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Start up bar Clarion

I consider myself being somewhat of a professional “mingler”. Put me in a room full of people and I will most likely end up talking to a bunch of them, be it superficially or actually with somewhat of a deeper connection. What´s cool about this is that you can allow yourself to be interested in what other people have to say and thereby learn, not only about them but also about yourself.

So with this personal trait I was prepared to go to the startup bar at Clarion hotel to broaden my horizon and perhaps have some interesting accouters. I was not disappointed. Stepping out of the elevator I gave a trained nod to a guy with a sticker on his chest which read “I´m looking for new partners”, an encounter was made. Being Swedish we needed alcohol in order to become friends so we headed to the bar. His name was Carl and he told me that he recently started a media bureau called “Fast Forward Media” and how being an entrepreneur was fun, rewarding and scary. I told him about my dreams of going into business for myself and what ideas I had.

A couple of minutes into the conversation a guy came up to us in a suit holding a bucket. He introduced himself and said that he was in the “health food business”. My instincts said straight away “WARNING MLM, WARNING MLM” and sure enough he was one of the, oh so many gullible people being dragged into this pyramid scheme in disguise. After having listened to his “pitch” and eventually getting rid of him we both commented the encounter as both of us had been approached by these kind of companies before. It didn’t take more than a second after mentioning “Multi Level Marketing” out loud before the next one was upon us. This time it was a fat lady with funky looking glasses trying to get us into her travel company and letting us know how her company was different and definitively not a pyramid scheme. So maybe not all encounters were rewarding, but at least they were interesting.

One of the most interesting encounters however was not with a person, but instead with a piece of paper I found on the ground. I was talking to a friend and enjoying the view from the hotel balcony, when I saw what looked suspiciously like a 500-euro bill on the ground. I reached down in excitement, but to my disappointment it was not money, but a business card with part of a bill printed on the back. I saw a guy holding a similar card and asked him about it. His name was Nils and worked at the crowdfunding site Funded By Me. He told me that the 500-euro business cards was an idea from the founder of the company. He thought that it would be a good idea to make the business cards look like money. So that if his employees didn’t meet any interesting people to give them to, or were too shy to introduce themselves, they should just wrap a few ones up and throw them on the ground in the hope that greedy people like me pick them up. I found it hilarious and a super cool way of marketing the company. I will definitely contact founded by me if I ever get to that point in my life as an entrepreneur.

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Reflecting on the effects this course has had on me

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123When I started this course I had no clue what to expect. To be completely honest, I basically ended up taking this course because I had a clash in courses which meant I had to find another one. A friend of mine then recommended this course and mentioned that it was a little bit different from other KTH courses. However, as the first class started I got to see why it was a good choice as well as I quickly realized how much more there is to know about entrepreneurship and everything around it.

Serdar has taught me how to look at myself from another person’s perspective in many cases, mostly through how I am viewed during presentations. He has also taught me to see things from another perspective. It has been quite a journey for me, to get out of my comfort zone and step into the world of the idea generation. Studying mechanical engineering I normally focus on the technological side of an idea, not the entrepreneurial side of it all as I have been doing in this course. Though, putting myself out there and challenge myself has been a bit tricky in my past, I have been pushed even further than I had expected of myself which means that I have exceeded my expectations. So kudos to Serdar!

But explicitly, what are the main learning outcomes from the course?

