The Spirit of 'Why Not?' - An IdeaLab Sum-up.

Landed in Dublin, sitting in the bus back to Galway. Perfect time to collect and organize all impressions of the IdeaLab in Vallendar. It was an amazing event, as good as last year when I visited it the first time. Thanks to the WHU students who organized such a large event with a great atmosphere and interesting speeches. Thumbs up!

The IdeaLab was all about ideas, emerging thoughts, lived creativity, startup life, and of course business as usual, especially a strong focus on financing. On Friday evening when everyone was having exhausting parties in Koblenz or Vallendar, Ben and me went to the one and only Korova Bar and talked a while about our product, new market trends, the Internet economy and where we see the future and how our internal roadmap reflects everything. Actually we did the same the next day until 3:30am. There have been some good discussions about strategies and we recognized how hard it is for everyone to understand our elevator pitch because we already imagine a world where Tagcrums is used in everyday life and where it already provides the full customer value. Same holds true for the business model (ad-based revenues) which relies on assumptions not transparent or intuitive for all participants. For investors we have clear answers, of course.

To come to the point of this post, as I studied at the University of Waterloo in Canada they had the slogan "The Spirit of 'Why Not?'" for their 50th birthday. A good fit in an entrepreneurial context.

"As George Bernard Shaw used to say: Some people see things as they are and say why. I see things that never were and say why not?" As often used by Robert F. Kennedy

As entrepreneurs we have to look into the future and try to shape it. Explaining your product's purpose requires returning back to reality and making it clear what exactly can be achieved and how value is generated. Customer development is a difficult topic but with all the great feedback from the IdeaLab we learned a lot and are really looking forward to invite the first beta testers in a few weeks.

P. S.

Because the future cannot be predicted many startups fail during the process. But hey, everything in life demands some risk to succeed! At the Osbourne Clark workshop with excellent lawyer Konstantin Ewald, two of the anwers to my questions ended in something like "...to become successful you often have to risk something!". True.

P.P.S.

I liked the pitch of Play & Build who really put the focus on ideas and cool projects, less the business side. I think with Tagcrumbs we combine the best of both worlds.

P.P.P.S

Some more link love to Barcoo.de which seem to have a great product with a technological foundation (that's what I like as an IT guy). They mentioned semantic search which sounds familiar for me working at an Institute that explores in large scale how semantic technologies can influence people and businesses. Their product seems well-suited for this kind of technology but focus, focus, focus!

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