A full week of Entrepreneuship

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This week was full of entrepreneurship and StartUp events and I will cover in this post the many things I learned from it.

On October 10th we went to the monthly STHLM TECH Meetup, which is basically a networking event that brings big investors in contact with the StartUp base and also lets anyone who is interested get a bit of an insight into the scene. This month’s guests were H&M CO:LAB and Nordic Makers.

Learn the language

The first part of the event was introduction of the guests and a report on how the STHLM TECH meetup has developed over the past 4 years. It was interesting to see the terminology (Angels, A rounds, B rounds, … ), that has just been taught to us during the lecture on fund raising, get a real life application. The entrepreneurship scene has its own language and you’re only going to learn it by constantly exposing yourself to it.

Learn pitching

After that came three pitches that turned to be … let’s say “sub-optimal”, but they got valuable feedback, which I will combine here, with the feedback that we got on our venture project pitches in the Entrepreneurship class.

Make it undoubtedly clear which value your service offers 
Remember that your customers only care about how they can apply your product for themselves. They don’t care which features and functionalities you provide, as long as they can’t imagine it actually adding value to their lifes.

Two things investors like to hear in your pitch:
What I really want to change in the world is …
We’re doing this thing open source …

Story telling
They want you to take them on a journey, so they can feel an emotional relevance to your product. Telling a story always gives more context to how your product can be applied in a real life setting.

Show me the product!
In the first 30 seconds you should show what your product actually is. Show them what you spent all your time and energy on developing. If computer generated renderings of a design are the closest you have to a product, then start your presentation with those. Also DO NOT show your behind the scenes development work. Investors want to be promised big shiny finished products, they don’t care about the technicalities.

To all the collectors
If you’re doing aggregating of existing services into one central service you still need an added value. Simply providing a collecting pot is not enough to draw users in.

Learn networking

During the event everyone had the opportunity to use the Hashtag #STHLMTECH on their Twitter posts, which would then be automatically retweeted to all the followers of Sthlmtech. This gives you access to a massive audience, which is perfect for when you’re looking to grow your followership. I actually gained several new followers that way.

After the event most people left, which always surprises me, because that’s when the really interesting networking parts starts. So we were chatting up all kinds of people including the Moderator and some Venture capitalists who gave us their contacts.

One useful side-effect of speaking with that many people is that you’re basically forced to explain your product idea again and again and you keep getting feedback on it. Trust me, nothing hones your elevator pitch better than repeating and tweaking it over and over while networking at an event like this.

One guy I met called Mikael Lenart runs a company called “Venue”. His service connects artists with venues and lets the audience decide who gets to play by voting for their favorite band with the purchase of a ticket for that band on that day. If their band does not play, no money is transacted. This reminded me of a company that I knew from Germany and I gave him their website, so he could do some research on it. After that we were chatting about the Sound Hub and he recommended me to go to the STHLM Music City event, which would take palace at SUP46 the next day. Since I already knew that place i happily agreed.

See how it’s really done

The STHLM Music City event was an amazing experience with speakers from Spotify and live demonstrations of the new app by pacemaker. Their presentations were really well done and could be described as 70% images, 20% charts, 10% text. That way the attention was much more on the speaker themselves. Also two guys presented their events SLUSH and SLUSH MUSIC which will take place in Helsinki on the Nov 30 – Dec 1.

Obviously more networking followed after the main presentation and I met some more people, which gave me important information about potential future competition for my Sound Hub project.

On the Wednesday after that I went to the Nomination Event for the Bicky Chakraborty Entrepreneur Program which took place at the KTH. It was good to see students from the KTH that followed their passion and finally also got some substantial funding for their further company development.

A Sequel and a Shout-Out:

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fullsizerender-4This Wednesday the magical story on CityLights continued: I had the follow-up meeting with Zaid and Lisa, about which I talked in a previous post (you can read that here).  After I had reached out to them on Facebook they proposed to meet at a beautiful place called Mosebacke in Södermalm. Apart from the gorgeous view we had a more in depth conversation on their past as retailers, on our ambitions for the future and on the options for bringing CityLights* to the market.

  1. Outsource the retail to parties like them, the benefit being that we don’t have to worry about marketing and finding the right target groups, as well as benefiting from their years of experience.
  2. Do the retail all by ourself, the benefit being that all the profit stays within our own reach, the downside being that we don’t have any experience in marketing.
  3. Or doing a bit of both.

*A prototype for CityLights was already produced and tested. Currently we’re reviewing what the best business strategy would be.

To round up, a little shout-out to all of you: it is just plain awesome to have a group of likeminded individuals like this. It is refreshing, it is empowering and it motivates you to take the next steps in your business. I would love to have an active network like this surrounding me, to talk about our ideas and projects, motivate each other, share information and valuable knowledge. Maybe I’ll find that at SUP46 – I don’t know, I haven’t really experienced that place yet. But if I don’t find it there, I am really looking forward to creating that network myself and if you feel like you want to continue the kind of lifestyle being promoted during this course, let me know! You can reach me via Facebook, LinkedIn, or email. To be continued…

STHLM TECH – Meetup

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So Alycia, ceo of ACE, invited all the team to this event. As you can see on the previous posts, big part of the class went also. So… I will just let here the tips I found about the 3 pitches to avoid saying what the others have already said:

  • Sometimes you know so well your idea, you can´t really explain it.

