Mentor, ziehvater, mentori, padre affidativo... you name it

This Autumn is gonna bring new waves our way, we know that for sure. 

Our new logo???

We carried on with our mentoring sessions today with Isolta Oy (liiketoimintasovellus.fi). We have the sessions once a month. There are altogether 4 different companies to be mentored and other times all of us meet together and other times there's just our team and the mentor. Today we were discussing our future and all the possibilities in it. One of the main subjects was money. We were wondering about questions like what different opportunities does GlobeOut have for earning money as a business? We have been thinking about affiliate marketing but it is good to have other options too. However, even more important at this point is where could we find funding from? Any ideas? We've got a few ideas on these topics so we'll be working on solving them first. But in case anybody has any suggestions, we're more than happy to hear you out.

Our mentor interviews us every now and then. Every time there's a new subject and we discuss it through our own experiences with our company and product. Today the subject was marketing. We're gonna post the video once it is out in the open so be patient and wait for it. (Unfortunately the interviews are in Finnish so those who don't know that beautiful language yet, you'll need to wait until you do or email us and we'll translate it for you.)

Have a great week people!

Back in Business

Now that the summer is officially over it's time for some serious entrepreneuring!

Here's a sneak peak for our upcoming fall with GlobeOut:

Intensive programming

Would YOU be interested in joining our team?

one step closer achieving our goal and making people smile

getting fit and inspired in the beautiful nature

We are determined to do whatever it takes to push it through the fall

What's the fall without any fun?

Sweet, Sweeter, Sweetest

What's the business without learning?

Until the next time... Have a super fantastic day ya'll!

If Opportunity Doesn't Knock, Build a Door

It’s a lesson we have learned during the last year or so. If you sit home and wait your life to turn out how you want it to be, would you believe your dreams would come true? Well, yes, if your dream is to sit at home.

I know this girl who wasn’t sure what she wanted from life. One day she decided to make a list of things she likes to do. Things she enjoys. Things that makes her happy. Once she got her list done it was obvious what she wanted. Now she works hard to achieve her goals and dreams to have a happy life. Isn’t that what we all want?

But as we have witnessed, making dreams to become your reality isn’t easy. At all. Sometimes you have to put yourself out there. Come out your comfort zone. Take risks. When you do something you don’t feel comfortable in, you will be proud of yourself you did it anyway. It’s a total ego boost. Who cares if you made few mistakes on the way? Mistakes are the ones you can laugh about later. Those are the moments you will remember to maybe not to do ever again but still you when you look back at them an instant smile comes to your face. Actually we should do a blog post about the mistakes we have done, would be fun!

At the end I could say that we haven’t been sitting at home waiting for miracles to happen, we have definitely built some doors and we recommend it to EVERYONE! Being afraid is not always a bad thing, remember that. Find out what makes you happy, get inspired and build lots and lots of doors!

Barbara Streisand wishes you GOOD WEEKEND!

OMG, I just found this from my files of links and I just had to post it! So funny!!!

http://www.gobarbra.com/hit/new-171044242e51673cc2ce2f534e8f78cd

Just like the first day at school

Today we had a meeting with Reino Meriläinen from Isolta, who is going to be our mentor for the next year. We went through the mentoring plan for the coming year and we got super excited about it. They have at the moment four companies to mentor and all of the companies are very different from each other. Which we feel is a great thing, you get different prospects for your idea and get to know other types of companies as well.

During the year we will go through almost every aspects of creating or maintaining a successful company from how to write a business plan to recruiting the right people. We are so lucky to be part of something like this! They are writing articles about the experience and if you interested to read more about the program or their products, check out their blog:

http://liiketoimintasovellus.fi/blogi/

Nea and magician Joni Pakanen check out www.jonipakanen.com

Susanna and Reino

Nea, magician Joni and Susanna watching some pitches

They videotaped the meeting and will post the best parts of it in their blog

Nea and the cool microphone :)

Susanna giving a pitch

Reino putting the camera ready for the interview

So all and all it was a great day and we couldn't be more happy! Like we talked with Reino today, the startup scene has changed a lot during few years and people are more and more helpful to one another. Everyone is very encouraging and it feels great to get to help out others as well. So now weekend is coming, weather is getting better and better every day and Vappu is just around the corner. Have a great weekend everyone and enjoy Vappu and the weather!

