One change that came from this thinking is, about two weeks ago, with a considerable regret, I gave resignation for my job at Flowdock (or Nodeta). So this Friday, 23 July, will be my last day.

I started at Nodeta when the first ideas and concepts of Flowdock was just in the works. The project had only a working name and most of the team wasn’t there even yet. Being there, building and seeing the product take the first few steps to where it’s now, maturing in the end of public beta, it saddens me to leave it behind.

But it seems, building a new product, or rather a new company, is quite long and sometimes tiresome process, which requires a great amount of interest and momentum. Things which I slowly begun losing.

However, it’s been the best job I’ve ever had. I got to work with a completely new product, contributing to the vision and working on interesting things with a great team in a very startup like company.

But I felt wanted something else, and to learn, to do and be better. I think the only way is to focus on things you’re really interested into and leaving something behind. For now I’ll withhold what exactly I’m going to do next, but it’s something different.

I still feel Flowdock is and will be really great product. Building tools to help people to work better is not an easy task, since it’s in the core everything, but it’s definitely possible and important. In any case, this doesn’t mean that Flowdock will slow down. This summer we just got three more people and I wish Flowdock and the team all the luck in the world.

“You will come up with a completely new business idea, learn deep collaboration with design students and come to understand the design and innovation process on a new level.”

I was happy to see how hands on the course seemed and how engaged the students were with their ideas. People seemed to have real ownership and passion which you don’t see that often in school projects.

Anyway, it was great to help out and here are the slides and the stuff mentioned:

Material mentioned:

Companies I work with:
ArcticStartup
Flowdock

The Process:
Steve Blank
The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Agile Software Development
Scrum
Business Model Canvas

Before The Start:
Events:
ArcticEvenings
More Nordic events: http://www.arcticindex.com/events
Aalto Entreprenuership Society
BoostTurku
Open Coffee; Google Search

Online:
ArcticStartup
Hacker News
Mixergy (Videos with founders)
Paul Graham Essays

Books:
Crush It: Why Now is the Time to Cash in On Your Passion
The Monk and The Riddle
The Art of The Start

Thanks:
email: karri (at) karrisaarinen.com
twitter: @karrisaarinen.com

Anyway, in the presentation I made a statement that “You don’t need a business plan” which generated some response. To clear that out, even I do believe that, I don’t think that business plans are completely worthless. The current way of making them might be.

Business plans and plans general have their place, you just need to think when and when not to do them. If you think you will get some value out of a business plan, by all means, do one, but don’t do it because someone tells you to. The greatest thing in entrepreneurship or doing startups is that you don’t have to do anything, you’re your own boss. If you think something is useless, don’t do it, but know that you’re personally responsible of that decision.

Another reason I wanted to state that was because the presentation was given to students studying business, and from the personal experience, I know that academia and business schools overvalue all kinds of planning. What they really teach us, is to do different kinds of plans and documents, not actually how to make great products or build successful businesses. This may be because it’s a lot easier to teach how to do documents that match some criteria than teach how to think well. So I wanted give these students another perspective.

The problem I see with business plans, or any ritualistic artifact that people unthinkingly appreciate, is the standard use and format of them. Usually the plan will have to have like description of the product, company financing, market summary, indirect effects, competitions, projections and other things. It’s also accustomed that in your plan, you will need to sound convincing and sure about these things even you’re not. You need to guess, make assumptions or even lie to make your plan to sound good. But also you might know things that are actually true, but now you’re mixing truths with assumptions and lies. When you give this kind of document to someone, you’re not telling the truth. After a while even you might believe that what you wrote is true. This is just terrible.

Another problem is that writing a business plan is not necessarily that easy, small or a fun task. For startups that think about doing Minimum Viable Products and other sacrifices and ways to cut the time to the market and be front of the customer sooner, should really think if writing some documents with no apparent customer value is that useful.

I see the value in the planning, finding about knowing what you don’t know and need to know, but making some document that has just as much truth and use than most of religious artifacts seems just stupid.

