Solve important problems with meaningful solutions, and the rest of business building will be easier with Nick Stevens
As a part of our quest to champion purpose-driven entrepreneurs across the world here is the story of Nick Stevens, the twelfth of our Humans of Happy Startups Series.
The Happy Startup School first met Nick in his homeland Groningen, The Netherlands, where we collaborated on an event for startups. Nick also facilitated some mind-blowing sessions at our Summercamp in 2016
Nick Stevens
Founder of Clogish & The Big Building
Based in The Netherlands
Nick, welcome. I’m really excited to share your story today. Begin by telling us your background and the driving force behind setting up Clogish & The Big Building?
My background — born in London, dropped out of college, no university degree.
Started working as a temporary worker at a company, which turned into a 12 year corporate career in global logistics and operations.
After that, I went back to the entrepreneurial world with a couple of small software companies. My motivation was to make software that solved problems in order to help companies do their business better. At the same time I got involved with Startup Weekend around the world and really started to see the bigger picture of how people people get started as entrepreneurs, how early stage startups/companies are born and the main causes of success/failure for these types of endeavours.
I believe that all companies need to innovate, and that putting the betterment of people and planet at the centre of your business model is crucial to the future of all companies. So by combining my knowledge and experience from both corporate and startup perspectives, I support people to start and grow business that makes the world a better place. I do this in many ways, but the two obvious ones are:
Clogish — is my work as a consultant, helping larger more traditional organisations (companies like Unilever, Philips, Rabobank) to transform the way they think and work around innovation.
The Big Building — is the community space I founded in a city called Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands.
How did you first get the idea for your community space off the ground? did you call on troops to help you?
In 2011 I brought the first Startup Weekend event to Groningen. Although we should remember that entrepreneurship isn’t actually new, there wasn’t much of the modern style “startup scene” at the time.
Over the next few years the recurring event became an anchor point of what was to become a young but thriving ecosystem.
Early in 2014, I was discussing with a friend of mine about what we felt could give a big boost to our city. At the same time I’d been inspired by places like the Google Campus in London, and it became clear that giving a central place for many entrepreneurs to be based, could be very beneficial for a number of reasons:
One keystone is the fact that many startups or young companies simply run out of money before they reach success, yet the cost of infrastructure (i.e a great office) is often the second or third most expensive thing a company must pay for.
So we hypothesised that we could use the economies of scale to reduce the cost for many companies, as well as reducing the burden of searching, increasing the flexibility of contracts, and at the same time, create a community of people and companies that could be powerful in itself.
We did some napkin calculations and realised that we couldn’t get the economies of scale without two key elements:
- Being much much bigger than a typical co-working space.
- Utilising some sort of space that enabled us to get a decent discount compared to normal market rates — because we are convinced that location is key, and wanted a premium location. Walking distance to the city centre, close to public transport, with street and private parking. You might imagine that’s a bit like having your cake and eating it — but we succeeded.
Jumping to the end of the story — this led us to taking on the first 5000 sqm of a postal distribution centre that was in the process of being wound down.
Since then we’ve taken on another 5000 sqm and shortly we’ll take on the final 5000 sqm giving us a total of 15000 sqm — filled with all sort of entrepreneurs and companies, forming a priceless community. All achieved without an subsidies or investment, and without any startup capital. I think this is the first key factor of our success. These constraints forced us to be really conscious about how we prioritised our time and resources.
The second critical factor came once we’d located the building, we identified about ten local companies/entrepreneurs that we felt would make excellent pioneers in the building, and that would attract other companies as well. We were careful to pick companies representing different industries, as well as different phases — from recently started to fast growing. Once eight of those companies confirmed they would be willing to join us on the adventure, we took the leap of faith to sign the documents giving us keys to the building.
With these companies we spent the summer of 2015 moving into the building, demolishing and reconstructing all over the place, with a deadline of being open by September. It was our belief that after September, we would open up the doors to other companies — but the reality was, we already had a waiting list before we’d even opened — and not through our own marketing efforts. Word of mouth from the pioneer companies plus considerable local press coverage for our unusual plan and way of working was enough to drive the interest and pique curiosity across the city.
Since then we’ve done our best at selecting what we believe are the right people/companies to keep building the community — that’s our goal, as opposed to most spaces who focus on renting square metres without any care for curation at all.
That’s an awesome story. We spoke at Summercamp all around the success you’ve had since with the space, were there any marketing efforts that owed to that success or was it purely word of mouth as you mentioned?
To date we’ve done zero traditional or digital marketing.
Our website is terrible.
We have a very lonely looking Facebook page and a rarely used Twitter account.
We do have a Facebook group and dedicated mobile app for our community members — but these are internally facing.
With over 100 companies on our waiting list, we don’t need to do any marketing — so we don’t — but I think this ties in with something I mentioned earlier — we solved a problem that many people were facing, and did so in a way that they wanted to be a part of it.
I can’t stress how important this is for any entrepreneur or company — solve important problems with meaningful solutions and the rest of the business building will be a hundred times easier.
Great advice, Nick. I’m curious… If a new entrepreneur asked you “Nick, tell me how I can get more customers with less effort?” would your advice be to just solve a problem really really well?
HAH! That’s actually similar to a question I ask all of my community members and consulting clients — how could you achieve ten times more by doing ten times less?
Your question implies that there is a value in having more customers. I’d want to validate if that’s true, or whether there is still value to be captured from existing customers — as it’s often easier to do repeat business than starting from scratch. One thing that many entrepreneurs forget to do is ask existing customers to make recommendations and referrals, which is a low cost/effort exercise that can yield great results — assuming you have happy customers.
Finally, how can we all get behind you! Where can we find your work and support you?
At the start of 2017 I published a bit of a manifesto of how I want to change the way I work. More info here. It all still applies and I’d love your help.
Additionally, I’ve taken on the challenge of creating a role — Chief Digital Officer for Groningen. Along with a small team, I’m going to focus on exploring what’s needed for the future of a city/region wide economy as we continue to become a more digital and tech driven world. As far as I know this is the first of such roles in the country — possibly world — so any input on the subject is welcome.
Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Nick. I’d also like to add that everyone should read your posts on Medium — motivating stuff, & great insights.
At The Happy Startup School we connect creative people like Nick, with likeminded others to support and collaborate on each other’s projects. If you enjoyed this post, please click that little green heart and follow our Humans of Happy Startups publication :)