  • Pitching an idea The Elevator pitch step taught me how to make business idea concrete and appealing for others in the span of just a couple of minutes. This was something new for me and I believe this will be useful in my future career. It is crucial to be able to catch someone’s attention and make others understand why what you are saying or proposing is relevant for them. The Elevator pitch step of the course has helped me understand that and gave me tools in order to do so.
  • The meaning of Entrepreneurship As we needed to blog about entrepreneurship I started researching the topic reading current articles and looking at entrepreneurship websites. One of those blog posts was What is an entrepreneur? I also realized that I became more observant of articles and posts related to the subject on the internet scrolling through my Facebook for example. Writing the posts, attending the lectures and doing the project gave me further knowledge. I also gained personal insights into the subject, apart from the actual knowledge.
  • Running a company Having to work in a small group both to sell coffee and work on our made me understand what it is like to run a company. There is a lot to think about and a lot of coordination to be done. This made me both see the charm in being an entrepreur and the value of being employed by a company. Also through playing the “marketplace live” simulation game, a lot of knowledge and terms of how to run a business and compete in a market has been a tremendous amount of help for me.
  • Going from idea to reality The task of having an idea and actually putting it into reality has become more realistic. The lecture on prototyping and the whole project was what taught me that. I realize that if one has an idea it is not impossible to go through with it if one really wants to do so. Finding and  trying out start ups see Lendify – the service that makes you rich $$$ and My experience with Instabridge and attending the start up events taught me how many start ups there are out there and how many great ideas there are that potentially could bloom into great things.
  • How to attract investors Attending the start up events I learnt both how to attract investors and the importance in doing so. Having investors is often necessary to fulfill an idea, to going from idea to reality. I learnt that the idea can be great but if it is presented poorly it will not matter. More about this in these posts 19@19 startup event with SUP46 and STHLM TECH Meetup.

Thanks again everyone!

 

How one class changed my life

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Taking the Entrepreneurship course ME2603 of Serdar Temiz at the KTH University in Stockholm was one of the most influential decisions in my life so far. I am incredibly thankful to Serdar for forcing us to step outside our comfort zone and explore new territory. In this post, I will summarize the many things I have learned since the course started and I will mark the tasks actually given to us in class, to clarify how awesome this course is, but also, how much work is expected of you. Many of the lessons learned have already been covered more extensively in some of my other blog posts, so I will link to them in case you want to take a closer look at a specific topic.

Lessons Learned

First of all, I learned that hands-on experience beats everything else. This was impressively demonstrated in the coffee sale, one of our first assignments, where I also learned the importance of customer awareness, which eventually made its way into my first, yet most popular post on “the importance of beeing present“. (Also the 3rd most read article on the whole blog 😉 )
The Marketplace Simulation Game only reinforced that exact lesson: You can have the best product on the market, if you don’t advertise enough or not in the right way, you will not sell.

Next, I learned the immense power of networking, which we were primed to experience through the assignments to attend startup events and to collect feedback on our business ideas. Just exposing yourself to the environment of the startup scene will get you in a different headspace. Talking to a lot of people will force you to express yourself and will also improve your pitch and sharpen your business idea. What I found the most amazing was the fact that everyone whom I talked with immediately started thinking of who they could connect me with to help me with my project.

Furthermore, the elevator pitch, which we had to prepare for our second lecture proved to me that anyone can come up with a business idea. Not having a good idea is really not an excuse to not start your own business. Honestly, the idea is the easiest step of the journey. Just write down a list of problems you encounter in your everyday life, then find a solution for any of those problems, there’s your business idea. That’s how I came up with the Sound Hub project that I’m currently working on.
Also while testing the two startups, I realized, that a service really does not have to tremendously complicated, as long as it solves a specific need in the market.

Serdar’s prototype lecture and the guest lecturers speeches taught me that the first step in starting a startup is to get an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) going. This is supposed to prove that there is actually a demand for the thing you are planning to sell.

The assignment to use Twitter, LinkedIn and this blog to communicate our experiences made me realize the importance of social media for promoting your brand. Also, it helped me getting feedback and practice, which further improved my writing skills.

The presentations of our venture ideas made me realize how important it is to precisely specify what exactly your service or product is supposed to do and which value the customer will get out of it. Also, it taught me to present big shiny visions and not to talk about the nitty gritty prototyping work when talking to investors.

Final Note

Now, I didn’t talk much about what has been covered in the actual lecture itself, because that can be looked up on Serdar’s Slideshare. What I found much more interesting are the things that make this course extraordinary. At some point we heard this quote in class:

I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.

Well, this course makes you do stuff. It forces you to go out and get your hands dirty and I am very grateful for that because it made me realize how much enthusiasm is in me for the whole entrepreneurship subject. So much so, that I am now taking two more courses in the same direction: “Entrepreneurial Leadership in practice” and “From Idea to service Business”, which are both promising to be very interesting. So thank you Serdar for opening this path for me!

