Monthly Archives: October 2016

So while everybody is busy studying for the exams, here as well as in the Netherlands. I took the time to reflect on my network and see which start-up I could help, and hopefully someone from my network as well.

So a while back I wrote a blog post about a start-up named kartent (http://intopreneur.com/?p=2709). They provide cardboard recycled tents for festivals, please read my post for more details. As I know one of the their co-founders I thought it would be nice to help him out. Now let me introduce a other company, Zeezout. They started as two friends who wanted to organize some parties at the beach for friends, but now they are one of the more house hold names in Techno and house parties in the Netherlands. And the founders used to live in the same student house in Delft as where I live and still quite often drop by for coffee or a beer.

Zeezout has a yearly festival which is only invite only for very close friends and family and with plans to organize a multiple day festival for a big crowed I imaged Kartent could deliver some  value to Zeezout. And after making some phone calls, first to Zeezout and later to Kartent, I managed to put them in contact and am proud to say that Zeezout is going to buy 50 tents at kartent for their annual friend festival as a tryout for a possible bigger sell related to their planned multiple day festival!

I was very happy to put these two parties in contact and help both out. I was quite surprised that I ended up a start-up and a company who already where in my network before I participated in this course and this makes me wonder who else in my network could benefit from connecting with each other. And more interesting in who’s network can I offer some value to their other contact? Some nice food for thought.

Starting this course I didn’t know what to expect from it, it all started with a lecture where I attended just to see what it was. I had never seen anything like it, the way the lecturer went around in the classroom just throwing questions everywhere, it was hard get a hold of what it was all about but the word entrepreneur kept coming up and I was intrigued to know more. It was just one catch, the next lecture we were supposed to pitch an idea, I did not have any idea and did not know how to pitch but I needed the credits so I did my best. At least I did my pitch and from that it could only go better, I was nervous and it was so outside my comfort zone. From that point I decided that I will take the course and just do it all.

Even though I thought some of the aspects of the course was a little bit too extreme, like how the environment in the startup scene is and how you should push yourself to meet people and gather a social network, I’ve learned a lot. I mean everybody is still humans and not some super humans who is doing everything right, which we have exercise trough guest lecturers. But what have I learned?

I’ve learned what an entrepreneur is, guidelines to become an entrepreneur and what not to do as an entrepreneur. Don’t give away small parts of your company in the beginning!

I’ve learned how to pitch, what to not do and what to do when pitching. Show your product!

I’ve learned what a business model is and how to make one. Use colors to show connections!

I’ve learned how to develop a prototype and what to think of. Use free tools and make it simple to understand!

I’ve learned how to navigate among investors, what a business angle is and how to present your idea to VCs. Don’t give away to incubators in the beginning, use the free locations you have!

I’ve learned a lot about how to run a company from the simulation. How to calculate the demand to avoid overproduction and why it’s not good to lower the compensations for the workers!

I’ve seen and learned from experienced entrepreneurs who was guest lecturer. They are all humans but what is different is that they really do what they believe in, they do not let fear stop them!

Even though I’ve learned a lot about entrepreneurship, investors, bossiness plans, pitching and startups I don’t think that is the most valuable that I will bring with me from this course. The most valuable I will take with me from this course is that I’ve grown a little bit as a person, each week I’ve been challenging myself to step outside my comfort zone and with that I have been developing my person. Just by pitching my idea I realized that I could do it, maybe in another way next time, but still I did it. Going to startup events and mingle around with totally unknown people, probably I will be better at it next time but I did it my first time. Selling coffee and being nice to the customers, I’ve done something similar before but still I learn a lot about how to communicate and how to say stop when people try to get free refill.

Now the last step of this course is to finish the venture idea report and make use of all our gathered knowledge during the simulation and the course. Utilizing all our knowledge to analyze and understand how we can take our idea to make some great money from it!

Thank you Serdar for pushing us to learn and to develop ourselves! And thanks to everybody in the class for contributing with knowledge and a good atmosphere in the classroom.