Social Media rules

Hey people, just to let you know that GlobeOut has started to conquer the world. Now we are also available on Facebook and Twitter with the name GlobeOut!!! Have a great weekend.

Be there or be Square!

Once again we proved how important taking part of different events is for start-up companies. In Pasila there was an international event for international students organized by HAAGA-HELIA. It was about how to be an entrepreneur in Finland. They had different guest speakers, an idea corner where the visitors could develop their business ideas, networking and also some stands where different start-up companies could showcase their business. We had our own stand which was very exciting and the whole event turned out to be a great success.

                                                        Thumbs up for GlobeOut!

                              Yummy chocolate covered strawberries keep entrepreneuers going

                 GlobeOut girls Susanna and Nea posing with Jani, owner and CEO of BetPredator.com

                                   HAAGA-HELIA start-up school coaches Kalle and Tommo

                                                                    Viet's Corner!

                       “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”




As you can see we had a good time and got plenty of new connections. We have been looking for a good team to test our demo version (which by the way will be ready in a month) and got many new connections and interest on that! 


And now when it's final we have the honor to announce that we got in for a mentoring program. Our mentor for the next year will be Reino Meriläinen from Arkhimedes. It's not only an accounting program provider but also they are experts in creating business plans. They interact with their customers and truly care about each and every one of them. We can't wait to start working with them and to be mentored as by the sound of the program's menu it all seems pretty awesome! 

http://liiketoimintasovellus.fi/blogi/ (in Finnish)

We wouldn't have been here without a fair called Oma Yritys 2012. Arkhimedes had it's own stand there and they had a chance to practise pitching in front of the video camera. Susanna pitched and what lead to another we won a competition and they wanted to take us in their mentoring program. All you need is encouragement and a positive attitude!

Ahh… Spring and all the colors which come along

What do you reckon these things have in common: Spring, Sun, Easter, Sparkling wine and bright colors? There is only one answer to this, the new Symbio room for HAAGA-HELIA Start-Up School’s students. The Campus in Porvoo has provided a beautiful room for us where we have a chance to do our magic towards the future. Here are some pictures for you to enjoy the beauty.

Us.

The three companies that have the chance to change the world.



The room.

How important are social events for startups?

Lately we have attended many different events and fairs mostly in Finland and they all differ from each other quite a bit. Last week we attended Oma Yritys 12 fair in Wanha Satama. It was 2 days and included top speakers, pitch competitions, mentoring and different stands to help you with your own company. Only a week before we attended HotSpot seminar and now we are taking a part of HAAGA-HELIA startup school opening ceremonys in Porvoo and Pasila campuses. We also held panel discussion for about 12 different startup companies in HAAGA-HELIA Porvoo campus.

Why do we attend to all of these? Is it necessary for us to get ourselves into all sorts of events and what is the outcome?

Obviously we go for these kind of events because we feel they are helpful for us in many ways. We get to build our network by talking with influential people involved with the startup industry. We get new ideas and valuable feedback. And most importantly, we let people know about us and our idea. Also to be able to help other startups is really important and it shows you are "professional" and interested in other startups as well.
 
So what if we wouldn't go to all these events? We would probably get more work done with our product and get other things done faster. We probably wouldn't spend that much money for tickets, gas etc.
We would have not won a lawyer services or meet other amazing people to help us out and pitching would be even more bigger pain in the ass right now. So many things would be unknown without the events we attended.


So I believe that one event can change your startup forever and I personally encourage all startups to go out there and let people know about your idea. Making mistakes are OK and you should not be afraid of that. Trust me, we have messed up embarassing amount of times but we are still alive. Talk to as many people as possible. Be prepared with your pitch and most importantly be yourself and have fun. Try to help others and make friends. With these we have succeeded reaching our goals better than we would have thought. Get out of your apartment and let people know about your idea, you never know what impact one event might have for your idea!

