People have been asking me what I’ve been up to in the last year and short answer is: I’ve been busy.
On the one hand busy supporting and nurturing the locals startup scene of Cologne grow and and teaching university students how to make their own mistakes instead of repeating my own mistakes when building a startup.
On the other hand, as a consequence of my experience with founding startups, working with corporations and teaching how to apply the scientific method to building startups at universities, I’ve been receiving a lot of questions from my old corporate contacts. They’ve been asking me what they can learn from startups and which methodologies and processes they can use in their organization to create more innovation. And the demand just kept on growing, so much so that I had to founded a new company to be able to serve the them.
You might already know of my bootstrapped startup Gauss – The People Magnet. What some of you might not know is that I teach entrepreneurial students at universities, young hopeful startups at NEXT, keynoting events and F500* corporates that as a startup entrepreneur you need to:
Talk to everybody about everything all of the time
Expose yourself and your ideas to as many people (your potential users and customers) as soon as possible
Acknowledge and understand that no smart person or company will ever copy you before you have a validated and proven business model
I have come to realize that it is about embarrassingly high time that I start practice what I preach. It’s about time to start eating my own dog food. I’m spontaneously throwing everything out there to see what happens when you shine as much light from as many sources as possible on your ideas and assumptions instead of having them worshipped inside the cult of the stealth startup. I don’t expect much and I have nothing to lose but my vanity, so here we go.
I hereby declare death to the cult of stealth startups and pledge and acknowledge that I will:
Publish and solicit feedback as broadly as possible on any and all prototypes before writing a single line of code (e.g. as features described in text, click-dummies or paper wireframes)
Be ready to face any and all critique in public in any form or way, the more and more brutally honest the better
Risk the embarrassment of being ridiculed and failing spectacularly in public
Risk having my ideas stolen by competitors
Only exercise the option to stop sharing everything in public, if and only if, I have a validated product-market fit or when I have a validated business model
As of now, I’m going to publish all prototypes instead of following the cult of the stealth startup. I LOVE your feedback going forward and you can use this form (so you can remain anonymous) or feel free to leave comments on this post in public. Be brutally honest. I’m ready to take it! :)
Here’s a scrappy video walk-through (and in no way am I apologizing for the poor quality, because I also preach it is better to have something instead of nothing!):
And here are two click dummies for you to test on your iPhone for yourself (they should sort of work on Android too, though).
The main click-dummy with core concepts. (Try this first for basic concepts and tap Robert Scoble to test features as his profile is the only interactive one)
This next click dummy will show you what happens when you get a notification from Gauss. (BTW, profiles are inactive, not tap-able in this version)
Let me know what you think. Is this a great idea or worst ever? Should we all remain loyal followers of the dark cult of the stealth startup or is it about time to let the public sunshine in? I shared this post on HN so feel free to continue the discussion there too.
*Caveat: Obviously, if you’re inside a F500 corporation, sharing within your enterprise is assumed, not necessarily with the public. That would obviously open up a can of whoop-ass from your legal department. Enterprise is funny that way.
Recently a band of merry men, also known as some of the key figures of the Cologne startup scene (and hangers-ons), boarded a plane and flew over to London to visit the scene there and advocate for our ecosystem there.
Above, Oliver Thylmann, Thomas Bömoser, Sebastian Wiehe, Thomas Bachem, Fabian Jager, Manuel Koelman, Thomas Grota, Jan Kus ,Julian Hansmann, Alexander Peiniger, Till Ohrmann, Ali Mokhtari, Lukas Strinste, Marion Reichel, Carlo Matic, Vidar Andersen (missing: Malte Delbrück)
We want to kick-off this blog with a brief summary of our recent trip to London, where we found out that not only Cologne, but the whole of NRW needs more attention.
Last week (Jan. 30-31) we went on a little trip to London with some startup pirates. The idea started in November last year, when Phil Moehring (yes, he’s from Cologne, NRW!) fromSeedcamp visited us in the Clusterhaus for a little presentation & invited us to their main Seedcamp event in January, so we hacked together a schedule for a two day visit and went from an initial five committed tech people from Cologne to a stunning 17 entrepreneurs, a few investors & corporates – and thus Pirates on a Plane (#poap) was born.
So we got on a plane, flew over to London and, with the help of a lot of intros from Phil, sat down to talk to a few startups, investors & corporates.
We learned about the local regulations, the UK VC situation and Tech City, thanks to Mathias Loertscher & Ray Coyle from OC and Andrew Humphries from TechCity UK.
Take-Away:
Lawyers & government employees can have an entrepreneurial background!
Seedcamp / Websummit Party
We met some of the newly funded Seedcamp participants and some of the brightest lights of the UK startup scene. #nophotos, or maybe one #explainsitall
A little tired, but highly motivated crowd arrived just in time at Moo HQ to have a short tour through their production facility and got a great presentation about the up & downs of moo.com by Lisa Rodwell, moo’s Chief Revenue Officer.
Last stop before flying back to Cologne. We met Sean Seton-Rogers and learned more about the ProFounders “micro VC” investment approach and how the UK & London startup ecosystems works.
We had an amazing time, represented Cologne, hopefully raised some awareness about the region and connected with a lot of great people. But most importantly, we became more closely knit as a group and came back with a bag full of ideas and highly motivated to accelerate the regional tech ecosystem. It’s true that we were there for a purely educational and business-related trip, but I wanted to see if we could have a bit of non-work-related fun too. So, a few days before we left, I was suggested this article to read for things to do around London, especially Shoreditch. I was thinking we could’ve maybe seen some places if we had had the time. But maybe next time!
That said, we would love to get in touch with you. We want to know about your story, your startup.
This blog is not a one-man show, currently we are a group of >15 people and we’re open for you to help get this ball rolling. Come join us!
The very first Startup Weekend Cologne was held January 25 – 27 2013. And what a spectacular event it was. Sold out in advance, the event was a complete storming success which saw 125 participants and over 220 people coming by over the weekend.
We even had the founder of Startup Weekend himself, US American Andrew Hyde attending!
See for yourself:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
An interview with Andrew Hyde, founder of Startup Weekend
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