By the end of this course I can establish some facts that I have learned, both about entrepreneurship but also about myself. Firstly I would like to stress the lessons learned through the experience of the simulation game which mostly was about taking decisions as a team, based on data/information. The great thing about this is that we all had the same objective, improve wealth and gain market shares, but we all had a slightly different view on how to do it. Some of us wanted to prioritize marketing and stick with our products to play safe, and some of us wanted to create new computers and take a slightly higher risk. This meant that we had to compromise and listen to all of our team members thoughts before we could make a decision. This always went very well as we sat together every time we were about to discuss our decisions or make plans for the coming quarters. We all took this game very seriously and really wanted to win, but we didn’t… I think that we all were Ok about this since we got the experience of taking important decisions on a fluctuating market with big competition and also to present our success to fictive investors. This task was both challenging and great fun at the same time, and I really hope that this game can be used in other courses so more students can benefit from these kinds of experiences!

The lectures about entrepreneurship and the guest presentations were good in the sense that we got solid information about entrepreneurship in real life to both give us perspective, but also get information to help us becoming better entrepreneurs. But I would say that the greatest experience of the lectures was the fact that we all had to participate in discussions and encourage our class mates to engage in the discussions. This made the lectures very dynamic and interesting, but also very demanding as you had to be attentive and alert 100% of the time. I really enjoyed these lectures and after every time I really felt that I got something out from my attendance and that the effort I had to put in to stay alert somehow has made me a little bit more outgoing.

Speaking of being outgoing, I have never been to any networking event like the start up bar I went to in the beginning of October (starta&driva start up bar 5/10). The people were so eager to engage in conversations with just about everyone! If this was not a compulsory task, I wouldn’t have gone there but I am glad that I went since this appeared to be a great opportunity to know new people in the start up scene in Stockholm which can be helpful in the future depending on the outcome of our venture idea…

In reference to my point made about the simulation game, I am really glad that Impetus could continue working as a team in the Venture game as our team work was close to flawless. We started off with a very thorough description of our idea and that really helped us in the start of the venture project. This project was though probably the biggest challenge in the course, but also the most fun part! We did almost everything together, and really worked through every detail of the report as we were sure that we would try to execute our idea in real life. We all got input from external people that shaped our idea even more. I am really excited about how this will end up! Even if the idea is a failure I still think that it will be a GREAT experience to execute this in the real world and probably the simulation game will help us on the way…

I want to thank to every participant of the class as you all have contributed to a very interesting course with your blog posts and discussions in class! -I really hope we will meet again, and perhaps on a start up-event in the future!

When I was searching for startups to help I was looking for startups in an early stage of their developing stage. My thoughts were that my feedback would be more appreciated in an early stage where changes are easier to do.
I have a couple of friends that is into startups. One of them is my old classmate Markus Wallentin. During a course he toke last semester they came up with an app called Stagecast. The app lets the user turn there cellphone into an interactive element that and the audience and the artist can communicate in a whole new way at a concert. I had a sit down with Markus and he explained the app. Markus didn’t want to reveal too many features but the app is going to be able to do two things.

1. The audience is going to be able to play the same sound from their phone at the same time to get a feeling of a surround system.
2. Audiences are going to be able to live stream from their phone. Users are then going to be able to look at the different live stream and get a total unique view even if they couldn’t make if to the concert.

During the sit down I gave Markus some feedback on the areas I have knowledge in. Mostly in the UX field and how they could do the app more user friendly by removing and adding some elements. Markus liked the feedback and wrote it all down to the next meeting they were going to have. Markus also explained that the hardest part right now was to convince the investors that Stagecast is a great service. But due the lack of investors and money they can’t launch the product and try it out in real life. So I gave Markus contact information to one of my friends that work on Marshall and we are now hoping they can do some collaboration and a launch party. Stay tuned on what’s going on true their webpage http://stagecast.se/.

My other friend, Camilo Blomqvist, is one of the guys behind the services Tutero. A online homework help that connects the student with the teacher in a digital classroom. This is a project they have been working on for the last two years and they are really close to launching. Camilo is a successful entrepreneur with some other projects and have invested in this new project but have also help to code the homepage. In their office I got to try a beta version of service. It service worked great but it was some smaller things they I, as a teacher, thought could have be better. Camilo was grateful for the feedback and was looking forward to have me as an online coach. If  you want to know more about Turero and when they launch sign up on their newsletter on http://tutero.com/.

/Birk

 

During the last weeks I’ve been collection feedback on our venture idea to form a picture of what people think about the Bluetooth hub idea. Recap: The idea is connecting your phone to a hub, and the hub is connected to one or more Bluetooth speakers, in order to amplify the sound volume for parties and gatherings with a lot of people.

