Startup Day 2014 Recap – The Theme Was Stories

Startup Day 2014 Recap – The Theme Was Stories

Startup Day 2014 took place at the beautiful venue Munchenbryggeriet, an old brewery in the centre of Stockholm. The event sold out and managed to gather ~1 000 participants, which is not surprising when looking at the program and speakers. Swedish Startup Space was a proud media partner to this great event.

The speaker line-up included some 30 passionate entrepreneurs, journalists and investors from companies such as Bloglovin’, SoundCloud, WIRED, Klarna and Index Ventures who was be sharing their personal stories and experiences.  In addition to the great variety of speakers, around 10 startups also pitched their services to juries of investors and entrepreneurs. Below are some of the highlights picked out by the Swedish Startup Space team.

Hampus Jakobsson

“Solve Real Problems!”, that was the main take away from Hampus’ talk. Hampus’ talk was energetic and to the point, with a lot of great quotes, but that was the most important. At Hampus’ latest venture, Brisk.io, they record all their customer phone calls and listen to these as podcasts so everyone can understand the problems the customers are having.

David Rowan, Wired UK

David Rowan is an expert when it comes to PR and how to pitch journalists, and watching him reading from his inbox was terrifying. It’s crazy that these companies pay PR firms to do their marketing for them. Horrible press releases, and he gets hundreds of them every day.

David urged us to focus on the reason and story as to why a product exists. He exemplified this by showing a few videos from startups with compelling stories.

A few things to take from this talk is to avoid using fake words, fake surveys and express why users should be excited about your product, not why you are.

Louise Eriksson, Vint

Louise did her talk on the topic ”Shitty things you are bound to encounter as a founder”. Her advice was:

• You are always wrong – Friends, family and many others will be doubting you and your business partners will try to find weaknesses in your idea.
• Don’t stop dating until you’ve met the right one – Go to a lot of meetings until you find the correct people to join your venture, both employees, board members and investors.
• You are never good enough – Even if you work 80 hours a week, you will still have stuff left to do

Startup Pitches: A selection of 3

Weld.io

“Responsive prototyping for designers” – that’s what Weld.io is selling and what their founder Tom Söderlund pitched in front of the panel.

Tom did an excellent job pitching their idea, but as an app developer, I agree with the questions that Tom had to answer; “Where do you draw the line? When to go Native, Hybrid or Web?” and so on. I am certain it is a great prototyping tool, hopefully Tom and his team can prove me wrong and take it further.

Cody Coder

Cody Coder and the pitch delivered by Sanna Nilsson in front of the Marta Sjögren, Miriam Grut Norrby and Frank Meehan was about how to enable children to use tech in an active way. The bottom line is that kids should learn how to code and the e-book “Cody Coder” is the way they will help teach them to do so. The team is currently developing an app that will teach kids how to program further and is aiming for 800 000 downloads. The most interesting question Sanna got was whether their focus was B2B or B2C.

Sanna ended her pitch with a fantastic quote: “Do parents want kids to play games or create them?”

Intreat

Intreat is a platform for venues, clubs, restaurants to solve the problem of queing and ordering at events. The users order from their smart phone and go to the dedicated delivery line to pick up their things. The biggest challenge for this team is how much is required by a venue to start using their platform. However, the pitch was delivered very professionally and I think they might be onto something.

Summary

All in all, a great day and another fantastic event put on by Marie and the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship team. A day full of old faces, new faces, plenty of lessons and a copious amount of inspiration.