"There's a couple of things America got right: cars and freedom"

Where's Dave?..Dave drove a Ford...

and one from Audi

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via Virgin Mobile USA

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Another beautiful video featuring New York...and the funny thing is that the beauty of it has almost nothing to do with the video...this city is beautiful irrespectively of how you film it...

Mindrelic - Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

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Something resignated with me in the latest post by Mike Arrington on Uncrunched.com:

There’s one last thing that entrepreneurs need, too. Your [...investor...] support. Starting a company is a lonely thing, and there are usually people in your life who think you’re crazy for doing it. Sometimes an entrepreneur just needs to know you actually believe in them to keep their morale up during the tough times.

Golden words...and one can't get the true meaning of those without trying to build a company from scratch.

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there's a million ways to get respect,
but there's one kind of respect that is undeniable,
there's one kind of respect that no one can take away from you...WIN

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It's been a while since I wanted to write about how (and perhaps, why) Campalyst not only survived, but thrived after Garage48. The "48-Hour Startup" story by Businessweek made this post a must.

So here it goes; a summary of the three most critical things and events that helped us turn a project into a company (ok, a startup for now:). Hopefully, other startups coming out of Garage48, Startup Weekend, Seedhack or any other hackathon will find it usefull (feedback us always welcome! here in comments or @jevgenijs on Twitter).

• Keep bringing the good news, every single day! Someone has to take the role of keeping the team motivated to continue working on the project. It is usually too early to see your project becoming a thriving business, and there is no revenue stream, and you have to keep up with your day job...there are tons of things that will prevent each and single team member from continuing the work. So someone has to bring the good news daily: find a friend that will start using your product (no need to tell the rest of the team you bribed him with a box of beer for that), get a mention on some random blog (there are millions of those, one will definitely want to write about you), find an article that proves you have a chance to go big (you can find proof for anything on the Internet). No need for big achievements, everything counts in those very early days.

• Ask for help! Other entrepreneurs have gone through this mess and will be willing to help! Find a mentor (or as many as possible), enter accelerator program, apply to a startup competition, go to startup meetups, do everything to get help from other people! In our case, we were lucky to get accepted to Startup Sauna, which actually gave us all of the abovementioned. Tons of feedback and practical help from mentors (serial entrepreneurs that built and sold businesses), competitive spirit giving extra adrenaline to work overnight, and access to fellow entrepreneurs in Finland and Silicon Valley. To illustrate the role of the program: right before going to Finland we were accepted to present at Mini Seedcamp Stockholm. No surprise, we weren't accepted to Seedcamp family. We came back (with the same idea!) after graduating Startup Sauna and pitched Campalyst at Mini Seedcamp NY...and finally got in! You make conclusions.
  

• Build a team with the same passion, as you build the product! When looking at the fist months of Campalyst, I should admit it was the easiest month in our 6 month history. Each month, each new achievement, each new level brings additional challenges. So if you don't start building a team strong enough to go together through any challenge the very next day after the hackaton, you might be dead after the first wave of success. I have seen and heard of huge egos of people coming up with the idea (claiming it's all about the idea, not the contribution from the other team members), and I have seen destroyed culture already during hackaton (calling people names is easy, retoring relationship is way harder). We made a simple rule: everyone is equal. Ideas are cheap and plenty (and you will realize it very soon) and talented engineers are hard to find. And though we have disagreements from time time we are always able to come up with the solution that is best for the whole team and for the company.

That's it about hackathons. In the light of Startup Sauna Warmups, I get questions about the program from people applying or considering to apply. I will write a separate post on this, but if you can't wait till then, just ping me on Twitter (@jevgenijs).

Tallinn, Estonia on the way to Arctic15h

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Building a startup is hard. I mean it's damn hard! Sleepless nights and jet lags, mile long to-do list and exploding mailbox, constant stress from not knowing what challenges a new day will bring (and it definitely will, even if it's Sunday!)...but then...

...but then you get an email from a client. a happy client. "didn't expect much from your product, but gave it a try, and aparently it works! solves my problem, so thank you!"

And all the challenges you face as an entrepreneur just fade away and you get tons of new energy to keep hitting the wall even harder, as you now know that someone on the other side of that wall has a problem and you can fix that.