The people I’ve decided to ask for feedback is people in my everyday life, classmates and friends. Of course the fact that I know them will influence their answer, both in a positive and negative way. The negative is that they maybe would not tell me if they think I could be hurt or offended by their opinion. The positive is that they will maybe take more time to give me more accurate feedback, more time to get into the idea and what it is about.

The key questions that I’ve been asking about the idea is:

• What do you think about this idea?
• What kind of problems do you think can appear?
• Is there anything that could make this device better?
• Would you buy this device?
• How much are you willing to pay?

The overall reaction to the idea was good, not that they were amazed about it but everybody I asked would buy this device depending on the quality and did think it was a good idea. I got some divergent thoughts about what kind of problems could appear, some thought that the synchronization of the sound could be a problem and other that maybe crosstalk between Bluetooth speakers could be a problem. The price was about the same for all the people asked, around 400 SEK was everybody willing to pay for the device.

Overall I did not get any feedback that would make us to consider a change in the idea but the feedback contributed to get a better picture what the price range is, on this kind of device. Also we will consider the problems that was highlighted, especially the problem about the synchronization of the speakers.

That was all, over and out!

I’ve been helping two new startups by trying out their apps and then reviewed them to give the feedback.

WOKwiki

During my visit to the STHLM TECH meetup last week there was three start-ups that was pitching their ideas, one of the start-ups is this app called WOKwiki. From their pitch I did not get the best impression but still I decided to download the app and try it out.

The WOKwiki is a quiz app that is providing the user with questions based upon Wikipedia articles and also you can, if you feel that you have the knowledge, create your own questions based upon a Wikipedia article. You can play against your friends through facebook or just against random people generated by the app, either way you will play one category and your score will be saved in that category for other people to beat.

My first impression of the app is a little bit messy, there is a lot of buttons and information when you get to the homepage and even more when you start to look around. ONE think that is really bothering me is that you need to sign in either through facebook or create an account just to try the game. I think one important thing is that the app should be fast and easy to download and try out, then get stuck.

 

I have some suggestions to changes that maybe can be helpful for the development team; make the app more intuitive and less buttons, make it possible to try the functionality without signing in and make the user connect the account when the user is hooked, separate the take quiz and create question because I think there is different users that will make the questions and just play the game and last but not least try to focus on making the game good instead of all the other functionality.

  

Overall I think the app is a good idea but it still needs some rework, make it easier and more lean and separating the create question part from the game part. Or integrate the question making in the game? And once again, do not try to do everything at once, try to do one thing really good. Why I’m pushing on this is because I did see that you had other apps that you are trying to launch at the same time.

Tower blockade

For my second startup I decided to google around to find an app that I could help with feedback and after some googling I stumbled upon the game Tower Blockade. I found it on this tech.co site in an article promoting newly upcoming apps that you should try out this week.

The tower blockade game is a strategy game that is challenging the player to defend himself from different bubbles coming towards the goals. The player need to build defensing towers and combine them to make them stronger, some of you have probably played games like this before, it’s a classic tower defense game.

The app itself have a very lean and clean look, easy to navigate and only two choices when you start up, level mode or challenge mode, this is making the app very intuitive and fast to get into. This kind of strategy games is, at least for me a reason to overusing of my cellphone. It’s easy to get stuck trying to increase the level and beat the bubbles. It’s not a complicated game and you get instructions during the first level which is making you ease into the game when playing. It’s a really nice looking app and the game is perfectly challenging for me. I highly recommend this game if you have some spare time to kill, which I know there is not many students that have.

 

Entrepreneurship affects your social life, so why not include your social life in your entrepreneurial projects? I have actually interrupted 3 different pleasant dinners to talk about the venture idea we currently are writing about and hopefully are about to execute. I have asked a couple of my friends, my girlfriend and my family which makes them a jury consisting of 7 people and the feedback I received were actually so good that I wrote almost every idea/question down in bullet points.

 

Idea in short: The idea is basically a platform to connect part time restaurant workers with companies in need of employees due to suddenly changed work load. We will act like a consulting company where we are ‘’hiring’’ people and their availability will be frequently updated so we can match the restaurants needs with some suggestions of workers they could hire from us. The revenue streams will mainly come from a percentage of the salary the restaurants will pay us for supplying them with workforce and the biggest cost will be the salarys we have to pay our ‘’employees’’.

