Venture Cup

I want to talk a little bit about Venture cup which is one of my main focuses right now. I am a very busy person right now as I work full time to support my family, some kind of part time because it is fun and I find smelly memories is a project which should be made!

Any how I am busy working on the business plan for Venture cup, and I believe I have a fairly good chance to be successful. The biggest problem in my business plan is that I am not by far done with the financing or team. Those happen to be quite important parts in this competition but I think that with the right motivations it could very well be fine. (motivation in this case would be proving I have solutions for it).

It is a pretty thorough work and one reason for doing it is because it gives me a great incentive to get the business plan done within a time-frame. The good thing is that I can get help in some parts form Startup Stockholm which is a great resource, but I am waiting with it because I still have things I can and want to get done before doing so.

I have also created a color scheme to use for my company, I am still working on the gold-color but I am pretty happy with it. I believe that the devil is in the details as they say,  and I am keeping the color scheme throughout my business plan, and it is also why this blog post has got some new colors. I am also going to try to update the blog to follow the scheme.

Teh palette as is.

The competition deadline is 5 April so I will hopefully have great news lining up after that date!

In sickness and in health

Hi there,

Really a lot to do at work, some to do at the extra project and had some sickness in family. I have also worked on my business plan and it's moving along. I am focusing on getting the business plan ready for venture cup since that could really make a world of difference in moving forward. Further I am going to book a meeting at Stockholm startup and apply to the almi mentor program.

I am looking at Nordic game conference but it is a secondary goal, since I still don't have a company or money in said company. Perhaps I am going to wait with that type of conferences until the company is set up.

Starta företag dagen

Sorry to those of you not fluent enough in Swedish to understand today's heading. To make it easy I'll do my best to translate: "starting business day".

Ok maybe I could have done better but there you go. So why am I throwing it out there? Well because I attended it yesterday. The day before I were at the dentist -_-.

More or less all instances which help out when companies start in Sweden had a representant there talking about the basics or bare essentials. Much of it were repetition for me but it really were quite rewarding! I met some interesting people and I also had the chance to talk to some of the representatives from the authorities.

I had really one thing I wanted to take with me and that was to leave feeling motivated and having some new ideas of steps to take. (ok you all know it they never expect the Spanish inquisition!) And I did, I really did. I hadn't thought about it but some of the helping organizations represented and I feel that I have a much clearer view of what I want to do now. Which basically is that I want to participate in Ventrue Cup, I want to get guidance and go to seminars and meet people. And I want to get a mentor from Almi.

All really traditional stuff. But really there is help to get I can't talk for other countries but here we do have a lot of help to make use of, and for me I am self conscious and I feel super afraid to talk to all these powerful people getting feedback on my ideas and so on. I am really scared that they will say that it's not good or that I am way off in my thoughts, calculations and so on.

So I am working on and my businessplan and I am focusing on getting my elevator-pitch in shape so that I can proudly say: "This is what I am doing!" with confidence. It might seem silly but I find this super difficult, not because I don't believe in the idea, but because I am insecure in myself (not my ability but in my person). I have a lot to work on in this department, because I know that I have some really fantastic ideas and I don't want to waste it on being insecure.

So I am currently trying it out, I am telling people my idea and trying to lay the self consciousness aside and I have only been met by ovations, so soon I will be ready to talk to those scary people about it with confidence as well.

In the end if there is one thing I've learned in my life it is that mostly you'll only regret not doing things and to become something you really need to see yourself in that position to be able to get there. (and ruthless efficiency!). So, fake it until you make it.

Planning a business

As of late there's been a lot of things moving around, no news is good news I guess you could argue. Mainly I've been busy at work and the spare time I've mustered has gone into business planning. If you have planned for a business or otherwise know how it works you probably are familiar with business plan and budget.

Those are what I am currently working on and what is taking most of my energy and time. The business plan is coming along and I would like to have a draft to bring next week when I am attending a seminar for start ups. The budget I am being a bit more modest with finishing as it is a really difficult task, which takes a lot of time, best guesses and keeping your vision anchored in both directions. It would be easy to make both a failing and a winning budget on paper. The difficult thing is to make a well weight budget which you actually do believe in. First of all I believe that a three copy system is more or less needed in order to get close to that. The three copy system would constitute one budget where you look at the worst case and what you have to do to make it work, the average case where you see it realistic to end up and a good case where you would exceed your expectations.

