Daily Archives: October 26, 2016

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!!

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.