Here is a sneak peek to projects I have been working on during the past few years:
The Path to Product Market Fit
The Path to Product/Market Fit is a hands-on book about customer development. It is based on tens of interviews with startup founders. For the very first time, you are able to get direct access into practices founders have used in customer development.
Russel Simmons (Yelp), Mikkel Svane (Zendesk), Tim Trefren (MixPanel) and Tikhon Bernstam (Parse & Scribd), Niklas Adalberth (Klarna) and Nami Zarringhalam (TrueCaller), Javier Soltero (Acompli) among others share their stories.
I managed the website redesign project for Mendor on time and on budget. It was fantastic to work with extremely talented individuals and create a super nice and fresh new online presence for Mendor!
The National Day for Failure campaign was designed to help risk adverse Finns to overcome the fear of failure and understand failures as important learning experiences. We got many well-known Finns like Mårten Mickos; ex-CEO of MySQL, Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle at Rovio, maker of Angry Birds and Jukka Jalonen, the Head Coach of Finnish national ice hockey team to openly share their failure experiences and what they learned from them.We utilised social media in multiple ways: downloaded videos on Vimeo, gathered over 8000 likes on Facebook in less than four months. One trick that proved to be really effective was that we asked people to change their profile picture to the campaign logo. According to our calculations the campaign reached fourth of Finnish population and got widely noticed in the media. Late 2011, I received a “Think Different” award for taking bold action and thinking differently. Here is a picture gallery about the media coverage, check it out.
Aaltoes Big Ideas Lecture Series
In Fall 2012, we realised that most talented students and researchers are not fully exploiting their capabilities and working on as challenging problems as they could. That is why we came up with Aaltoes Big Ideas Lecture series. In short, we are bringing in the founders who are building transformational companies. Furthermore, we are aiming to link the most promising research cases at Aalto University with the most driven young entrepreneurs.
23.10.2012: Julien Fourgeaud, co-founder and CEO of Scarlet Motors: Rethinking transportation
15.11.2012: Bas Lansdorp, founder and CEO of Mars-One: Human settlement on mars 2023.
We benchmarked the concept from the Silicon Valley where we attended a startup crawl in late 2011. The concept is somewhat similar to a regular pub crawl, but instead of queuing to crowded bars, you’ll get warmly welcomed to innovative business sites. Instead of paying an enormous amount of money for drinks, you’ll get a fine after-work event and useful information. Instead of waking up with a considerable hangover, you’ll might even wake up with a job in a real startup. Startup Crawl was Finland’s first startup-to-startup sprint, where participants visit local startup offices. The crawl provided students and other startup-minded people to get a view into Helsinki startup offices and mingle with others in the Helsinki startup community.
The first event I organised as a Team Member of Aaltoes.The idea behind the panel was to gather speakers from wide array of startups to get listeners to get as comprehensive view as possible of real product making. The panelists came from industries as diverse as daily diabetes treatment, nanotech, cancer therapeutics, greenhouse lighting and design smoke alarms.The panel touched upon numerous topics like: How to get finance for your first prototype? How to get a CE-certificate for your product? Patents. How to get and protect them? How to find & manage partnerships?
Project Gallery for Energy Efficient Renovation Projects and Theses
During my trainee period at the Confederation of Finnish Construction Industries I created a project gallery for energy efficient renovation projects and theses.
Riku Lindholm 