Rapidly exploring ideas - developing disruptive brands, user experiences and digital businesses in startup, growth and corporate environments
Thoughts on
Thoughts by
7 tips seed stage startups should take on board
Over the past 6 months we’ve seen and worked with a lot of startups and interestingly the same issues crop up again and again. So, as it’s Christmas we’ve decide to share a few of them.
User needs can not be retrospectively fitted to your idea
Understand who you have as your target audience and then figure out what their real needs are - without trying to match either to your precious vision.
Don’t solve the wrong problem really well
This follows on nicely from the first point; until your proposition has been broken down into user needs - even sociological needs - it’s very easy to go way off the mark and create a product that no-one wants.
For more read on
Basekit on Swedecamp
“Swede have an excellent way of merging creativity with business logic. They walked us through the creation of a high level visual representation of the market prior to BaseKit – helping us to understand the key problems and pains that need to be addressed. We then projected an ideal solution forward into the future, creating a visual of a new better market with BaseKit as a central point. Swede helped us to see our business from refreshing angles, have helped us to gain a deeper understanding of our customers – and have helped us start to shape our ideas regarding the delivery of an exceptional user experience. Thank you Swede!”
Richard Best, BaseKit
UberVU on Swedecamp
“It is said that about entrepreneurs that they are so focused on their daily startup work that they can no longer see the forest from the leafs. It was our case and I think the case of every web entrepreneur out there. What Swede managed to do so elegantly was to help us extract all the things we knew about our business, mix them with our goals and aspirations and sketch a clear path for our company and us as entrepreneurs. Don’t think of them as consultants as they will not push ideas at you, but as trainers who will help you crystallize what you already knew and felt. Working with them was extremely rewarding for us, useful and fun.”
Vladimir Oane - CEO uberVU
Mobclix Swedecamp - moving to become market leader
We hooked up with the Mobclix team via Skype chat and Adobe ConnectNow last week to see how a virtual version of the Rapid Innovation framework would pan out. These guys have had a great few months, first becoming finalists at TechCrunch50 and later winning Seedcamp. There is little doubt as to why - they have what appears to be a great team and a very timely product.
Check this article for a short summary of the workshop.
Basekit swedecamp - turning web 1.0 to web 2.0
Finding a user base that would benefit from Basekits promise to let you develop 80% of the needed functionality of 2.0 web apps in one hundredth of the time is easy - creating a proposition that let’s web savvy but perhaps not tech savvy small business owners, bloggers etc take their websites from web 1.0 to 2.0 is definitely harder.
It’s clear these guys have an extremely strong product on their hands, and gauging from the new interface changes we saw it’s getting closer to be a tool worth your attention. Check out the brief summary inside.
Soup swedecamp - expressing yourself
This Tuesday was Soup.io’s turn to go through an in-depth examination and exploration of their product, users and potential future.
We knew Soup had a great product already, making it really easy to blog anything, pull in your feeds from around the place - and make it all look great with very little effort. But what we didn’t know was that if you take the core foundation - the needs that have motivated soup to create their product - a really exciting future picture emerges…
Pictures and more conclusions inside
UberVU swedecamp - back to the future
Last Friday we took UberVU through our product exploration workshop in the boardroom of Scottish Equity Partners. These workshops are meant to dissect the current product into it’s individual building blocks, analyze each component and then build up a new, stronger product proposition.
Check out this brief summary of the conclusions as well as more photos from the session.
Seedcamp videos, Financial Times
Two weeks after Seedcamp and the Financial Times have just launched three videos with some good interviews and conclusions of the event.
Day Three - 17 Sep
Day Four - 18 Sep
Day Five - 19 Sep
As an update, the Seedcamp winners have now booked their places at the Swedecamp workshops we donated, all of them will take place in central London during October.
First up is UberVU this Friday - we’ll be asking each team for permission to publish the results here so watch this space!
A space that represents the real me
A lot of profile pages on social networks really suck. Built on the same template with boring predictable layout and features - often just text-based and non visual, apart from a profile image if i’m lucky.
During one of our projects recently we wanted to show that it is possible to give a personal space that is both user friendly, intuitive, exciting to use and slightly more human!