 

The most relevant questions/ideas:

 

1. How are you going to verify the workers?
2. How will you be sure that your workers wont sign a contract direct with the restaurant?
3. What happens if your workers don’t show up/perform badly?
4. Is the part time workers for restaurants in Oslo a big enough industry?
5. What taxes will you have to pay as a consultant employer in Norway?
6. Will you outsource the verification process or create a software for it?

 

As I said I received quite a lot of feed back, and these bullet points were the most relevant questions which we had to answer in our written project. Actually no one said that idea was not feasible and they all seemed to agree that the idea was good enough to actually execute. A negative aspect of getting feed back from your friends and family could be that they do not want to be negative and tend to encourage maybe a little bit too much. But as my friends are entrepreneurs themselves I am sure that they provided me with honest opinions and thoughts!

 

This was actually really helpful wherefore I suggest that you all do the same!

Defining a start up could be hard if you have to consider all details to be correct, for instance the scalability of the concept…I have tried a start up with a scalability that is beyond question, but is the business concept and execution good enough…?

This application called Spontano has been around for around a year and is available on all platforms. The service they offer is that they are providing the user with suggestions for events with short notice. This means that they serve both event companies with a new source to sell/market tickets, and also the user with last minute entertainment offers. The idea could work in any city as long as the company can market themselves to event-companies so the application can get filled with exciting proposals to the customers

I have now tried this application several times wherefore I trust the application which I did not do in the beginning. Booking tickets through third parties often seems like a bad idea and could mean that you have to pay a price premium. But the thing about this application is that the accessibility of event-suggestions and the easy-to-use interface makes it so easy to discover new events that the price is not the main USP and since many events seem to offer reduced prices due to last minute bookings the price premium is hard to distinguish, and I am not even sure if there is one. Since I am very tight-fisted I have only used the app to attend to FREE events, and all of them were great fun! (Thank you, spontano!). So it is possible to be a free rider if you want to.

The application itself is very easy to use and there are some features that makes the user able to share events and also connect other friends to the app and gain points and trophies. For Stockholm area, there are a quite few suggestions and possibilities to choose from, but I get the feeling that the diversity of the suggested activities could be bigger. The application is backed by sponsors and seem to have partnerships with big event companies wherefore the supply could be a little bit too homogenous and tight. These partnerships do really raise the trust for the user though and it feels like the application will provide you with legit information and suggestions.

Basically this concept is a start-up in my definition since they have just targeted Stockholm right now, but I truly believe that this concept could be successful if Spontano expands to more cities. Which should be feasible, since the scalability of the concept is rather high in my opinion due to the fact that the software/database already is established and the next step for entering new markets is customer relations and marketing.

I can strongly recommend you to try out this application if you are boored and want to do something else than go to the movies or kick your boyfriends ass in bowling…

Download the app and get started!

 

https://www.spontano.se

He has a net worth of 21.1 BILLION USD and has worked his way of from a small tayloring business to one of the biggest retail companies in the world. Maybe Tadashi Yanai, chairman, president and CEO of Fast retailing (most known for Uniqlo in Europe) can learn us something since he started of small and soon made a great name for himself in the retail industry. He started as an entrepreneur and moved on to be a business leader and luckily he wrote down some of the management principles he learned through hard work and experience. While I read these principles it really got to me that these bullet points can be good to embrace for any entrepreneur in general and maybe entrepreneur students in particular.

1. Put customers first
2. Contribute to society (My favourite) 
3. Embrace optimism
4. Learn from failure
5. Focus on details
6. Be your own critic
7. Connect to the world
8. Disrupt yourself

WHICH ONE IS YOUR FAVORITE

An aspect that we shall not forget about this is that there are probably not any specific criteria for being a good/great/the best entrepreneur but I think that it is always good to be responsive to what society wants and what other entrepreneurs have learned through their mistakes/success in their career.

If you want to read the full interview where I got the principles just visit:

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/people/uniqlo-fast-retailing-ceo-tadashi-yanai-management-principles

Please share if you stumble upon anything similar as advice like this could be useful in our venture projects!