the last one started her company with male colleagues more her age. I get the impression that women have the hardest time with older men if you don’t show authority and that you are “hard”. The more feminine you are, the less you get accepted. This may not be true, but is my interpretation.

The three pitches were good and got good feedback. The problems were as I have talked about in previous posts that they had to few pictures, numbers and maybe not specific enough on what customer segment they wanted to target. It was interesting to go to an event only for women by women. Except for the part about that it sometimes can be difficult to be accepted as a woman in the business world it could have been an event for everyone.

 

One of the pitches done by very nice woman from their company Sevn.

 

 

 

 

On Thursday 27th October I went to the Startup landscape event at SUP46. There 19 startup-supporting companies presented themselves, in a 2-minute pitch each and afterwards everyone was invited to go and talk to the ones that they found the most interesting. Here’s what I took away from the evening, which might be useful for other early-stage startups.

STING Test Drive

STING Test Drive is a free series of workshops run by business coaches, designed to give you clarity whether you want to pull through with your business idea or rather change it. It will help you sharpen the idea to a point where execution is much more focused and efficient. In the end, you even get the chance to present your venture to a group of investors. You can get more information here on their website.

Venture Cup

Venture Cup is a platform, where you can upload your venture idea and then get feedback from other users on it. You can also rate and comment the ideas of others and in the end of the contest, the 20 highest voted Venture ideas each win 5000 SEK. If you’re curious, you can check it out here on their website. The application is open until November 8th, 2016. So hurry up, you have nothing to loose!

 

MVP Workshop

On Friday 28th October I went to the Toolbox Friday event of the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship. This week’s topic was “MVP for Startups”. Very interesting for me, because I have just started working on a Prototype for my Sound Hub.

An MVP is a Minumum Viable Product. Its purpose it to test if there is a market for your service or product before you sink a lot of time and money into it. It is supposed to focus on the core customer value of your product. For example, if you want to see if you can sell shoes online, you can just put pictures of them on a simple web page and if someone orders a pair, you go personally to a shoe store and buy the shoes and ship them.

Here are some common objections to this method and their respective answers.

• But this a bad product!
  • If this thing sells, then you have a market for sure. If it doesn’t you can still try to improve it. It is much cheaper to get a false negative and cancel a project that might have been successful, than to get a false positive and keep developing something that doesn’t sell in the end.
• But we need to compete on features!
  • People buy a product mainly for its core features, everything else is just to make the customer extra happy.
• But competitors could copy my product!
  • Don’t worry about others copying and focus on your own execution. While working on a project you will develop knowledge and intricate understanding that cannot be copied. Secrecy does not pay off and is mostly unnecessary.
• But it doesn’t scale!
  • It’s not supposed to scale at this stage! An MVP wants to answer two critical questions: Is there a market for this product? Can I reach that market in an affordable way?

Crowdfunding

The best way to find out if there is actually a market for a product is to start a crowdfunding campaign on platforms like Kickstarter, Indigogo or Fundedbyme.

For this, it is recommended to determine the price you want to sell your product at and set that as the pre-order price. Then you need to find manufacturers and figure out how many devices have to be produced to get the price per unit down to the pre-order price. That way you just break even. That amount of pre-orders times the selling price will then be defined as your minimum funding goal.

But before even starting a Kickstarter campaign you should already create a Fanbase of about 200 people that have agreed to pre-order within the first 3 days of your Kickstarter campaign. Because that’s the condition for your venture to get featured on Kickstarter’s front page, which is critical to generating enough attention.

If your funding goal is not reached the MVP has proven that there is not big enough a market for this product. In this case, you can either redesign or abort the project to avoid sinking more time and money into a fruitless business.

Final Notes

The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship also offers a Fellowship program that comes with access to seminars and a free co-working space right in the center of Stockholm. Applications can be filed here on their website.

One last recommendation is this free online Course on “How to start a Startup”, which contains almost 17 hours of high quality content presented by successful founders of Million Dollar Businesses. Hope you enjoy!

I shall not lie, I almost forgot to make a post and collect some feedback. Luckily I used the idea of waiter app during the pitch workshop I did at SUP46, and for the other feedback I made some phone calls this morning to people in the hospitality sector I know and potential costumers. This combining with the market research we did using a survey we did for the report I think we can have a clear idea of what value our app can offer.

