The idea of forming a company had been on our minds as early as 2018. After settling on the Mohavi team and having a consensus of our goals and objectives, we needed to start learning the first steps of entrepreneurship. Through word of mouth the team learned of a mentoring program for early startups right here in Tampere. The team didn’t even hesitate and decided to go for an interview for joining Red Brick Accelerator.
Red Brick Accelerator program is an intensive coaching and mentoring program for early-stage startups. The 12-week program includes high quality workshops and mentoring sessions hosted by top-level experienced industry professionals. Teams receive coaching and mentoring in several topics such as: prototyping, product design, branding, concept testing, user persona building and many more. And to top it off, the program is completely free and does not claim any equity of the chosen startups.
Baby steps
This batch of RBA started at the end of February. We were surprised and genuinely intrigued by some of the startup ideas from the teams that had entered; mobile vegetable blocks, an AI system measuring online sentiments and a package delivery system in an Uber fashion? These ideas are cool!
A workshop hosted by Joe Pacal from Framlabs was definitely a stand-out from the first few weeks. His 6-hour intense and condensed workshop covered a multitude of topics such as customer journey, company personas and target demographics. And the guy himself was a lovely chap. Cheers, Joe! 😉
Going online
Unfortunately at the end of March, RBA had to transform the hands-on workshops to the online ecosystem due to COVID-19. There were many questions as to how everything would continue, but thankfully RBA got transferred and completed successfully online. This was thanks to RBA organizer, Mirza Sagdati, as well as RBA marketing representative, Kaya Brandt. We would like to offer our gratitudes to these two for their efforts on this difficult challenge they weren’t expecting to encounter during this spring. They did an excellent job to keep all the teams updated with weekly checkups as well as informing us often on Slack.
During the online bit we had two mentoring days. Each mentoring day gave us the chance to meet five different mentors, each with unique business and startup knowledge such as investing, user experience, social media and business model tweaking. These days were definitely one of our highlights during the program.
Finishing on a high
The program was supposed to end on a Demo Day where all teams were going to pitch their startups in front of a live audience that would have consisted of investors, founders and other startups. Instead, due to the circumstances all teams did a pitch in a video format. These videos were shot and edited by the amazing people at Bermuda, and you can have a look at our Mohavi pitch below:
Luckily, we still got to meet each other last week at a farewell party at Tribe. We got to celebrate our successes we had during the program and have fun before departing in our own separate ways.
Parting words
RBA has been an extremely worthwhile part of our journey. Without attending this program, we would probably still be scratching our heads on several aspects to running a business. We now have a clear vision on what our next objectives and goals are and now we have the knowledge to achieve them.
Once again, thank you to Mirza and Kaya for organizing RBA and thank you to all the teams that participated. We have learned a lot from you and we can’t wait to see where your ideas and startups evolve in the future!
Unitel next time! ✌
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