Category Archives: News

Events, News, startup

I need your VOTES!

Our startup Gauss – The People Magnet (@getGauss) has been nominated for Nordic Startup Awards in no less than three categories: Bootstrapper, International and Startup of the Year! Wow! We’re humbled and amazed! Now I need your help by voting *every single day* until October 27th and spread and share the good word all over them Internets.

To vote, simply go to http://startupawards.co/startup/193, scroll down to below the video and click one of the “Vote” buttons with orange text below left – every day (new vote each 24h for you) for the next week.

Be advised that “liking” the page is not the same as voting for us, so make sure to hit those “Vote” buttons in orange *once every day* – and then return and “like” the page too for extra karma points! :) The red circle below shows where the “vote” buttons are located.

And then for more bonus karma points, remember to click the “like” button on the voting page *in addition* to voting. :)

You can additionally help by retweeting this tweet:

Thank you!

About The Nordic Startup Awards:

An Award show like none before, Nordic Startup Awards is a series of events that happen throughout the region in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden to recognize and celebrate the startup eco-system based in the Nordics. All of the events will lead to a grand finale in Copenhagen in December 2012 to crown the startup kings and queens of the Nordic region.

The main purpose behind the event is to consolidate the Nordic startup scene and place Scandinavian startup ecosystem on the map as a leading center for innovation in Europe, against London and Berlin. We all know we do things here a little different. And probably a little better than others. This is an opportunity to show the rest of the world how vibrant our community is and how successful Scandinavian startup genome is.

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entrepreneurship, Events, Lessons Learned, News

From Nothing to Something at Betahaus Cologne’s Startup Supper

Recently I was invited to speak and share some of my experiences as an entrepreneur at Betahaus Cologne‘s Startup Supper event.

Startup Supper is an informal evening dinner event where invited startup entrepreneurs share selected stories from their experience and answer questions from the audience.

The subject of my little chat was “going from nothing to something”, about how I got from just an idea to building an actual team and shipping an actual product beta with our startup Gauss – The People Magnet.

Here’s the main points:

  • Search XING, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and events for talent, potential co-founders, line up dates
  • Attend as many tech and startup events as possible in your city
  • Create your own events to attract your people if the existing ones aren’t
  • Have coffee dates with as many potential co-founders as possible
  • Avoid people who overlap your skill set too much
  • Avoid people who are all talk and no do
  • Avoid people who don’t align with your values
  • Try to find small projects to work together on before getting to third base
  • Talk to everybody about everything (screw NDAs)
  • Only promise what you can deliver, no ponies and double rainbows (instead: pain, suffering, hard work and real possible risk of personal bankruptcy)
  • Have a name, a logo and some impressive mockups of what you want to build made before you can expect any traction with potential co-founders and other helpers (paint more salient pictures in the real world to accompany your nebulous dream speak before expecting other people to grasp what you’re talking about, let alone join in on your vision and team up
  • Communicate your needs to everyone, everywhere (this is not the time to be secretive)
  • Offer equal equity split for any potential co-founder(s), save discussions
  • Get into a startup competition event, use it as leverage to get accepted to the next, make sure to shoot it on video, bring your own crew to shoot it or have someone in the audience do it for you with their phone or yours
  • Publish everywhere, nag people, get our of your comfort zone
  • Dont’t give up, keep on going (if you are feeling despaired, you’re only just beginning – keep going)

In summary, it took about six months of searching and dating to attract and recruit the right people. From there on it took a month to build a prototype (MVP) and another four months to reach a public beta stage and another three months before we launched on the Apple AppStore.

Images by Thomas Riedel (@boydroid)

If you’re interested in me speaking at your event, why don’t you shoot me a mail and let’s talk.

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Mobile, News

OneSec – An experiment in crowd funding

As some of you already know, I’m collaborating with a friend of mine on this little fun crowd funding summer project thing called OneSec.

So get out your credit cards and pledge now!

OneSec is an iPhone app that makes shooting & sharing good videos fun and easy by changing the format to one second shots. Less is more!

Check out our campaign on IndieGoGo for the full story.

We thought it would be an interesting experiment to test if crowd funding is a valid option to fund awesome high-quality iPhone apps. We’re iterating our campaign every day and sharing insights what’s working and what’s not. Stay tuned for more insights.

So head over to the campaign and pledge, pledge, pledge as much as you can spare and if you can’t or won’t pay us be sure click all the like and share buttons on the campaign page. That helps too!

Oh, and not to worry about Gauss. That one is still moving ahead at full speed. I’m just doing this as a fun little summer experiment as others have their well-deserved summer break.

 

OneSec screenshot 2

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Education, entrepreneurship, Lessons Learned, News

Lessons Learned – steps2startup at University of Cologne

I was recently invited to speak about my lessons learned as a startup entrepreneur at the steps2startup program at the University of Cologne.

steps2startup is a student initiative at the University of Cologne to help young people interested in startups and entrepreneurship build their network and exchange experiences and ideas with like-minded people. It is important for entrepreneurs to get started on their ideas and build on their business, so they will need as much advice as they can get, this may even mean contacting a trade secret lawyer California firm or a firm in their location so they can see how they can protect their ideas.

It was inspiring to see about 50+ student in attendance at a very busy exam time.

Here are the slides I used:

Continue reading →

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