Isn't that why we build startups?

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As the concluding note to the 5 days of absolute awesomeness, extremely hard work, mentoring sessions with top investors and entreprenuers, and 3 hours of sleep per day on average (yeap, this is what they call "Seedcamp Week"), I would like to share (meaning writing down not to forget) the lessons learned by our team and me personally.

• "Show confidence": if you're saying you're going to conquer the world you better tell it with confidence! If you've missed the presentation by GrabCAD or Transferwise go check their pitches on SoundCloud to understand what I mean. I believe, the confidence in itself answers many questions.

• "Know your competition": you never get away without being asked who is your competition and why you can do better. It doesn't matter if you're talking to a potential customer or investor, this question will be asked and you better know the answer. Following the advice from Steve Blank I have always been keen on meeting our direct and indirect competitors, which to date seem to be playing a crucial role in evolution of Campalyst as a company and as a product.

• "Constantly show progress": at Seedcamp Week I met people, who saw Campalyst right after its birth at Garage48 (48 hours since we started), and people that mentored us at Mini Seedcamp Stockholm (1 month since we started) and later Mini Seedcamp NY (2.5 months since we started). The most positive feedback we've heard was not about the idea, or the product, or the team; it was about our progress. Month by month we keep delivering what we've promised and moving forward and people value that.

• "Never ruin the relationships": we've met so many people during this week, and not always their feedback was positive. Some people just didn't get and openly told so. It would be easy to just stop the conversation and move on, but my advice is to keep the door open. Thank for the feedback and stay in touch, because you never know what might happen next and you don't want to ruin the relationship for life. For us the biggest non-believer in Campalyst from Mini Seedcamp NY turned into our biggest advocate during Seedcamp Week, and one investor invited me for the meeting the very next day after literally destroing us at a mentoring session.

and the last, but I believe the most important lesson for me

• "Listen to your customers": your customers will be able to tell you way more about your product and directions for further development than anyone else on this planet (including yourself). You might get tons of opinions from the people in your circle on why your product is a killer or a dumb idea, but this is only up to your customers to confirm if they see any value in using it. If you've listened to your customers, you will be able to answer questions of any mentor or investor trying to challenge your statements.

Seedcamp Week was absolutely amazing, so many many thanks to the whole Seedcamp Crew for ogranizing it, to all the mentors for giving such a priceless advice and all the teams for doing an extremely hard job at promoting entreprenuership!

All the luck and let me know if I can pay back with any help!

Jevgenijs
London, UK

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Last time I was in Silicon Valley with fellow Startup Sauna teams was full of new discoveries, achievements and fun...but that was my first (ever) visit to both Silicon Valley and the United States. While packing for the trip to San Francisco (July 19 - 23), I was thinking about the "beginners luck". Will Silicon Valley be as friendly to me as the last time? I don't know...but as Robert Scoble said, "if you're building a global brand, you have to be here!"

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Steve Blank expressed a good point about Google+ (not a big fan myself so far. still remember how they let me down with Google Wave :) - Google will use the leverage of AdWords to push Google+ after introducing "pages" for businesses. Didn't think of this before, but it makes total sence. If Google gives some incentives, in a form of AdWords credits, or similar, businesses will endorse Google+ and consumers will follow (creative content produced by the brands).

I guess, I need to give Google+ another chance...

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There's so much I want (need) to write about...About how Campalyst started at Garage48, about Startup Sauna (and the amazing feeling when we won it), and most recently about winning Seedcamp NYC and becoming part of Seedcamp family. These have been incredible 4 months! Still amazed how much can happen in such a short time period. I mean, really? There was no Campalyst just four months ago? Crazy...and I like it!

Photo: me pitching the idea of Campalyst (called Extended Insights those days) at Garage48 Riga.

London, UK

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Brilliant words by Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe!

London, UK

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We closed Campalyst's founders meeting yesterday (will blog later on the subject...but promise, exciting times ahead!) with this video. Why? Cause hearing "I am all in!" from the people, you chose to build a company with, is as inpiring as this ad. Adidas is all in, we're all in!

