How to accelerate your company COVID19 style!
A recap of our 2-day Bootcamp in the Nordic Startup School Acceleration Programme:
- Pre-camp
- What happened in DAY 1
- What we did in DAY 2
On the last week of April 2020, Nordic Startup School Bootcamp II Spring 2020 still carried out as planned but with a twist. Following social distancing request, like the rest of the world, we moved from on-site to online.
Pre-camp
The purpose was to announce the new virtual concept of NSS which was unfamiliar to all of us.
After a month of waiting they were finally informed about the theme of this Bootcamp: refine proposition, test and validate assumptions, and design initial sales outreach.
It actually took NSS only about a week to adapt “camping” experience to the digital environment.
Easily, Zoom was the main communication tool as well as meeting channel where all the kick-off, presentations, announcements and teamwork happened.
Mural was introduced to help members write and organise their ideas together on a virtual wall. To be honest, it’s a brilliant tool but their customer service sucked!
Besides, 12 mentors were also at the briefing so they and 8 startups got to know each other before each team booked 4 different mentors to meet on Day 2 of the Bootcamp.
Bootcamp DAY 1
On Friday 24th April, at exact 9 am EEST, more than 20 entrepreneurs entered Zoom and kicked off the camp.
Throughout the day, startups got time to work on the exercises designed for them on Mural.
The goal is to find assumptions that they made and think about the methods to test those assumptions.
In between, there were two Lighting Talk presentations on Surviving Covid-19 and Finance and Funding.
First Day ended with satisfaction. Everybody was working intensively and gaining new ideas and knowledge while looking forward to meeting mentors on DAY 2.
Bootcamp DAY 2
In the morning, Startups worked on their own to design experimental sales outreach emails and the content of their mockup websites.
Then there were another 2 Lighting Talks on Engaging Sales Outreach and Wellbeing as an entrepreneur.
In the afternoon we brought mentors in and gave each their own room to talk with startups who booked them
The rest of the afternoon was for startups to “take advantage” of our mentors.
Closing the 2-day experience was a virtual beer where it is all about chatting and chilling.
Riina Laaksonen and Tea Latvala came to share their own story of entrepreneurship.
Riina is the founder and CEO of Nordic Fit Mama, was the previous winner of Nordic Startup School with a 1-month detail schedule bringing the business to the United State.
Tea, a bold woman who designed her own intimate products and founded Teatiamo. She shared with us the sweets and pains working in that sensitive industry.
Conclusion:
Having to make this a distance learning experience was unexpected, however, we can’t deny that this actually forced us to further evaluate our programme and opened up the possibility of bringing it online 100%. Which means wherever you are in the world, you can be a part of Nordic Startup School.
Check our website and follow us on Linkedin to get more update on our programmes and activities for startups, mentors and investors!