The difficult thing about the business plan is to get into word the ideas filling up your head and making it without writing too much around the topic. What you ultimately want is a document which people actually want to read and which will deliver a crystal clear image of your vision. This is hard, it wont just happen it will mean a lot of rewrites, refinements and pure labor to get it done. The upside is that probably you will start out with a pretty good view of your vision and as you write more about it you will find new angles and ideas, some of them you will pick up on, work on and integrate into your vision while things that seemed like a good idea when starting out actually doesn't work when you look closer.

There we go that's some thoughts on it all, hopefully I am starting to refine soon, I still feel like I am in an initial creation phase where I am edging out the idea little by little. I am still trying to ignore too much language-related editing and layout, (which I think we've established is difficult to a stickler!), but getting there. I feel secure that I can bring a printed copy for my seminar even if it doesn't feel good enough it will have most all of the content.

Extra post!

Just when I am taking a step back I wrote this little "thinking out loud" type of discussion about network and how to reach answers to difficult to estimate type of questions.

So, I would like to know who you are? Please do make a comment answering these questions:

Who are you?
Why are you reading here?
Will you read more of what I write?
Is there something you would like me to know?
How can I help you finding value in reading this blog?

That's all, cookie to the once answering! (metaphorical for now, could well render a physical cookie at some point in time that has futuristic characteristics)

Community and network

I find it interesting to "analyse" how community or network can change the rule-set. And not only your network of known nodes, but your network in the bigger picture. I mean if you are interested in opening up a kiosk there is a lot of knowledge around you.

First of all you may have someone running something similar in your network, you can ask a lot of questions from this person. If you ask an entrepreneur how many customers they have per day and similar questions they will know. Why? Because they have done a business-plan for their business, they know pretty well their market and it is the numbers they use for their own business.

So then it's super important to know someone which runs a similar business? No, actually not, or that is not really true, the better answer is: "You already do". In this example we are looking at a one-to-one service sale, by service sale I mean that it's more an administrative, meaning no one is actively selling. It is different in other business but generally if you want to sell stuff to people you do know someone with a business. In Sweden we have Pressbyrån in more or less every subway station, you probably have some 7eleven, or the equivalent in your country around the next corner. If you aren't a patron of these stores perhaps you visit some coffee-shop or other lunch restaurant. My point being is that you probably do visit some place regularly enought so that you feel secure enough to ask: "May I ask you, how many people do you have on average per day?" It's more or less all you need. So let's summarize: You can get an answer to this type of questions if you find someone to ask.

Sounds simple enough right? Well it is, and in all honesty to keep the entrepreneurial mind happy, at least I need inspiration every day, I need visions of my venture coming alive and one great way to do so is to talk about it, to think about it, to talk about stuff related to it. I listen to a pod-cast produced by Venture Cup. It keeps me inspired.

Quite short and specific thoughts on network and lack thereof, all I am really saying is that seeing people and asking questions is a great way to both keep engaged and a great way to gain knowledge which is otherwise hard to get by. One of the most difficult things is to find specific information about prices, so go to someone having a similar business, ask what they pay ask from whom they buy, and bring a notebook because odds are that you will be getting answers!

What I've done is that while working on my business-plan and budget I have a to-do list where I constantly put anything down which I need answered, then I find someone which can answer the questions and this way I can do a much more thorough market research. *I hope*

Thanks for reading, and do share :)

weekly updates

As the heading indicates, I am going to try for weekly updates. I guess that if you have read anything I've written you know that I tend to get pretty wordy. I love writing and I have a lot of thoughts and ideas which I want to communicate. But at this point I've felt like updating daily is more a chore that I need to do rather than something inspiring and any time I start writing I tend to spend more time than I really would like. I will try to make an update a week for now and see how that feels.

I have heard the idea that you should always write something every day on your blog even if it's just one line. That was the reason that I started off doing that, but I also believe that you need to listen to yourself in most everything you do. At this point in time I feel that it would help me utilize my time and energy more effectively and hopefully it would also lead to better content here, if I published once a week instead of every day. So let's do the listening thing and see how that feels.

I have spent much time the last couple of days actually visualizing my ideas and it's not too shabby! I really have a quite clear view of what I want to do now, I am working on my business plan and it's coming together and I am starting on writing my budgets. So perhaps something is already happening? As soon as I have those parts together I am moving on to the next steps. I have some ideas of what I want to do but I am not sure about the details. But one of the things I want to do is finding a mentor to really get down into the idea and talk about the values and pinpoint the entrepreneurial nerve through the years to come. I have decided to try for the mentor program at Almi which would be a great help.

Anyhow, those things are still a bit further into the future.