Dec 27, 2015

Photo Essay: 3 Months at Buildit Accelerator

My co-founder, Na “Anna” An, and I thought we would share some highlights of our company’s, Toona Technologies, experiences over the past three months in Tartu, Estonia as part of the Buildit hardware accelerator program through photos and a bit commentary. If you have specific questions about the program, living in Tartu, banking, e-residency, etc. leave a comment, we would be more than happy to answer. (Photo Credits: (B)Buildit, (T)Tarmo Haudi fotogalerii, (TR)TechHub Riga, (SV2B)Silicon Valley Comes to the Baltics, (E)Estonian World)

Goodbye South Korea

Our story starts on August 25, 2015 when we received an email telling us that we had been accepted into the Buildit hardware accelerator program after taking part in several Skype interviews.

“Congratulations — you are accepted to the Buildit program starting on September 21st.”

We were excited and looking forward to being part of the program, but September 21st?!? That gave a little more than a month to pack up and leave Chungju, South Korea; not a simple task considering that both of us had been living there for several years. Additionally, Anna had to go back to China to secure a visa for Estonia and I had to travel back to the US to renew a passport that was going to expire soon.

Packing up a research and development lab after accumulating seven years of “stuff.”

With boxes packed and shipped our journey starts…

Feeling the effects of the long bus trip to Incheon Airport from Chungju.

Welcome to Estonia

Once we both arrived in Tartu our priorities were to find and and setup an apartment that Anna and I would share, get personal bank accounts, pickup our e-residency cards, and quickly familiarize ourselves with our new surroundings. Some tasks were easier than others. For example, it actually took me almost two months to get a personal bank account, and finding a place to live required us to use a real estate broker.

The Kantri Hotel, just a short walk to the Buildit offices, was an ok place to stay until we found our apartment.

The Tartu Science Park; where our office will be for the next three months. (E)

There are quite a lot of food markets, and the prices are very inexpensive when compared to Korean markets.

The Program Starts

On September 21st we started the program with a kickoff session and heard presentations on how to work with the mentors, prototyping services, and we got to meet other teams and select our working space for the next few months.

Our batch was very multi-national with teams from Goa, Finland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, and Estonia. (B)

Anna and I introducing ourselves to other teams in batch 4. (B)

Shared office space for the next 3 months. (Extra points if you can find what’s wrong with the map painting.)

- …there was a party to get to know some of the key players in Tartu… (B)

At week’s end a potluck dinner and team socializer were each team had to bring/make a food from their country. (B)

Anna and I decided to make heroes aka hoagies aka grinders aka subs aka submarines.

We had the pleasure of meeting Kristoffer Lawson and Mike Bradshaw of SOLU — two great mentors. (B)

Anna got to learn a lot about manufacturing with trips to several factories in Estonia and a seminar at HWTrek. (B)

10.07.2015 was the day we officially became primary shareholders of Toona Technologies OÜ an Estonian company.

TechHub Riga Academy and SV2B

We applied to TechHub Riga Startup Academy, which was running a day before the Silicon Valley Comes to the Baltics (SV2B) conference, on a whim, it hadn’t been promoted or suggested to us by Buildit.

“Congratulations! You’re accepted to TechHub Riga Startup Academy Fall 2015."

Getting accepted to the Academy and attending ended up being one of the highlights of the last three months. We were able to get great advice and mentoring from Sean Percival (500 Startups), Peteris Marculans (Startup Next at Techstars), Hasan Haider (500 Startups), and others. At the end of the day we had became one of five teams nominated to pitch on the big stage at SV2B.

Our trip to Riga, Latvia starts with a walk to the bus station at 1:30 AM.

Final pitch of the day after almost 2 days of no sleep. (TH)

Viesturs Sosars: “You are crowned the king of change!” for the improvements we made on our pitch. Off to SV2B. (TH)

“Meet Bob. He has some problems” and he was an integral part of the story our pitch was based on.

Practice. Practice. Practice. Preparing for the SV2B pitch.

Pitching on the big stage at SV2B. We didn’t win but the experience we gained was incredible. (SV2B)

SV2B was a great conference and Anna made a new friend….

SLUSH 2015

After returning to Tartu we had a few days before we had to leave for Helsinki, Finland to take part in the Founder’s Day program a day before SLUSH started. Our main goal for the conference was to connect with angel investors, VCs, and accelerators and we ended up doing pretty well: 3 angel investors and 4 accelerator meetings and 1 VC meetup. We learned a lot about how strong and growing the health tech ecosystem is in Finland and got some great advice from Invest in Finland and GE Health Innovation Village.

Anna making our plans for which talks to attend.

We had a great meetup with Reactor Ventures who we had initially met at Founder’s Day.

Helsinki has very nice airport, but we didn’t get to have reindeer burgers.

Two More Weeks…Feeling Some Stress

Returning to Tartu after SLUSH we had little more than two weeks before demo day. The big push was on and both of us were starting to feel some stress. We also had to deal with the shorter days and darker nights nights with the start of the Estonian winter.

My reaction to Anna telling me to “Experience the power of breathing…take a deep breath”

Anna’s reaction to me telling **her** to “Experience the power of breathing…take a deep breath”

We owe so much for the help and encouragement of our great advisers/partners Signe Sääs and Gert Post.

Working with Signe Sääs Head of Design at Sewfu, on our breathing belt.

Gert Post and his team at Frozen Kingdom helped us build out Toona’s app/game.

Demo Day!

Our Demo Day took place at Garage48 HUB Tartu in conjunction with the launch of UK-Estonia TechLink.

Janne Saarikko, a fantastic mentor/coach, helped us polish our pitch for the big day. (T)

I performed the main pitch; here discussing our competitive advantages. (T)

During the program many mentors said that Anna didn’t talk enough, so we decided to prove that she had the skills necessary to pitch our progress and demo. She did a fantastic job! (T)

We had a lot of interest in our product after our pitch, so much that neither of us had a chance to eat! (T)

We did it! Official graduates of Buildit accelerator batch 4. (T)

More Hard Work To Be Continued…

We accomplished quite a lot during the eleven weeks of the program, including:

Completed several iterations on our product, ending the program with a substantially better MVP than what we came in with.
Performed extensive customer discovery, performing over 180 interviews and surveys, proved problem/solution fit and strengthened our understanding of our markets.
Competed in TechHub Riga Academy, became a finalist, and got to pitch at SV2B along with revising our deck and pitching skills.
Through meeting with over 20 mentors we were able to get advice that helped us refine our market strategy, product design, and business development plans.

We have a lot more work to do, and we look forward to hitting several milestones in 2016 as we bring our product to market.

Looking forward to having a successful 2016 with continued hard work. (B)