Sponsoring the Seedcamp winners
The winners of Seedcamp 08 have just been announced (uberVU, Kyko, Basekit, Soup.io, Toksta, Mobclix, StupeFlix). Amazing job - this is when the fun bit starts!
This year we will be giving all the 7 winners a series of rapid innovation workshops around their brand, user experience and design. To quote Ryan Carson at the Techcrunch party last night: “that’s awesome!” - we agree Ryan, this will be most wonderful…or ‘grymt’ as we say in Sweden.
Seedcamp thoughts
So we’re half way through the second Seedcamp in London. The finalists should be awake for most of tonight prepping for the big presentation tomorrow after which the winners will be picked.
It really cannot be said enough just how important this event is and what an amazing opportunity is represents for entrepreneurs all over Europe.
To all the finalists - I’ve spent many years on your side of the table (and still often do!) and hats off to you for the graceful way you have listen to the absolute insane amount of advice given over the last few days. It is hard when you have 200 individuals all wanting to add their piece of wisdom to your project and I feel especially for those of your who are on your own.
Good luck in the finals everyone - we’re on standby to do some kick-ass creative work with the winners during the coming months.
My new found love
This could easily turn out to be a love letter to Carol Twombly, but im not sure if my girlfriend would approve, so therefore this is about my new found love Nueva Std Condensed designed by Carol in 1994.
It’s not often I go Bananas over typefaces, especially ones that have been staring at me for [...]
Making ecommerce social
Shopping online is a solitary task. Much unlike the social experience we get when walking into a store where we constantly allow other people to inspire (or annoy) us and affect our purchase decisions. Are there many people in the shop? What areas are most frequented? Is there a queue to the tills? The latter may be annoying but a sure sign of a popular store.
In this article are some thoughts on how, through visual stimuli we can convey the more social aspects of shopping.
More than two thirds of money spent developing an idea is wasted
Some things have changed in the last year or so - the introduction of truly commoditised IT like Ning and a market full of ideas but short on cash - and the professionals in charge of designing products, services, PR and marketing must change accordingly.
This article outlines some thoughts on how rapid idea development must be in todays market.
The world’s first online pawn broker
Borro set out to not only be the world’s first online pawnbroker but also to change the perception of pawning as a whole. We worked with Paul Aitken, founder of www.borro.com, to rapidly launch a new version of the site. We share a belief with Paul that by rapidly going to market we can iteratively develop the brand and the site based on consumer feedback so it would be great to get your comments.
Have a look at what Channel 4 news had to say in August.
What I just spent 5000 gold on
At it’s core WoW is not about flying an admittedly, awesome looking Nether Ray, but about a sense of constant progression with moments of generosity. Couple that with the strong community and great game mechanics and you have a recipe for high level addiction.
This post from the World of Warcraft universe is the first of many looking at the game mechanics behind the worlds most succesfull online world.
Navigating interactive TV
Most remotes are crap - however they will prevail for quite some time yet so thinking of better ways to navigate ITV content using these clunky remotes makes sense. I was playing around with the remote for a project of ours and this, while a neat interface, was not directly applicable to what we were doing.
The thought here is to mimic the button faces on the remote allowing us to cycle through four categories of content using the directional button as well as having four quick-links from the color buttons.
A way to make video websites not suck
A couple of years back we tackled this looking at a concept for when the journey is more important than the goal. What if 1000’s of videos are mixed with products, personalities, articles and advertising? Can we send people on a journey of discovery through a 3-dimensional space? Is being pleasurably lost an appealing state of mind?
In this article I moan a bit, remember the 90’s and show some nice work we did on video interfaces.
Get in touch
We’d love to hear from you.
Via our big email: hello@weareswede.com
What we do
We develop brands, create narratives, design user experiences, prototype and build front-end.
Our specialisation is rapid development of all of the above with full knowledge of commoditised technologies like Ning, Drupal, Wordpress etc. which means we can be disruptive in helping to form a launch strategy.
We believe that change should be introduced quickly to the market [...]
a bit about us
With a background spanning the corporate world, agencies, consultancies and startups we bring understanding of prioritisation, large scale projects, strategic advice, business objects, brand development and moving with the rapid market changes.
Over the years we’ve built up a strong network of industry experts, VC’s, entrepreneurs and development agencies - a network we want to share [...]
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