Feedback to the venture project

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In the last couple of weeks I have been presenting our venture idea for 5 people to get some feedback. I am in the group that have the idea to put the NFC tags on public transportation that will give the passenger entertainment during the ride.

When I choose the people to interview I had in mind to get people with knowledge in
– Technology (2 persons)
– UX and startups (1 person)
– People without knowledge in earlier mentioned topics but that rides the bus/subway (2 persons)

The age of the participants where from 22 to 38 years and all live in Stockholm. I used a semi structured interview method but the questions divorced a little depending on the participants.

The feedback from the technologists was positive. They though that it will not be any problems with the technology due it already exist for other products today. And they couldn’t see any bigger problems with the software either. We continued talking about the advertisement and who the costumer would be and what the market looked like.

The second meeting was with an expert in the UX field but has also had a successful startup in the textile industry.  She explained that making a user-friendly app and to have the right logarithms to show the right news/entertainment in the app is probably the key to success.  And from and entrepreneur point of view to test in an early stage, maybe on only one bus, to get numbers on how many actually use the service.

The last two people I interviewed was friends that uses the public transportation on a daily bases. My questions here where more open about the transportation itself and what they did on their journey.  They both admitted that they are using their phones a lot and are mostly looking at entertainment. They both had a positive attitude against our idea and said they would us it if their phone had a NFC reader.

So the feedback was definitely different from who you asked. And that’s kind of obvious because of the knowledge in the subject. But that’s also really important when developing a product, to get feedback from all potential users.

The idea overall will not change but we will defiantly have the ideas in mind when we develop the concept!

Educate yourself!

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“Success in the twenty-first century depends on street smarts, not book smarts.”

– Dale J. Stephens, founder of Uncollege.org

If I had to name one big take away from this course ME2603 – it would be “Educate yourself!”. Right from the start Serdar told us that instead of asking too many questions via emails and LinkedIn we should rather put our “google skills” to use. The fact that the lecture slides were not available on Bilda, but sometimes could be found on Slideshare is a good example for that. The comprehensive but in some cases contradictory and outdated course overview information added to the need of organizing and managing ourselves instead of simply following instructions given by the teacher.

But there was also way more to it. As a substitute to a standard exam we had to engage in a lot of “outside of class” activity. This included amongst others finding and attending startup events, being active on LinkedIn and writing blog post on this very website. It was this activity which by far has taught me the most in the last two months.

“How do I even write a blog?”

– every classmate after the first lecture

By attending startup events, I became better at the art of small talking and learned how to pitch an idea to a complete stranger, as well as giving qualified feedback to others. One event which I went to was a super interesting book club meeting, a fact which lead to even more self education – before being able to attend I had to read the book “0 to 1” by the famous Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel which contained several valuable learnings for me. Thanks to a friend’s tip I soon picked up another book with the title “The education of millionaires” by Michael Ellsberg. This book stresses the importance of educating yourself outside and beyond university and definitely got me thinking. Thanks to my experience from the Entrepreneurship course I could relate to a lot of claims the author made and in return began to understand better why our teacher kept pushing us out of our comfort zone.

The same holds for the exercise of writing blog post. In order to deliver an appealing text, I first had to teach myself how to write a blog post and upload it on a wordpress page. And you never know – this could very likely be a super useful skill in the future.

As a disclaimer: I personally had profound knowledge in entrepreneurship before I started the course. Otherwise I most probably would have been able to learn even more in class. Nevertheless I am happy with my choice of taking this course and I’m absolutely certain that it will benefit my future life and career.

“Self-education is the key to upgrading your mind and your life.”

– Matt Mullenweg, Creator of WordPress.org

 

Sthlm tech fest 10/10

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As many other of you I attended to STHLM tech meet, where I got to meet a lot of people from class and also experience som real elevator pitches and several great presentations about start ups. H&M, EQT and Deutsche Bank  are just some of the names among the companies that held presentations and attended the event. This was all taking place at Hilton Slussen and it was really crowded, and it was hard to even get a decent spot to stand, even though we were over a half an hour early…

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The presentations were all very interesting and it was a great experience to listen to many different elevator pitches. Some of them better than other, but I will especially remember the person who sort of called himself Steve Jobs, even though his pitch was regarding a mobile game based on wikipedia…

 

The most interesting thing from the event that made the most impact on me was how the manager of renowned MMA star Alexander Gustafsson presented how they as a team started to invest in tech. start ups. Of course he presented several reasons why they have chosen to invest in this industry and the ones he emphasised the most was:

  1. It’s the future (-A bit of a cliché, but still an important reason)
  2. Important for his brand (-Interesting take on brand management…)
  3. They think that the mindset of entrepreneurs are similar to Alexanders mind as an athlete (A thought I have had myself as many of the characters of an entrepreneur are so similar to the dedication you need to perform as an athlete)

 

Point number 3 is certainly my favourite since I have heard some of the ground rules about being a successful athlete before. I have been active in cycling at elite level and our team manager were always clear about the sacrifices we had to make to become better and more successful. –Actually, the points were pretty much the same as the warnings that we got presented in a lecture about entrepreneurship….screen-shot-2016-10-13-at-10-38-04                    (fast prototyping customer development mockups, http://www.slideshare.net/SerdarTemi )

ProductTank Sthlm in SUP46

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20161006_195210The past Thursday  I went to the ProductTank Sthlm that took place in SUP46, and it was a really good experience. I found the event in the web of SUP46, and I met mostly with Product Managers of different Start Up from Stockholm.

The event stared with a cocktail where the people could meet each other, and then were expositions of some Product Managers (PM), who gave their view of how is to work like a PM.

One thing that I like a lot is that the most of the expositors said that the motivation of their job is in that a good work could improve the service (and why not, the life) of thousands of people. For example, Marcus Kohlberg, PM from Spotify, said that he thinks that with his job, he was helping to bring music to the world.

Another thing that was mentioned a lot of times was the importance of have a vision of how you dream that your service or product would be in the future. Siam Choudhury, PM in ACast, told us that the most important thing is to have a roadmap tied to the company goal, and to be focus on that, so a big challenge is to have a clear goal, that everybody knows and share them.

In the same direction, Stina Redemo from Benify, putted a lot of attention in her key learning “get everybody involved”, that mean the importance of involve to the hole team in all discussions from the beginning, everyone is important to reach the goal that the team has.

A final learning that I would like to mention, is that when you are leading a project you have to be versatile, know how to relation with different kind of people and professions, and make that all these different persons work for the team goal. Is not too important know the how, in that position the important thing is to what is the goal and why.

Saludos!