Material mentioned:

Companies I work with:
ArcticStartup
Flowdock

The Process:
Steve Blank
The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Before The Start:
Events:
ArcticEvenings
More Nordic events: http://www.arcticindex.com/events
Aalto Entreprenuership Society
Open Coffee; Google Search

Online:
ArcticStartup
Hacker News
Mixergy (Videos with founders)
Paul Graham Essays

Books:
Crush It: Why Now is the Time to Cash in On Your Passion
The Monk and The Riddle
The Art of The Start

Thanks:
email: karri (at) karrisaarinen.com
twitter: @karrisaarinen.com

The marketplace is crowded with products with no soul. I’ve always wondered who creates the masses of these terrible products and why they don’t they fix them: startups that run for months or years with horrible user experience.

It just seems that with a little bit of effort it could’ve been much better. In today’s world, you actually might need that extra effort.

In Ancient Japan, katanas were regarded as having a soul. The forging of blades was a long and complex art and each family had its own method. The actual creation of the sword was something of a religious ceremony. It was said that a sword would contain the personality of the smith who forged it. Even with its limited use in actual warfare, the katana was the most valuable possession of a samurai, the customer.

soulless |ˈsōlˌlis|
adjective
1. (of a building, room, or other place) lacking character and individuality

In mass markets, the soul part has traditionally been dealt with through branding and marketing. With a great logo, clever copy and a bit of celebrity bang we can dress up frogs to be princesses. This might work in the world of controlled and limited distribution channels, but not in the vastness of the Internet. This might work with sodas and cereals, but not with functional tools like swords and software.

Think about the products you use today. What do you like the most? Do you feel something using them? Do you actually compare features or just choose what feels right? Compare Powerpoint and Keynote. What is your level of frustation when using them? The way Chrome is more opinionated than Firefox. With Chrome you don’t expect to find the whole kitchen sink, but speed and simplicity.

Having a soul doesn’t mean that there is only one right answer, but for a soul, one needs to be true to self, and not get distracted by competitors. It means you have something to be proud of.

No Words

In Zen, one of the basic tenets is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter how hard you try to enclose Zen in a verbal space, it spills over. No words can capture the truth.

The same goes for products and product specs. You cannot trust them to do your job. As a product visionary, trying to describe the product on a piece of paper with paragraphs and bullet points is like trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with a whiteboard marker. You just cannot transpose your vivid vision into mere words, and even if you could, the person (or persons), reading them would again understand them differently, changing the truth.

To battle this we have agile iterations, wireframes and what have you, but the problem is that the vision is multidimensional and it cannot be transferred directly from mind to mind. As a product visionary, you must engage in doing.

Taste

In movie business, the directors are highly respected even they don’t actually participate any making activity, only directing. So it appears decision making itself can be an art form, but for a great movie, for a great soul, you need great taste.

Paul Graham talks about taste in his essay Taste for Makers:

… If taste is just personal preference, then everyone’s is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that’s it.

As in any job, as you continue to design things, you’ll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you’ll know you’re getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can’t be wrong.

In making products, taste is not a matter of opinion, but an actual sense of sophistication that a person has. People who make new things need to practice taste and recognize beauty when they see it. Schools or education have very little to teach in the area of taste, you need to get involved in making something real.

In his Macworld speech The Auteur Theory of Design (I highly recommend you to watch it), John Gruber underpins taste to be even more the liability of the person in charge:

The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge.

Without taste, products turn out soulless and inferior to the actual talent that built the product. This is why taste is so important and for the person in charge, it’s crucial.

Breathing

Like katana, every product should have a soul. In some markets, or with some products, you can get away with not having it, but it’s still worth seeking: for both you and the customer. Probably many of your customers don’t care if your product has a soul. They care whether it solves their problem or meets their need, and how well. To fulfill this task the best you can, you should thrive for a soul.

For the soul, you need a person with a great taste to be the living and breathing aspect of the product. The one forging the blades. The person who thinks about the in and outs of the product and the business. The person that gets furious about a complicated registration form, plain colors, subtle hiccups, how settings are layed out, bad customer service and every other big or small detail out there.

It doesn’t mean seeking perfection, but seeking what fits with the soul. This person may envision the product in a way that it enables him or her to make decisions intuitively, and with the utmost taste – this can lead to something great.

Recently I’ve been travelling a lot between my current place to live and study, Vaasa and my place to work, Helsinki. I travel mostly by train so I can work during the trips. For a couple days stay, I try to manage with a backpack packed with the essential things above + one set of extra clothing. If I stay longer, I can always buy new clothes or other stuff.

After a while you start to wonder what are all these other things in your life for.

Today in Finland you can hear the word ”innovation” coming from politicians and other officials mouth almost more than “healthcare” and “education”. As much as politicians have something to do with actually curing and educating people they have to do with innovating stuff. The difference is that they know what a school or hospital looks like, but probably they don’t know what an innovation is even it was shoved in their throats.

Politicians seem to think they can get some more of those nice things by educating people more (which actually declines entreprenual probability), throwing more money to people and organizations (well again for most of the time they don’t know what good ideas are) or forcing different kind of people together (Aalto University – okay, it works in theory trough ‘the Medici Effect’).

But what they miss is the actual source of innovations. People. Ideas are almost worthless, resources are usually trivial, but execution is everything.

What makes people execute their ideas? Motivation. Personal motivation can come in different shapes and forms. It can be seek of wealth, personal challenge, achievement, fame, success, can’t let the idea go or all of them. People don’t do great things because of they were educated or have some burning desire to boost the Finnish economy.

Out of those motivational sources, probably the only thing where government can have some influence is ones desire for wealth. If you look at countries that are highly innovative you can probably see that they are also highly rewarding. You can also look back in 1993 when they lowered the capital gains tax rate to 25% here in Finland. In following years this actually led to huge increase of state tax income and lots of professionals jumped to be entrepreneurs. Of course this was not tolerated for long since it’s almost criminal to cumulate more than average wealth in Finland. The only exceptions of cumulating wealth are that if you do it by driving some car, skating on ice or divorcing one of these previously mentioned. Even then you have to actually live in Monaco.

I think that Finns still have some kind of peasant mindset, probably coming from the time we were under foreign influence. We’re a small country with no real friends. We’re afraid to make and dream big things. Even if one would be brave enough of such heresy, others sure are not and you should keep your mouth shut about it as well. One possibility could be also that due of historical and other reasons, we don’t have so many gods living among us – we have very few global brands proportioned to capita.

Innovations are seen complex and almost magical. They are something that some important dudes talk about, doing stuff in their labs and just getting some great ideas while skiing all around Lapland. But what people miss is that anyone can have great ideas, one just needs to execute them.

2. Lack of Finnish seed money – I think as well that this is a fairly big problem, and some Valleyers and entrepreneurs agree.  Getting the initial money probably isn’t easy anywhere in the world and the institutions in this sector are very limited.  You can see what kind of trend YCombinator started with their “ramen-financing”. Initial funding has traditionally fallen in the hands of high-risk angel investors. Problem is that we don’t have that many angel investors here in Finland or they’re just hiding.

3. Mobile – Alas, mobile and mobile-internet/multimedia/[insert here] has been talked and financed for ages, it still doesn’t work. iPhone is a very good product and it actually solved some problems and ignored the rest, but it still just scratching the surface. And as Matt Maroon and others have pointed out, most people don’t have a iPhone or even a smartphone. Unfortunately as an independent developer or a startup there isn’t much you can do about it. Industry is still much controlled by the manufacturers.

Generally I would say that my Mindtrek Conference experience was good. Speakers and their topics were usually specific but still useful, that you could gain some knowledge or just ideas that you can apply to your own business or interests.