Friends with benefits

We spent this week in Helsinki having an intensive course about presentation skills. We decided to take this course since we wanted to improve our presentations and get rid of the stress we feel sometimes before performing. We all have very strong backgrounds in public speaking and performing but we felt that little practice on the selling side might come as a useful tool in the future. 

We packed our bags headed to Helsinki to live in Nea’s grandparents’ studio.  This naturally scared us a little bit since we are not only close friends, business partners and school mates but we also live in the same building. We see each other every day and we spend most of our free time together too. The only time we are separated is when we sleep in our own apartments. And during this week that own private space was taken away from us. But who would have thought that we were capable of living in total peace and harmony! Surely the entire studio was like one big mattress and dinner was eaten while watching MTV on someone’s bed but we had fun. And that is what reminded us of why we wanted to start our own business; to do what we want, when we want and with whom we want and most importantly to have fun while we are doing the stuff we love. 

Life is too short to spend 8 hours a day 5 days a week on doing something that makes you miserable. It’s not easy to start your own company and it takes a lot of time and effort but when you do it with your friends and you enjoy what you do it is worth it. A lot of people told us in the beginning to reconsider about starting our company because we are such good friends. “Three girls can’t never make it because there will be too much drama!” they said. Of course there will be drama! It is part of life and it is only natural that people have different feelings and sometimes those feelings can cause arguments. But the beauty of friendships is that you can talk about it and others will listen. Good communication is one of the key tools for good business. Good friendships can create beautiful businesses.

The power to us

After Berlin we decided that there is a lot to be done and now we have a chance to concentrate on those things full time. We had a meeting where we went through the assignments to be done for this semester and located them into our schedule. This helped us quite a bit to realize what will be keeping us busy for the next few months: marketing research, social media research, financial plan etc.

Each one of us went to different seminars and lectures at the ITB Berlin fair. We wrote a report of the notes of the lectures as most of them were really interesting and useful. We got quite a few pages to be able to adapt to our business and future. We are so very welcome, yeah, and it’s awesome. The ITB Berlin fair had many lectures on different social media aspects and talked about the importance and the future of different social media channels. We’re on the right track and want to work hard out to get our way towards our goal.

Hilma started doing a social media plan for GlobeOut and communication plan. I myself started working on our financial plan and Nea will continue working with our double trouble planning the demo to its end.

We were asked to be key speakers at the opening event of HAAGA-HELIA Start-up School and we nailed it! This was on Thursday and we were really excited to get a chance to tell our story. It was nice to realize how far we have come and how much help we have received from all around. Thank you, people.

The evening continued to Ahjo Bar & Club where there was a mingle evening for the women in the game industry. We thought we would go and connect and that is exactly what we did. I talked with a lawyer from a law firm called Aldea which is situated in Helsinki and they are partly specialized in the game industry. It was really interesting to get new tips and ideas for the future. We were also very excited to be able to tell gaming people about our idea and how they got excited too.

Towards the end of the week we had one more meeting with one of our coaches who gave us a couple of tips for the marketing research which we will carry out during this spring. We will also be joining an International day that the Start-Up School of HAAGA-HELIA is organizing on the 11^th of April. We will have our own stand at the event which equals up to the best opportunity to tell our idea to a lot of people and get direct feedback from it. This spring will be full of different events and happenings which are good for us and the whole company so we are really lucky and looking forward to these events.

On Saturday we entered a seminar called HotSpot 2012, which was held at the BioRex hall, in Helsinki. This seminar is for young entrepreneurs with about 6 or 7 different kinds of speakers who told their stories. The hall was full of people and the speakers were phenomenal. We noticed that each speaker had their own will and had done things the way they wanted keeping their own ideas as the most important ones. This gave us a new perspective towards our GlobeOut and our company. Again, we are extremely happy we joined this event. They are investing in the young entrepreneurship in Finland at the moment and we appreciate it a lot. All these kinds of events make us even happier to form GTP Group in Finland.

http://www.hotspot2012.fi/

Ich Bin eine Berliner

Let me just start saying that last week was... AMAZING! 

