Week 6 of Startup Journey. 3rd full week of July. Finland is closed. Everybody seems to be on summer holiday enjoying the archipelago or eating ice cream in the city center. All except our up and coming startups! When everyone else seems to be in deep sleep mode, we figured out that it will be perfect time to do some experimentation.

Teams where quite exhausted after our trip to Kotka Startup Festival and the Boostcamp we had before that. Summer had been very intensive for them.

In order to help them recover we wanted to give them some new energy thorugh experimentation. Tuesday we started with a small "Teekkarijäynä" - prank competition, because we felt that these kind of "Jäynä's" have lot in common with business. It is all about going out there, talking to the people (customers) and convincing them with new ideas that they have probably never heard about. So for that we had a workshop hosted by Teekkarijäynä competition winner Sami Nieminen. By the way our teams did a fantastic job with their sales skills at Kupittaanpuisto! (Maybe some video footage coming up later).

Teams getting ready to sharpen their sales skills while pranking

Wednesday we had an in-house graphical design workshop where we sorted out different kind of marketing materials. Business cards, roll-ups and different kind of poster designs are essentials of getting your brand out there, so we focused one day entirely to produce those materials with the teams. On our Demo Day you should see the results!

Thursday was again metrics day where we analyzed what has been good and what needs attention. Also on these metrics days we award the winning team of each week and if you are interested about which team has been able to convince the coaches you should come to Sparkup to see our Startup Journey wall!

Besides our weekly community BBQ we also had nice pitching workshop on Friday where we had our alumni Oskar von Wendt from Rekorder and Startup Journey 2016 facilitator Leo Kadieff from Nuoret Yrittäjät to give our teams super valuable feedback about their pitches and ideas!

Work that pitch!

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