So this happened most with the second start-up. She was struggling to communicate her idea, because for her it was so easy to say one sentence to understand her start-up. But when I saw the faces of the others, there was confusion in almost all the faces. The communication was bad, so the host said “I think you know so good your idea that for you is easy to understand, but for us is not”. If you are going to explain your idea to an audience, maybe more practice with random persons can help to improve your communication.

  • More simple please

So this happened more with the last speakers, they were talking about so many different things, it was just too many data to understand even the basic concept. For example, I know the third start-up wants to talk about the endless possibilities, but. sometimes less is more.

  • Innovative Business Models 

I have seen this trend in many articles, places, blogs, etc. A need of new ways of managing the companies, so maybe you can satisfy this need.

Image result for peace

  • Chill out!

I don´t know if it´s because I am more emotional for being Latino-American, but for me the first start-up speaker was really aggressive in his answers to the hosts. I think that he was so passionate about his start-up that he felt attacked when the hosts criticized him or the start-up. I think you have to be passionate about your idea, but you have to be able to control yourself and be open to constructive critics.

 

 

My experience with Instabridge

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There are many start-ups from Stockholm. I decided to try the Instabridge app, a app that allows the users to join and connect to Wifi communities and hotspots without having to use a password. The app is connected to millions of Wifi spots and is available on both Android and Apple platforms.

The reason that I wanted to try the service provided by Instabridge was because I had not heard about the app before but liked the description when I read about it in a list of different Swedish start-up companies. I thought, why have I not heard about this before.

I went to App Store to download Instabridge. It was interesting because when I was going to download the app I saw that there were not any reviews or ratings shown. Normally that makes me question the app and think it is a bad one since the more used apps always have reviews and ratings visible. It made me think that it can’t be that popular yet. Anyway, I downloaded the app and tried it out.

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The Instabridge service was really easy to use and I was surprised that it worked. I am glad someone has come up with this app and that it was so well done. It even had functions that I did not expect or that I would think of. One could click on different Wifi spots for example and then see how far away the hotspot is in minutes of walking. The speed of the Wifi spot is also specified. There was also a way to filter the Wifi spots that are shown on your map by choosing between different options as shown in the picture. Such as choosing only open ones, that are fast and in a restaurant.

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As I was so surprised by the quality and the userfriendliness of the app I decided to send them some positive feedback in App Store. The only downside was that one had to go out of the app to “settings” and then manually choose the Wifi found in the Instabridge app. But I will definitely keep this app on my phone and use when traveling outside of Sweden to save some money on my mobile phone bill.

Continue surfing!

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STHLM Music City

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Sometimes you find yourself unexpectedly at places where you never imagined yourself to be. But it feels right. It is exactly where you need to be. Right now.

This happened to me last Tuesday when classmate Niels Weggeman asked me to join to start-up bar SUP46 in Östermalm. Initially I had no idea what I could expect. On the way I found out that STHLM Music City organized an event for start-ups in music technology. For a music passionate like me, the exact right place to be.stockholm-musictechThe first speaker was a woman Eva from Spotify. How to market music using the user’s listening behavior data? With over 100 million active Spotify users there is a lot of data to analyse and use to better understand the listener: your customer. Music from the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark) is increasingly popular around the world. Eva guided us through a story how relatively unknown artists can score enormous hits by analyzing the data, adding the song to popular playlists and coordinate releases with major record labels. The Swede Mikael Persson aka Mike Perry is the living example with his hit ‘Ocean’: his only release on Spotify has over 260 million plays in half year. SHLMN Music City sketched the future of the music industry as more decentralized, where the role of publishers, music labels and agencies will shift towards a more supportive role around the artist.

Hereafter I have seen several presentations of breakthrough technology and ideas for music technology. Slush is a non-profit organization that organizes a large tech conference firstly in Helsinki, followed by editions in Tokyo, Beijing and Singapore. What do they do differently? They combine the entertainment of a music festival: loud music, lasers and pyro shows with the interesting technology from a tech fair. Big players as Google and Tesla have found their way to the event.

The Pacemaker app developers came with a new idea of creating mixtapes. Where they previously developed an iPad app for DJs to live mix music using Spotify they now bring an app to iPhone and Apple Watch for the big audience. Instead of making playlists for yourself, you can now create personalized mixtapes to share with your friends. You choose the songs; the app mixes them for you automatically. In addition you can personalize your mix by changing the transitions or adding effects such as hi-lo pass filters, white noise and reverb.

Finally, I want to highlight the impact of going out of your comfort zone. Going to places where you have never been before makes you meet people you have never met before. This can result in you having new ideas, which you otherwise not have been able to come up with. Never let go of an opportunity to find out new things. Follow your curiosity.