Riga, Latvia

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I asked Steve Blank, whom we met during the trip to Silicon Valley with fellow Startup Sauna entrepreneurs, about how we should address the issue of competition. Should we cautiously watch what they do? Should we carefully study their tools and technology? Or should we execute on our idea without paying much attention to the competitors?

The answer was “Go meet all of them! Look them in the eyes and see who gets scared, you or them. In any case you will learn a lot.” And so we did. During the coming days we met a number of companies (they are competitors, so no names and free promotion from my sideJ) that are trying to address the same problem as Campalyst, namely, measurement of results from social media presence.

The discussions we had were quite open, friendly and insightful. We spoke about the problems the industry is facing, the feedback we get from the clients, technological challenges, working with Facebook and Twitter,  and many other things. I am not sure if meeting competitors would be as easy in Europe as it was in the Silicon Valley, but I definitely doubt European competitors would be so open in revealing their experience. However, Silicon Valley is a different universe by many parameters.

Coming back to Steve Blank’s advice: we really did learn a lot! Some of the people we met have been working on their products longer than us, some had sophisticated technological solutions, some had more experience with VC backing and already raised financing rounds. Each of us had a unique perspective and experience and I hope everybody learned something new from those meetings.

Conclusion? Follow Steve Blank’s advice; go meet as many competitors as possible! And as an additional motivation, I can tell that we didn’t get scared. Through discussions we realized our unique competitive advantage, which is having domain expertise, and understanding how marketers and agencies think and act. Understanding this fundamental difference from competition gave us additional motivation to execute on the idea. So go and meet your competitors and find out if you have something unique to bring to the table!

Jevgenijs
NYC
June 14^th, 2011

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Those of you following the Campalyst story (thanks for that and stay tuned! there is so much more to come!) might be aware that we visited Silicon Valley in early June with fellow entrepreneurs from Startup Sauna program.

During an extremely intensive week we managed to meet such tech idols as Steve Blank (I assume no introduction needed), Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Marten Mikos, CEO of Eucalyptus and former CEO of MySQL, Sami Inkinen of Trulia and Katherina Fake of Hunch.com. Moreover, we had a number of meetings with media and PR agencies in the beautiful city of San Francisco and even a personal interview with…no kidding… Robert Scoble! (you can watch the interview on Robert’s YouTube channel if you don’t believe me).

There is so much I would love to share about the things I’ve learned during the trip (and I promise to write about those at some point), but today I would like to focus on what was the most striking and mind opening lesson for me personally.

The lesson came from a meeting with Jury Engestrom, founder of Ditto and Jaiku. I asked Jury a question if a startup from the Baltics founded by first time entrepreneurs had a chance to get attention of tech bloggers and angel investors in the Silicon Valley. The answer was unexpected: “It doesn’t matter who you are and where you came from. Everything that matters is what you do and how good your product is!”

As simple as that! The meeting with Jury was closing the weeklong trip, so I was able to apply his answer to the feedback we got at the numerous meetings in the Silicon Valley. What I realized was that it really didn’t matter who we were and where we came from; we were judged purely based on how good Campalyst was and what we’d achieved to date. Yes, Steve Blank (given his Lithuanian roots) and Steve Jurvetson (whose parents are from Estonia) were curious about our Baltic origin, but the feedback was not about that. The feedback was on whether the product is good and if we can execute to turn it into profitable business.

Moreover, potential clients we met didn’t even care if we’re a startup or a big corporation, or are we from Europe or US (one client was sure we were from New York City, just visiting Silicon Valley). The only thing they cared if our product can help them sell more. That’s it!

As the conclusion to this long post, I would like to take an ambitious mentoring role and give my piece of advice to all fellow Baltic and Nordic entrepreneurs: if you want to conquer the world, leave your small market/country/nation complex at home! Hide it as deep as possible and think and talk bold! If your product is good you will be welcome in the Silicon Valley and NYC (more about Campalyst’s trip to NYC in the coming posts). Remember Skype, MySQL and GetJar, they all came from our region and they’ve made it to the end of the rainbow. So can you, right?

Dusseldorf Airport, on the way from NYC to Helsinki

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