Last Open Coffee of 2019
This semester in AD and Pr Lab has surely been an exciting and important one. During a session of our Lab our tutor, Mrs Betty Tsakarestou, informed us, among others, about Open Coffee, a convention, targeting mainly already successful star-ups and generally the business world. Every first and last Friday of the month, a good amount of people interested in start-ups, marketing, business in general and even investors would gather at Benaki Museum to attend speeches of memeber of start-ups that are out in the marketing making impact, and of course, being profitable.
Our tutor strongly suggested we attend the last Open Coffee of the year, in order to take a good taste of what really is going on, right now, in the business world, listen to sucess stories, meet new people with similar interests with us and of course get inspired and give new approach to our ongoing projects.
On Friday 24th of May, we were all ready to attend the event. At six o’clock the team was assembled outside the Benaki Museum ready to take this new experience. After about one hour of meeting guests of the event and mainly talking about what we do and getting introduced to what they do the doors to the conference room opened. We took our sits and we were welcomed by our host with a brief summary of what we were going to listen to.
The stage was then given to one of the founders of Ferryhopper, a new start-up that creates routes to small islands that the ships rarely visit, compared to other islands, but the tourists would love to, without of course having to stop to other irrelevant islands.
Ferryhopper gave a great example of how to take advantage of the inconvenience that a target group feels in the market and offering a solution that actually makes sense and people would gladly pay for. Thousands tickets were booked through ferryhopper, leading to revenue streams and a perfect validation of the usefulness of the idea.An interesting interaction with the audience was then made, asking and answering questions or explaining further some points.
The stage was then taken by a founding member of Novoville. Novoville is a start-up, application based, that offer citizens a quicker way to pose their problems to the authorities and getting sincere actions as a result. This action not only gave citizens in the cities that is being active, mainly Athens and London, a great way to solver their everyday (and not only) problems, but saved the authorities a lot of money and thousands of working hours.
The same format of presentation was followed leading to a constructive converastion with the audience, yet again answering questions, sharing thoughts about the future and giving excellent pieces of advice.
To wrap up the even, our host invited on the stage one of the founding member of Radiojar, an exceptionally successful, innovative start-up about audio and radio. The two of them had a talk about the start-up, giving insights from the beggining of the journey until their achieved goal, the exit plan.
After the talks, we all had the opportunity to approach each one of the enterpreneurs and chat with them, asking for quick mentorship, receiving feedback concerning our projects so far and getting ideas on how to fix certain weak points.
Overall, it was an interesting experience that not only showed us a glimpse of the actual field we are working on, and the market right now, but gave us motivation to attend even more out-of-lab events and expand our network.
Danai kiritsi, Giorgos Zervos, Lamprini Harmantzi, Pashalis Nastos, Eugenia Kolovou
