What has Demola Taught us?

This blog entry will be dedicated to tell about Demola’s and Business Kitchens in general, and what these great institutions have done for us. Business Kitchen is the place in Oulu for entrepreneurs and startups to work and hang out together, and we don't think there is another place for this purpose at least not one we're aware of. Demola is working inside Oulu Business Kitchen and its' goal is to bring companies and students closer to each other. For companies it offers rather cheap labour to innovate new ideas and solve their problems, as well as showcase the talents working in these teams. For students it offers interesting projects, contacts and place to show ones' abilities and skills. This and much more can be found from Demola’s website www.demola.fi.

Demola team. These guys has helped us a lot during our project. Thank you guys!

Now we will move on to more personal experiences about Demola during our project. First encounter with demola for me (Antti) was when they celebrated their first birthday in Oulu at university. They had cake and coffee and because Antti is into free stuff, he wanted to listen what they had to say. One thing led to another, and a week or two later I found myself from Sanoma accelerators' meeting. As said in the earlier entry there was free beer, and more than that interesting people. Thats one thing about Demola. You meet people that otherwise you would not meet. Plenty of people in Demola’s projects are foreign students so it’s good for your language and you can learn a lot about different cultures.

Since then Demola has kept me busy. I have tried to participate almost every activity there has been including

• Reflection meeting
• No Slide pitching
• Presentation skills by Demola
• Demola Jams

Reflection meetings are the most regularly occuring as they are usually held each thursday after the webinar. These meetings are meant to track our process, and make sure that assignments are clear to us. I think these meetings have been meaningful, although not too many people have been present in these meeting. It’s always good opportunity to see how other groups are doing and get some good advice and peer mediation on how to move forward.

Antti and Janne doing some serious participation in reflection meeting

Other than reflection meetings, and the fact that Antti uses the Business Kitchens facilities almost everyday, Demola has arranged us some interesting events. Pitching events of course are the highlight of the Demola programmes and an occasion to show off your project and progress to various people from demola and everyone else present in the pitching event. There is an entry about our no slide pitch written few weeks ago. Next week we will have our next pitch and probably some material about it will show up here in our blog during the next week.

Front line, suit up, No Slide Pitch

Demola’s presentation skills work shop was probably the best presentation workshop where I have been in. The focus was on developing our pitches and presenting on stage. This workshop was simply brilliant and enabled us to realise strengths and weaknesses of our presentations.

Demola Jam was held last weekend. Two guys Janne and Jere from Demola Tampere came over, and tried to help us in creating better demos and MVPs. They also refocused our actions from thinking and dreaming towards doing and trying things out. Sounds simple enough, but at least for our group it was a good thing to hear again. And again. Most of the times we repeat the same questions without actually doing anything to learn the answers. In Demola Jams we went out and did questionnaires for real people about our projects.

As we learnt in Demola Jams no one cares about your opinion. Didn't say anything about sisters though:

In conclusion, what we learnt from demola is a multiple of things. Besides the occasional food and drinks, Demola and Business Kitchen community has provided us with lots of support and events that have been very useful to develop our project and us as people. Thank You Demola! Keep it up.

Ps. Check how project is doing at www.thefairlabels.com or at our facebook page www.facebook.com/FairLabels

We are living interesting times right now

We haven't been posting anything in a while, but despite that there has been some serious business going on! We attended the Demola's presentation skills workshops, where we were able to develop and practice on our pitches. Also there was a Demola Jam -event, where two co-ordinators from Demola Tampere came here and gave us some awesome tips on how to develop our project. But first things first.

At last we got picture of the whole team!

The last webinar A.K.A Doomsday no. 1 took place yesterday and our team wasn't really sure what to expect. The end of the last week was a kind of a disappointment to us, because we didn't manage to give enough effort to our project. Well, at least Antti worked with our MVP all night long like a workaholic. The main thing that we accomplished was to get into the group of 20.

Got it?

The good thing was that we had been in the list of top invested ideas in Sanoma accelerator for a couple of weeks, and the idea had been mentioned in at least 3 or 4 times. Also our contact people from Sanoma and Demola poured us with confidence and assured us of the faith they had on us. At this point we were quite sure that we had all the tools to make it to the top20. But when Wednesday came, the distrust towards our idea came as well.

The due day of final voting was on Monday and big surprise, NONE of us remembered to give their votes (sorry for everyone about that!). The only criteria to get into the desired top 20 was to get enough those goddamn VOTES we didn't give (SORRY!). That made the Wednesday night super exiting, or terrifying depending on the point of view. But luckily our criteria was the first thing, lessening the nervousness and excitement. WE MADE IT TO THE  T O P  2 0!! And thanks to our votes of the best e-commerce idea (that's our idea, didn't see that was coming?) we made it to the top 10. And we were absolutely shocked.


After all this hard work this thing is starting to pay off and we are now a bit closer (about 200 ideas that is) to our Amsterdam trip. But before a bigger celebration we have to do some more things to get into the top 5, to be the group that is the best of the best. So from now on this is going to be nothing but hard work and pitche$. Like we like to say, make good pitches and money will follow!

The game is on.

Key to success ;)