‘’ Lesson number one: don’t act as if you already have a company.’’
Last week entrepreneur Jelle Kamsma ended his pitch on how his start-up LocalFocus became a succes with a slight sobering bang. According to him, the first steps when receiving funds to execute a plan for World Domination, are most of the time taken in the wrong direction. His message: don’t waste your precious time on stuff like decorating your new office or worrying about where one of Mother Nature’s most powerful gifts — coffee — gets his place. Just. Start.
Could it really be that simple?
If you want to be succesfull then the answer is yes, it is. This has been told to me and my teammates by every masterclass entrepreneur while we’re aiming for exactly that in this amazing rollercoasterride called The Challenge. The core message: stop procrastinating, and overthinking how to realise your sizeable ambitions. Just begin by gathering some stones, one step at a time.
So here we are, piling up rocks, one at a time. By pitching, emailing and now blogging our way through this cloudy start of something that, in fact, could become the next best mountain of journalism innovation.
How do we do this?
By consuming a lot of sandwiches, post-its, coffee, breakthroughs, break-downs, laughing about the overused term ‘pivot’, crying about ‘pivot’ and maintaining a dozen of doc files while spreading our enthousiasm anywhere possible.
Our previous assembly of rocks have now gotten up to a point where they are more or less in one place. And it seems like it’s going up from here.
The world has literally entered our ‘office’ — the livingroom of one of our teammembers — and it’s starting to get more and more covered in post-its. They represent the correspondents willing to join our international platform of journalism students: Mappening. From their own perspective they will tell about one global topic at a time. Since we can use this blog to spread my message, why can’t some youngster in India, Finland or Peru do the same thing by using one platform to do so? Mappening provides their stories with extra information and data about a country and situation to provide full-depth and easy to digest articles.
So what’s next?
Winning The Challenge and getting that office. In the meantime overcoming anything that will make us doubt we can. Even if that means putting our fantasies about neat coffee corners aside for a while.
P.S. Haven’t read our concept story yet? We’ve made a preview and we’d love to have your feedback. Use the feedback-button at the bottom of the preview page or send us an email.
Hoping to hear from you,
Nina Bogosavac