We headed over to Berlin, Germany where we took part of the biggest international travel fair, ITB. After an intensive planning of what, when and how we were all really excited about going there. We had planned a good schedule which included taking part of some lectures and interviewing exhibitors. The main idea was to educate ourselves more, do tons of networking and have a little fun.

Interviews went really well and I think we got some pretty interesting connections and made tons of new friends. Right now we are collecting some information together and figuring out the next step. By the way, we have now THE MOST COOLEST business cards and we proudly were handing them out to the people we met.

Like I said, we took part of some of the lectures they had and I have to give props to the ITB fair organizers for having a big variety of them. Sadly, most of the lectures were held in German and since we are beginners with the language it was pretty difficult to follow up. Some of them had headphones and you could hear the translated version in English but personally I think it didn't work out that well. We found it odd that if the travel fair is international, shouldn't most of the lectures also be held in a language that the majority of the listeners could understand them?

Enough of complaining because the lectures just confirmed us even more that indeed there is a need for something like GlobeOut. Speaking about GlobeOut, we have done some major changes with the whole concept and we will keep you updated on it when everything is confirmed.

Back to Berlin. We all fell in love with the city. It has so much history behind it and at the same time it's very young and hip. We had a guided bus tour around the beautiful city for a couple of hours and visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was quite wakening, however, very interesting. Other than that we managed to explore the beauty of the city in different areas among the 3,5 million people. Berlin is one of the cities in the world that has a very friendly atmosphere and everybody is welcome.

We stayed at this hostel called David's Hostel which was few train stations from the Zoologischer Garten station. The atmosphere was really really really good, people were nice and we even left a little picture of ourselves on the wall there! This is definitely a place to go back to the next time we go to Berlin!

Remember the past, plan the future and live today

Our company went to have a small holiday week in Lapland to get relaxed after all the hard work. We did a lot of skiing and snowboarding. Hilma is a snowboarding instructor and a very good one of those. She even managed to teach Nea how to slide down the hill without falling! On our way back to south we had a stop by in Kajaani. There we had a meeting with the one of the teachers of Kajaani University of Applied Scienses to talk about possible co-working between us and their students. The meeting went well and we made yet another great connection. 

On Tuesday we had our company’s very first board meeting. We decided that Hilma will be given the rights of holder of procuration since she was they only one of us without those rights. Nea has those rights as a CEO and Susanna has them because she is the chairwoman of our board. We also discussed about the next summer and what should we do during it. We all live in different towns so we need to have a game plan for the summer to keep things running.

Rest of the week we spent on preparing for the ITB Berlin-fairs. We did a lot of research about the companies and the lectures that will be held. We also decided to do a little bit of research about backpackers and their travel process. And we had a meeting with Double Trouble about the progress of our Demo-version and how we could help them out in developing it.

Next week we will be in Berlin getting to know the travel industry today and in the future. One of the lectures we are looking forward is called “Technology trends: the google perspective”. We find this one very interesting since if Google is coming harder on the travel industry we might have some serious competition. We are also looking forward for “Mobile Travel Trends, Forecasts and Predictions” to see what’s new and where should we be heading. We will tell you when we know!

A big step towards the future

WOHOOO!!! So now it’s official and we’ve got the company papers in our hands. The whole week was full of happy things happening. On Monday we met with our lawyer and signed the founders’ agreement. On Wednesday we had an appointment with a consultant called Harri Kari who helped us last year with our financing plan. He gave us such good advice on many things about the financial part of our future. Later on the same day we also had an appointment with a bank attendant where we opened a bank account and got everything going from that point of view. Now we just need to wait for the final decision on our company’s name and it’s all real, for real.

We have been busy with our visit to Berlin next month. We will be going to the ITB fair which is held from the 7^th until the 11^th of March 2012 at the Messe Berlin fair center. We will be going there for three days to obtain what the industry has to offer for us and our company. The fair is said to be the biggest travel fair in the world with 26 different halls and about 9970 different exhibitors this year.

