Category Archives: startup

Business Ideas, entrepreneurship, Events, Lean Startup, Lessons Learned, startup

I am Making my Open Office Hours More Accessible

UPDATE: You can now book your free in-person office hours with me here: ohours.youcanbook.me.

This article was originally posted at STARTPLATZ by Inga Höglund in German. Reposted here for my English speaking friends. TL;DR – I’m now available for free advice every Wednesday 10am – 1pm 1100 hrs – 1400 hrs (BER time) at STARTPLATZ in Cologne Dusseldorf (check availability and book up front).

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The Norwegian entrepreneur and startup founder Vidar Andersen has since over a year become one of the important members of the STARTPLATZ family.

Vidar supports the regional startup scene coaching applicants to the monthly Rheinland-Pitch event how to pitch their startup and moderating also the event itself. He organizes the Startup Weekend Cologne, Startup Next Cologne and he also lectures and holds seminars around the topics lean startup and corporate innovation here, and now every week he’ll be here for his open office hours.

Whatever startups need help with, he is able to advise and assist. Sometimes, they need help securing more funding to set up their operations and he is able to show them different ways to secure the money they need.

This is an interview with Vidar about his open office hours and why he’s so actively supporting the Cologne startup scene. Many thanks to Vidar for taking the time to speak with us. We hope you enjoy the interview.

Q: How did you get the idea to offer free open office hours?

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Customer Development, entrepreneurship, Events, Lean Startup, startup

NEXT Cologne is here again, starting October 23rd!

I’m stoked to announce it’s here again – We’re going for the third round of NEXT Cologne in STARTPLATZ!

NEXT Powered by Google for Entrepreneurs

For those of you who may not know, NEXT Powered by Google for Entrepreneurs is the premier experiential educational program teaching early stage startups how to build the skills and tactics your startup needs to prepare for an accelerator, investor, or early product launch, accessible at a nominal fee and on a schedule allowing for your day-job or studies in parallel.

NEXT is brought to you by the non-profit organization that also brings you Startup Weekends and Startup Digests – UP Global (recently mentioned by POTUS Obama) – and our partners include Steve Blank, TechStars and GAN – Global Accelerator Network.

It consists of a three hour evening meet-up, five times across six weeks, digital learning material with homework in between – and is adapted to people with day-jobs and university students.

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Customer Development, entrepreneurship, Lean Startup, startup

Customer Development on German National Radio

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Recently I was interviewed by Julia Fiedler at DRadio Wissen (Radio! Yes – it’s actually still around!) about what to do if you have a business idea an how to proceed. Should you start by writing a business plan? If you are copying an existing proven business model, say opening a new ice cream shop around the corner – maybe. If you want to create a new travel app that the world have never seen before, most probably not.

“No business plan ever survives first contact with customers!” – Steve Blank

Business Plans are guess-based works of fiction and what you want to be doing is to get from a guess-based fantasy to a fact based business as soon as possible.

So what should you do instead? In the radio interview I talk about the concepts and methodologies of Customer Development, Business Model Generation using the Business Model Canvas and building and testing Minimum Viable Products (MVP) – the minimum you need to build or create to start testing and measuring if the guesses about your product, customers and revenue model are correct.

Have a listen [in German] for yourself.

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