 

Photograph at SUP46

She really likedthe idea, and would definitely  use she was always in a hurry and travels to a lot of divergent  places she quit often ends up eating something at a take away. If the app offers her the possibility to pre-order she would love it. I must mention that she was the most enthousiastic about the idea and it might also help that I gave her a face tot face pitch.

Willem, restaurant owner in Holland where I used to work

He didn’t feel that much for it. Even though he really liked to simplify his administration he thinks that people come to his restaurant for the personal experience and having good staff gives him the possibility to justify the higher prices and offer something extra.

Cor, chef-cook at Willems restaurant.

He liked to idea as it cuts a way a link between the customer and the kitchen where miscommunication can find place. It makes him able to do his job more effectivaly. He also mentioned that there is also a challenge with the higher turnover rate and expectation for quick service that if you don’t offer this quick service people can get really mad.

Ilsa Maria, works for international company that travels a lot for her work.

She liked the idea but would only use it as it gave her the possibility to use it every where. She would stop using it if she went to a other city and only offers 2 restaurants in a multi-million city. The success would really depend and the scale of availability.

Mark Muller, dad and project developer and real estate broker.

He liked the possibility to have more say in the matter of placement and customization of food. But when going to a real fancy restaurant he wants the really restaurant experience with ordering at a real waiter. But he thinks it could be a good product for the cheaper and middle range restaurants.

So as I am a son of an entrepreneur I thought I had a good understanding of what it meant to be an entrepreneur and had a good understanding of what to expect of this course. The truth t is, I didn’t.

I didn’t learn all the terminology and steps I thought you have to walk to become an entrepreneur. But I learned this was also the complete wrong approach to become an entrepreneur. There is no handbook with steps you have to take on the path to success, instead there is only a wild river where you jump in and hope to surface still breading.

And so the course wasn’t teaching me a false reality where the most important thing was to know all the terms and names so you never look stupid among other entrepreneurs. No it learned my to step outside of my comfort zone and open up to all the possibilities around me. Don’t be afraid to look stupid or have nobody believe in you, prove them wrong and find out how willing people around you are to help you further.

In the first lecture Sadar told us to go out and go to start-up events and blog and much more, this I didn’t expect and one word get floating around in my head as I left the classroom, blog. This was something I simply hated and had tried to avoid as long as I could. But I must honestly say that I actually enjoyed it and saw myself growing in the ability to step outside my comfort zone.

Knowing now what I do and seeing what people make up the startup community I will finish my degree and would be very enthusiastic to become a intropreneur. As I think I could be very creative and am too passionate to become a 9-5 employee in a company but I also love engineering that much that I do see myself ending up a big company with the ability to be a game changer and focus completely on technology instead of having no sleep because I can’t find any funding. Combining these qualities I think become a intropreneur (a word I didn’t even know 6 weeks ago) suits me best.

Okey, so I’m about to give you some real honesty. I didn’t have any expectations of this course – any at all. It was the one and only course fitting within my schedule, but that´s about it. I didn’t expect to learn anything new, I was actually convinced that the course was going to be 7,5 credits of clichés. Follow your dreams, only do things you love and you will be successful, blablabla. And then, of course, a written exam to show the teacher that you have learned all the phrases he likes. Yes, I am a bit cynic. But as a hardcore realist, the “fluffy” subjects are just not my cup of tea.

What I didn’t expect was for the course to be the exact opposite. Instead of reading books stating numerous of mindsets, we should just get ourselves out there. We were encouraged to participate in start-up events, meet up with entrepreneurs and network as if there were no tomorrow. We were encouraged to get out of our comfort zones, to do things we were afraid of and hadn’t done before. Of course it was not fun all the time – but most of the time, it actually was.

So, what was the outcome of all this? Well, even though I am still uncertain of some of the technical terms, I believe I am on my way to be a skillful networker. I am some friends richer, and certainly believe that there are plenty of people eager to give me opportunities – they just don’t know me yet, so I just need to put myself out there!

To receive useful feedback for our venture idea, I turned to some persons within my personal network. I did choose them carefully so that they represent different stakeholders of the future business.

The idea is, as presented in class, to provide an app that enable restaurant visitors to order and pay their food within the app. This is the feedback I received:

1. Employee at hotel, receptionist

“Would simplify for us in reception, since we then don’t need to spend time on transferring calls. The waiters are often occupied, resulting in guests wanting help to order food to bring to the room.”

2. Employee at hotel, chef

“My biggest concern is how this is going to synchronize with our present system. For us in the kitchen it doesn’t matter if it’s the customer himself or the waiter placing the order, but it should reach us the same way in the same “printer”.”

