Week 1 in Finland
Marina Ahoy is in Finland ! Oh… as much as I wish to say that our service is already in major marinas across the country, we have to wait a bit… a bit I mean. We applied to Startup Sauna and made as one of those 2% of 700 applications to get into the program. It started on Monday and yes, the program is going to be intense. So 1:0 for Startup Sauna as we saw ourselves visiting the local marinas and promote our tool besides participating in the program. But again. The program is cool. At the first day I was ripped out from my comfort zone. They had this BMC (Business model canvas) workshop. You may think as I did, what a waste of time, as it is a really popular tool for fresh companies but I was wrong. This ended up as a really useful introduction to let other teams and invited coaches to know what you are up to.
The whole Tuesday was full of shitty pitching and feedback without any mercy from Mike Bradshaw and Juha Ruohonen so let´s skip this one. But on Wednesday we had 16 sessions 1on1 with coaches. Oh and meanwhile I left Relika to the coaches and had a meeting with Wärtsilä, Shift Actions and Mirum downtown Helsinki and got back to Startup Sauna to continue. 17 meetings in a day is actually not too terrifying. Sorry, keep on reading. Two days to come.
The fourth day on Sauna was the 5th of May, a public holiday in Finland. But as we are entrepreneurs, this isn´t our religion. Instead we kicked the shit out in Sauna. KTSO is a very clean official definition for that. So what we succeed, what we failed, what are our planes for the next week and our KPIs. By presenting it we didn´t know that we´ll fail completely in inviting some interesting coaches to lunch on Friday. Yes we failed. We were too late with the invite or we weren’t interesting enough or we picked not the coaches who were available.
Whatever, we failed this time. But hey, there is sunshine and there will be the next week and we are in Finland! We got some hints, some solid contacts and we know we have a great tool. As for the KPIs, we have 10 marinas already using Marina Ahoy, the Android app will be released silently this weekend and I know we have the first marinas from Finland connected next week.