We went through all the companies that will have a stand at the ITB fair. One page had about 50 companies on them and there were 201 pages all together. We found a good punch of different kinds of companies that could be suitable for us in a way or another. The idea is to spend our time smart and concentrate on the most important things. There are also quite a few seminars where anybody may enter without extra fees. We did a little research on them and picked up the ones that match with our needs. Now there is a schedule done for our 3 days at the fair as the idea is to be separated from each other so that we derive the most possible profit from the fair. There is still a lot to do so we will be very busy until the next time.

Running as fast as we can

This week our plan was to work on the demo-version so much that the demoboys could start programming. Honestly, we had no idea where we got ourselves into! Even if we did a lot of research about the whole developing a demo-version… it’s a LOT of work. But we are so excited, determinate and full of boom factor to WOW the whole world with GlobeOut.

We started the week with a very interesting meeting with Tapani Siltala, who not only works for Karttakeskus, but is also the connection in Finland for Bing maps and Google maps. We had a long discussion about whether to choose Bing or not and whether Google is still a better choice for us in the end. With Bing you can use their maps for free for 90 days and afterwards the cost consists of the amount of users. Google maps can be used for free until you have 25,000 clicks per day. We still have lots to talk about and we are not in a hurry making any big decisions like this yet.

Tuesday and Wednesday we did more research. We found great websites worth looking for. Check out www.quora.com. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write and share new content on in the web. If you want to get connected it is definitely a place to be!


We found some tools to share documents to make our life a bit easier. With www.dropbox.com you will never have to e-mail a document to yourself nor carry a memory stick with you anymore. We highly recommend this to everyone! We also use www.flowdock.com to chat, share e-mails and documents. They have a 30 day free-trial so we recommend you to try it out. One of our biggest problems was to plan a schedule for every week. We all have a very busy timetable and planning a meeting was getting very difficult. Now we have a calendar in Google Docs where we can write down our schedules and change it if necessary. All of us are able to make changes and the rest will see it right away. This is an awesome tool for small groups!

Few more links doesn’t hurt anyone, right? We have had major issues with pitching. Somehow we can’t get it together and every time we pitch, it’s somehow different. Harvard Business School has a really helpful application on the Internet that will guide you through writing the perfect elevator pitch. Check it out here: http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/. There are a lot of tips for pitching but this slide is a must see: http://www.slideshare.net/garr/pitching-tips-presentation-tips-from-the-pitching-coach-presentation.

Enough of links… for now. On Friday we collected tons of books that could be useful for us and, man, did we get some really interesting ones. Posts about them will be coming up soon! Also we did a little gallup around our Campus area. We walked around interviewing as many students by showing them pictures of the front page of GlobeOut with different visual effects. We got really important information about which looks good and which doesn’t Next week is going to be the most important week for us so far. We are finally sending our Ltd. papers forward and soon GTP Group will be a real company. We are very excited!

Until the next time, don’t forget to smile!

 

Introducing Double Trouble

Last week we mentioned that there were only three of us left but you never know what happens in a week. Past week has indeed been super fantastic! Now we are back to five members in our team and this is due to the most amazing news: we got ourselves coders for the demo version of GlobeOut! And not just any random dudes from the cellar wearing “I’m from planet anti-social”-T-shirts. No, our coders are super nice and easy-to-work-with  and… wait for it… TWINS. Our own Double Trouble.

So we are finally getting things rolling. There are few pumps on the road we still have to figure out, mostly technical stuff, but it should be easier with our trouble solvers. One of the technical issues includes map services but we are having a meeting with one of the biggest map service providers for the next week. So we’ll see if we are going to be working with them in the future.

There are a lot of technical things we need to go through with Double Trouble and figure out the order in which each function will be developed. That means we will have a lot of work cut out for us. But it is time to remove our nail polish and get our hands dirty.

As ITB fairs (held in Berlin) are getting closer we are preparing ourselves for some heavy networking. So we are getting more familiar with this great book called “Little Black Book of Connections” by Jeffrey Gitomer. It is giving us some good tools for networking and some insight on how to use the connections you have made. So let’s get connected!

And we want iPads!

Until the next week and the future: