Last day
Today’s the last day I’m working as a Community Manager at Scred so I decided to take that chance to:
- Thank Scred for an amazing opportunity of working at a start-up over the summer: a job so cool, only the Summer of Startups programme can compete with that.
-Reflect on just how much I’ve learned: from tech lingo to marketing techniques and even some Finnish expressions – thank you for your patience, Tuomas and Kristoffer! You’ve been the coolest bosses one can get.
- Hope that my work has had a positive impact on both Scred and Fläbät (the latter being my favourite ticketing system ever!).
- Mourn about my old Acer laptop that suffered a coffee spill on my first month at work but lived on, alas with a different owner now.
- Embrace all feedback, criticism and comments you, members of the community, our clients and friends, have regarding my internship. Be open and honest – I don’t hold grudges. Not for long anyway.
- Preemptively answer any questions you have on what’s it like to work at a tech start-up as a non-tech female – pretty freaking great!
- Accept that this will be the least read post on this blog because it’s oh-so-sentimental.
Thank you for making this summer amazing, helping and supporting me and for reading this post!
Yours,
Anna.
P.S. I <3 Senna Dog.
The new kid on the block
Daring, impuslive and a little bit crazy Punajuuri block party is bound to be a hit. It’s always refreshing to see active people in Finland who have vision and ambition to do something different. This time an independent group of enthusiasts put together a line-up of well-known Finnish bands to play for free this Saturday 21st August 17-21 in Punavuori, Helsinki. And all that was arranged in a space of a week!
The concept behind the party is to offer free music to the public, reinvigorate the community and deliver a powerful message that seems to be at the core of the project – not all good things have to cost money. Though the party is free for the participants, the organizers welcome donations to reward some of the helpers and fund future events. Sum of donations varies from 1 to 100 euros and when you send the money you can attach a message that will be put on group’s twitter page @Five_Corners. The payment system is powered by fläbät, the new ticketing service developed by Scred.
The party should be a great addition to other activities of the Helsinki juhlaviikot. So if you happen to walk past Viiskulma or the corner of Kankuri and Pursimiehenkatu on Saturday evening, you’d be treated with a free performance by K-X-P, MANNA, 22-PISTEPIRKKO and UUSI FANTASIA. The event will also be livestreamed on Punajuuri’s webpage.
What’s most intriguing, however, is what will come out of the initiative – the party this weekend is just the beginning of a larger project that aims to promote mutual help as an alternative to money. How far that would go remains to be seen.
Who else wants a ticket to the AltParty?
AltParty is the biggest digital art festival in Finland, if not in the whole of Europe. Founded a decade ago by Scred‘s founder Kristoffer Lawson (a.k.a. Setok), it hardly numbered a hundred people at the start. Ten years down the line the festival is massive: it runs for three days and occupies all of the humongous hall of the Cable Factory.
Every year demosceners, coders, computer enthusiasts, digital art appreciators and curious public flock Ruoholahti to indulge yet again in what the festival has to offer. Exhibitions, presentations, competitions with excellent prizes and even fun activities for families with young kids revolve around digital culture but are themed differently every year.
From dreamy-eyed star-gazers to astronomers to top-notch scientists space exploration and space technology continues to capture people’s minds and emotions. Unfortunately, though, the topic has been unduly neglected by the media and society in general for almost 20 years. This year’s AltParty aims to bring attention back to the open space with a ‘Space, The Forgotten Frontier’ theme. If you’re interested in space or digital art or simply want to visit one of Finland’s coolest events this autumn you should definitely drop by!
The event will take place between 22nd-24th October and you can follow the example of many and buy your tickets now. Ticketing service for the event is powered by Fläbät.fi – Scred’s up-and-coming new product that offers a dead-simple solution for ticket sales. Mobile Africa is using Fläbät too but it’s not just big events like these two that can benefit from the service’s simplicity and affordability. Small and medium-sized events would definitely find it handy. If you’re arranging an event and are looking into ticketing services - get in touch and we could arrange a special deal for you 
Otherwise, stay tuned for Fläbät’s official launching party!
Night of Code!
From 19:00 until around 23-00, Scred’s traditional Night of Code will make another appearance this Thursday evening. It’s short notice, we know, but hopefully some of you can make it. We’ll certainly be there 
Come along, give a presentation on some techie topic, or just sit around working on your pet project, or hear about what Scred is doing.
Our Dutch friend Peter Robinett will be coming over, and hopefully he’ll tell us a bit about Scala or some other interesting topic. I could recreate my StartupJam presentation on my Tcl-based web framework.
Time: Thu 29th July, 19:00
Place: The Cable Factory, Tallberginkatu 1E, 5th floor, Room 565.
We’ll provide a few beers! Let us know if you’re planning to come.
Scred Shop Updated
Despite the sweltering weather and burning desire to escape to a summer cottage in the middle of nowhere, Scred team got some good work done this July. One particular item that I’d like to highlight is the updated Shop feature. The function used to cause some troubles in the past but is now repaired with a shiny new look.
Any group that needs to sell something online and keep track of the process would find Scred Shops quite useful. Your student group wants to collect membership fees or your theater association wants to sell tickets easily? Create a registration in the ‘Registrations’ tab and it would automatically appear as an item in the shop. Put the link of the shop on your website for all members to see and use in an instant. Your charity wants to sell ribbons to collect funds? Add that directly to your shop with a fancy picture of the ribbon and start selling! While you’re busy sending the items to your customers, Scred is automatically tracking transactions, managing inventory and generating reports.
All that software is still free but you’d need to chip in 1,5% from each transaction on top of PayPal fees. So for every €5 of ribbon you sell you’d need to cough up a mere €0,07 to Scred. Let me know if you can find an easier and cheaper solution for your webshop!
0.7 design
Entrepreneurship takes many shapes and forms. Start-up ecosystem in Finland today is growing richer with stories of tech entrepreneurs hacking their way towards big exits and international success. Social entrepreneurs, however, receive much less glamour and coverage even though their numbers are growing and their stories are just as fascinating. Here’s one such story of a for-profit one-person company that is as much about business as it is about maximizing social impact.
Ten years ago Jenni Moberg spent a year in Japan. Coming from Finland, she recognized similarities in people’s aesthetic values: simplicity of design, preference for straight lines, natural materials and colours are as popular in Japanese design as they are in Finnish. That’s when the seed for the business idea was planted.
It was not until 2007 that Jenni founded her own company 0.7 design that helps Finnish artists, artisans and designers sell their produce abroad, particularly in Japan. She mostly exports small gift and kitchen items, children’s clothing from ecologically grown cotton and things made out of recycled material. The biggest hits in Japanese markets are products made out of birch bark.
When she started she hasn’t even heard of the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ yet she was one from the start. Her goal with the company was to promote hand-made Finnish design, help talented artists who often live in remote areas of Finland and lack any business or computer skills to sell their produce beyond the town’s gift shop. Apart from having a social impact in Finland by supporting local producers, her business gives 0.7% of profits for development projects abroad. Right now 0.7 design sponsors a project in Sierra Leone that re-educates local teachers and motivates them to return to work in rural schools.
The most important and most difficult thing for a start-up is to find customers. Jenni started off selling produce of her Finnish designer-friends to friends of her friends in Japan. Little by little that network grew and now her company supplies 20 shops in Japan.
Many artists think that when their items are sold internationally they’d immediately get large sums in income. What they don’t realize is that the retail world works slowly and sometimes you’d need to wait for a couple of months to receive money for the item you sold. The biggest challenge initially was to convince the designers to trust her so Jenni took a wholesale approach to the business: buying the items first and reselling at her own risk. When the business took off and her company gained more trust, that model was changed to give her more flexibility.
The business goes in cycles but Jenni enjoys being her own boss and when you see the spark in her eye whenever she talks about her company, you understand why. ‘Helping people from different backgrounds mix and realize immense possibilities their cooperation can bring keeps me going’, says Jenni. ‘In the future, I would like to have close business partners to help me find new markets in other countries. But more importantly, I want to be an example for entrepreneurs in any field. I’ve gained some valuable knowledge since launching my own company and I’m happy to share it. ‘
Check out Aalto Social Impact – one of the few groups in Helsinki that actively supports and encourages social entrepreneurship.
The RAN
In my search for ways to improve Scred service I will connect with our target groups by meeting them and talking about what they do and how they deal with internal financing as a group. This is the first of a series of posts that will be out throughout the summer where I explore the pains and sorrows of book-keeping and accounting, or rather how to avoid them, and Scred’s high and low points that we can build on or fix.
My first guinea-pig is a Finnish indie rock band called The RAN. They shared with me some of their history and what solutions they currently use to track and share finances within their group.
The RAN
Two Turks, two Finns and a Russian – the RAN is a multinational band that was started back in 2007 as a ‘family business’. Can and Ali, the founders of the band, knew each other from family relations but on top of that they both liked making and playing music. They found two more band members online via Muusikoiden.net and were later joined by a guitar player.
The RAN describes the music genre they play as post-punk revival. ‘Music is big part of our lives: we practice quite a lot but our minds are busy with music everyday’ – says Can. The band borrowed their name from a Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet Ran who was expelled from the Ottoman Empire for his communist views. While neither communist nor in exile, Ali and Can still sympathized with the longing for home that inspired a lot of N.H.Ran’s work. That and the fact that The RAN sounds cool and can mean loads of different things is why guys chose this name for their band.
The finances
Small Indie bands in Helsinki do not earn shiploads but they still need to keep track of the money they make and spend as a band. The RAN used to have a manager who helped them with that but he quit due to the lack of time and guys had to start sorting out band’s finances by themselves.
Band members prefer to settle payments informally, quickly and as easily as possible. A pretty useful solution for book-keeping is Google docs, though it still takes a lot of manual input and additional work. The RAN agreed that Scred offers another solution that makes accounting easier and helps keep track of finances over time, though the user interface needs modifications (Scred team took notice and the work is in full swing to fix that).
Check out The RAN’s upcoming gig on June 22nd in Club YK (Pohjoinen Rautatiekatu 21) http://bit.ly/dtdsG8.
Listen to and comment on The RAN’s music here or find them on facebook.
Mobile Africa
‘Mobile is booming in Africa. Entrepreneurship and unconventional thinking is booming everywhere.’
This year Europe’s largest happening on mobile opportunities in Africa is organized in Helsinki, Finland, on September 30th, 2010. This event will bring together 500 mobile professionals from small and large companies as well as public trade organizations from European and African markets. If you work or are interested in mobile industry this event is a must!
Registration is now open. Early bird tickets can be bought throughout June for €70, in July-August they’d cost you €95 and if you purchase them in September you’d have to pay €150. Note: if you register 2+ people from the same company you get a 15% discount per ticket!
The event is organized by Mobile Brain Bank which is a non-profit open network of mobile entrepreneurs and professionals. It was founded in August 2009 and has organized many events around Finland and abroad to connect people, brainstorm and share ideas on mobile entrepreneurship.
Ticketing system for the event is handled by Fläbät – a new service created by Scred. The service is in public beta and has already helped many event organizers in Finland to handle their ticket sales. Fläbät takes pride in being extremely simple and easy to use since it’s stripped off any extra hassle, hidden costs or long confirmation and waiting time. Hard to believe – try it out when buying your Mobile Africa ticket!
Wrapping up StartupJam Baltics
In the heart of the old town on a beautiful sunny weekend over 50 people sat in dark rooms glued to the projector screens typing away on their laptops. That was the StartupJam Balticsheld in Vilnius on the last weekend of May.
Our colleagues from the Baltics managed to put together a cool (un)conference that attracted people from Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and even Belarus! In addition to informative workshops we got to know some appealing start-ups in the region. Below is a
short description of some of the presentations from the event.
Tiklist.lt
This local start-up supports local farmers by selling their goods through an online shop. It’s a great example of how to help farmers and deliver organic locally-grown food to people’s homes.
Nebula 44
This ambitious start-up is building an exciting browser-based online space strategy game with a plethora of cool features. The game is in open beta at the moment and creators are promising $25 worth of gaming items if you join and test the game now. The launch is said to be early this summer so grab your chances while you can!
Manodrabuziai
This website helps you sell and swap clothes and accessories. Currently it is oriented only for Lithuania but expansion to UK and Germany are on the way.
While there are a few websites out there that help you exchange and sell things (some Finnish examples being Netcycler and Huuto.net), it’s interesting that this start-up chose to cover one niche only – clothing and accessories. We’re eager to see their progress!
Humanway
This Polish start-up is offering a platform for recruitment that claim to greatly reduce the cost of hiring. They cooperate with existing job boards and use other channels for promoting job offers (careers page, social networking platforms etc.).
BalticReports
Many foreigners do business and live in the Baltics but there is a lack of information and news in English, which makes it hard to invest into local markets. BalticReports is the only online news bulletin in English that reports from the Baltic region with the help of professional journalists. They have experimented with different business models and are currently in search of new ways to monetize online journalism.
Framedy
These innovative guys from Latvia offer ‘the simplest photo-sharing on the web’. Your profile won’t be linked to that of anyone else’s and there will be no ads on your page. They claim it’s ‘so easy – your grandma could use it’. While the service would be free once it’s launched, you’d need to pay $9 to test the beta version unless you get an invite.
…and there were more start-ups present! Best of luck for all of them – it’s exciting to have a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region.
P.S. Taking a roadtrip from Helsinki to Vilnius definitely rocks!
Greetings from Scred’s new community manager
Young, foreign and struggling with IRC – what exactly am I doing at Scred? Certainly not coding. That bit is already brilliantly covered here. What I am working on has less to do with computers and technology and more with people and their needs.
I’m Anna, Scred’s summer intern responsible for marketing and community management. I am a Sociology and Communications student at the University of Helsinki, a competitive debater and founder of an Entrepreneurship Society at my Uni. I’ve been active in student organizations ever since I entered the university and with time I realized that skills I acquired recruiting members, arranging events and doing annual action plans can prove to be useful elsewhere. What I lack in computer science skills I make up for in ‘people’s skills’ and that’s what I will be concentrating on at Scred.
Finding easy and smart ways to share expenses and track group’s cash flow over time is tricky, boring and time-consuming. The worst thing is, the problem repeats itself next time you arrange a gig with your band or go on a road trip with your friends. None of that is true, of course, if you have a Scred account!
The service is up-and-running; it’s got a steady customer base and is gaining popularity. As a community manager for this summer my big goal is to increase the number of dedicated users through stronger customer relations. I want to improve Scred’s visibility and tailor the service to your group’s needs. 80% listening, 20% talking. The end-result would be a website that is more intuitive for the user, a service that solves the problem better and more efficiently than before and a brand that you trust and love more than ever.
Ambitious? For sure. Realistic? You betcha!
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