Speed dating experience!

Last week, all the Ad discovery and Creativity lab students, had the opportunity to share information about our startups and also give and receive feedback and learn more information about the other teams. In order to achieve this we used two methodologies: Speed dating and World café.

The fist method we have practised was speed dating. Here we have three roles : the pitcher, who presents the main idea of the start up, the questioner who asks two questions and gives one feedback to the piching person and the observer who gives feedback to both piching person and the questioner. This procedure required changing roles by the end of every round, so that each individual had taken for once every possible role.

So, first the picher gave information about his startup and explained his concept. After that, the questioner asked him about more information about his idea. Then the observers who were just listening utill this point, have to give feedback to both of the speakers.As every student had the opportunity to speak for the same amount of time as everyone else, no one left out and all the procedure was equal.

Our team is “The Chocomists: The alchemists of chocolate” and our startup is called “El Mejor: the best chocolate of all” . We are chocolate lovers and makers and our fundamental idea is to produce high quality chocolate for people with health issues, vegans and people who want a healthier lifestyle in general. We produce chocolate based on raw cocoa bean and other high quality ingredients. ( https://medium.com/@gmitsoulas98/el-mejor-chocolate-8b21d7fb9f28 )

The speed dating experience was something unique. You must be able to present your startup in some minutes and interact with other people. You see different views about your ideas, you get and give feedback which is really important if you want to improve your team and you come up with ideas, not only for your project, but also for other startups. It might be very challenging but at the end you learn to manage different kind of people, respond fast and on point in any question and hold the audience’s interest by being clear to your presentation.

Pitching to different peer-students

This was the most demanding role. In this stage, you must be able to communicate your main idea clearly and in a short period of time. That is something really demanding because you need to know every little information about your startup and at the same time describe it in a few words and be on point, otherwise your dater will get confused. So, you have to be focused on what you are talking about and make sure that you keep their attention when you speak.

Responding to questions and feedback

In order to respond to questions you must be really focused. You learn to hear carefully your dater and try the best you can so as to answer clearly. It makes you think as fast as you can and reply without ignoring anything.The feedback part was also really useful. It’s really important to hear a new point, a new idea for your product. It might be just a little piece of advice that can make you reconsider many things for your startup and evolve it.

Asking critical questions and giving feedback to your peer-students

This stage was also important. In order to ask critical questions about something that was presented to you, you must again listen carefully the speaker. After that I asked questions to understand completely the idea. The stage of giving feedback is the part where you can be really creative and makes you come up with new ideas so as to help the other team.

Observer

As an observer, you learn to listen, take notes, think of feedback and watch the whole conversation without interrupting it.You have to write down anything you found really interesting and at the end try to provide feedback and ask for any ambiguities you’ve traced. Its a multitasking role that improves all your skills,from listening,noticing details of the conversation and little by little, try to get your own impression about the other startup.

Coming to World-Cafe format- changing tables and meeting new startup fellow-students founders…

World -café was also a very helpful. Here, we changed tables and met several other new startup founders. By talking with people and sharing different ideas we took as a team many tips so as to evolve our startup. You realize that every single person can give another feedback and not all of them have the same opinion on your idea. It is like every single future client tells you his opinion about your product.

Going through this interaction experience, we heard a lot of questions and many feedback that had to do with the flavour of our product, the differences it has from all the classic chocolate bars that are right now available at the market, the price that is going to have and about its main target group. When we answered their questions and after some of our fellow students tasted our chocolate prototype during the conversation, most of them said that our idea is pretty interesting and has something unique. However, there are many gaps that we found trough this procedure and we are going to fill them.

In conclusion, these methodologies, made us think more and more ways of how we can become better and useful for the market and consider about the needs that a person might have of our product. Also, seeing people interested in our idea, made us happy and willing to continue improving our start up!