PS:   I will most likely keep writing these blog posts, because I found it to be very useful to structure my thoughts and the lessons I learn during my time here, so stay tuned for more posts 😉

Feedbacks on my start-up idea

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My start-up idea

I wanted to build a start-up to create a smartphone application linked to a website made to help people find local farm food producers and facilitate interactions between them. I started thinking about this idea when I noticed that there are more and more people in France trying to eat healthier and eco-friendlier food, especially organic vegetables, fruits, meat. To that extent, they try to avoid industrial food as much as possible because they often can’t be sure about where it comes from (which causes environment problems if it was imported from far away for instance), or if chemicals have been added to the food, etc. Thus, they tend to prefer to buy food directly from some local farmers which are supposed to produce more organic and eco-friendly food. But when I tried to find local producers around where I live, I couldn’t find any really close on the internet. In fact, they can be difficult to find because most of them get their clients thanks to word of mouth. That’s why I want to make an application which would help people get connected with the local farm products producers around them, and make the interactions between them easier.

Collecting feedback

I wanted to target more precisely my potential customers, so I had to know who would be interested in my idea. Thus, I got in touch with seven people from different places (cities and countryside), with different age (from 20 to 72 years old), different social background. These people were mostly family and friends but there were also a couple of people I’ve met on the website senscritique.com, which is a film critic website. It seems that it is a quite random range of people but in fact it is very varied, as I wanted, and I think one of the most interesting feedback came from one of my interviews with a guy on senscritique.com because as I didn’t really know him (we’ve had exchanged a bit about some films before) and because of the sometimes coarse-mind of cinema critics, he felt really free to tell me truly what he thought about my idea, even if it is obviously non-related with cinema. He specifically gave me a feedback on my pitch rather than my idea because he didn’t seem quite interested into it in fact. So now I know I have to work on my pitch and be more precise so people understand easily my offer.

Now let’s get to the point. I’ve noticed that my idea could interest mostly people who live in small towns or in the countryside because it seems quite annoying for people in big cities to have to go in the countryside to get their products, where the farmers are located. People in the countryside seem very interested into farm products but are not very interested into a website and even less an app because they already have their own habits and contacts. Actually, my primary target could be people 30 to 50 years’ old living in small or medium towns. I’ve received from one of them this idea of making a sort of subscription system to a farm food producer which could provide information on what products are available at a certain time. For instance, if a farmer has just finished to gather tomatoes, then he notifies to the app that tomatoes are now available for sale, and it would send a message to his subscribers who could then come buy some, etc. It could be really useful for people living in small or medium towns because they are not so close to the farm food producers to get these information, but they are still close enough to drive a couple of miles to get there.

Will I change my idea?

I will surely do slight changes because the feedbacks I’ve received are very interesting. Now I have a more precise view of who could be a potential customer of my service. Also, I really like the part about the different features that these people would like to see in the app. I feel it’s almost like working closely to the customers already, and I think it is one of the exiting things of developing a new product. Finally, I appreciated the feedbacks on my pitch because some people didn’t really understand the concept I was explaining so obviously I have to work on that. It reminds me of the pitches I’ve heard during the STHLM Tech event, which were not always clear so even if there were probably good ideas, I wasn’t always convinced because it wasn’t so evident to understand what they offered to the customers.

SUP46 | tuesday evening

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Yesterday SUP46 arrganged a startups recruitment meeting aimed to introduce several startups and try to find people that were interested in their product.

The participating start-ups introduced themselves and what type of people they for the moment needed.

For me I got kind of confused, because I didn’t realize that there was going to be a mingle were diffrent startup apporached and asked about qualifications and such. But it was alot of fun to discuss different ideas and see what problem startup had, besides the obvious staffing issues. I also want to give a cheer to SUP 46 way to invite, both startup and people intetested in the business. A very nice way for people to meet up and enjoy an evening in each others presence. I really hope some of the startups find the people they are looking for, and the hired person’s expectations are met.

Cheers to SUP46!