First post! Yay!

In this blog I'll be writing about lectures of class "How to start a startup". For more information about the ideas behind the course please see: http://startupiceland.com/2015/04/01/you-are-not-a-lottery-ticket/

So what did I learn from the first lecture?

I learned some of the dos and don'ts about starting a startup. My favorite point about the class was the idea about timing of a startup: "The best time to startup is now because yesterday has already passed and tomorrow it is too late". It's better to just get started and not to worry about details too much. I learned that some of the general reasons why startups fail. These reasons include premature scaling and the lack of engagement with customers. 

We also went over some basic definitions e.g. what is a startup & entrepreneurship. In the class we also had time to go through the 4 important things about starting a startup. These are:

• Idea (the difficult thing is turning idea into reality, also timing is an art in itself)
• Product (a great idea leads to a great product)
• Team
• Excecution

We also covered some key metrics for a startup. These are the amount total registrations, active users, activity levels, cohort retention, revenue and net promoter score (which tells our effective is the marketing).

In the first lecture we of course also talked about general stuff related to the course, timetables, assignments and such. In the course we will be starting our own startup with our own group of 5 people. We need to come up with an idea and try to sell this idea to strangers. We'll divide roles for each team member and we'll start by creating a web page for our startup. Before all of this we need to come up with a great idea for the startup of course.

We also had a skype chat with the author Sean Wise of our course book "Startup Opportunities: Know when to quit your day job". We got to ask questions from him. This was a really interesting chat and he had a lot of good points. He for example talked about entrepreneurship and family life. He also made good points about the future of startups and idea generation. We went over few different ways to create ideas. One was the purple cow game where a group is tasked to monetize on the world's only purple cow. This can for example be done by charging fees for people coming to see the cow or maybe by making a tv-show of the cow. The possibilities are endless. The point of the game is to strengthen the idea generation of the participants. In a way the game forces the participants to think outside of the box. 

All in all the lecture was a very positive experience and I look forward to the next ones.

That's all for today.