3. Employee at restaurant, waiter

“I like the thought of having some of the guests placing the orders themselves, especially during rush hours. The question is how to make the rest simple, like how I know where the guest that placed the order sit when to deliver their food. If there are not a proper system for this, the app would make my work harder instead of easier”.

4. Potential customer

“I don’t think I would use the app, since I prefer to order from a real person.

5. Potential customer

“Since I’m allergic it would be important for me to have some extra fields where I could put in those messages. It would also be necessary for me to see which of the dishes that I can eat.”

Conclusions

Since the persons I asked for feedback have different experiences and profession, the feedback I received was varying. Most of them where putting weight on the features and compatibility, but the most useful insight was a reminder of how important it is to continue collecting feedback from all different stakeholders throughout the developing phase as well as after. The idea of the venture project hasn’t changed due to the feedback received, but it has made the picture of the market and the challenges clearer. For the restaurants to choose to use the app, the features and number of users are most important, but for restaurant visitors to use the app we will need to encourage changes in customer behavior. The feedback was also important to set the direction of the report, since it enlightened the challenged that should be adressed.

The idea of the sound hub is that it allows you to play music from more than one Bluetooth speaker at the time. The purpose was to market it as a more affordable type of device that could target mainly students. Therefore I spoke to five different people who studies or have studied in their past. As I know a lot of people that are studying, the main source of information are from my friends, but I also spoke to other people through connections of my friends. However, in order to spread the type of source I chose people studying different programs at different schools.

To summarize what the interviewees said about the idea, most of them had not thought about anything like it before. They believed that in order to get better sound you would need better speakers, and not more of them. But after realizing what the idea meant, (that you could connect several speakers at the same time) the thought was that you would be able to get better sound easier and at the same time make it more convenient. However, there were some concerns about how well the device would function, especially relating synchronization issues. By having such a device, it would also require several Bluetooth speakers which is not that common to have. None of the interviewees multiple Bluetooth speakers. This would result in that the usage of this product would only be at occasions when people are gathered (e.g. parties).

To clarify, the idea of the sound hub is good. However, in order to attract a bigger range of people you would be required to visualize the idea and show that it works and how it works. And most importantly, show different scenarios where the sound hub would be nice to have hence it now only fits a quite specific need. Most of my interviewees did not really have a need for it, but perhaps the issue is that they just don’t see the potential.

The last Sunday took place the municipalities elections in Chile, where the people that could vote and they didn’t reach almost a 70%. Also, the past year Chile was identified as the country on the OECD with more abstention in their democratic elections, this due to that the 58% of the citizens that could vote didn’t went to the polls. So is necessary to take actions and try to find new ways to motivate specially to the young people (18-30 years old).

One Start Up that is working in this is Evoting, a company in Chile that is trying to give a fresh air to the bureaucratic world of the democracy. Evoting offers the possibility to make electronic voting through internet. They manage the hole process, so the organization don’t have to take care of anything but make the question and establish who can vote.

They have a lot of possible costumers: schools, universities, municipalities, labor unions, big companies, or a whole country. Every institution that wants to make a democratic decision is allowed to take the service of this Start Up, at the moment they have 54 clients, but I’m sure that this number is going to continuously grow up.

I talked with Mario Novoa, Commercial Manager of Evoting, and he told me that the main difficulty that they had at the moment is the law restrictions, because the most of the processes need a Minister of Faith, so at the beginning they needed around 10 months to have the authorization.

I asked him also if they had change the service that they gave at the beginning, if they pivot the original service, and he told me that that service didn’t change it from the original one, but that they changed the segment of costumers that they expected to have, because in the beginning they thought the service for “political elections”, with citizen consulting driven by political authorities and municipalities. However, the demand of that segment has been really slow, so they had to change the costumers to institutions, unions and professional associations, where they found a bigger demand for their service.

In resources, and how they finance the investments, Mario told me that they raise cash from three ways: they made an investment with a family office and they won public funds for ventures.

With respect to the goals that they have to the future in medium term, he told me that they work to be the leaders in South America in electronic voting, and that they are starting the internationalizing process, this with the support of the operations that they have in Chile, which have been growing since the company started.

I told him that I think that maybe they should study the possibility to install some machines that can print a voucher, so the people that have more difficult to trust in this type of service, they could have something that check that they vote. He told me that actually they are studying possibilities like that, so they can improve their service.

You can learn more about Evoting in http://evoting.cl/

Kind regards!!