Adam Lindholm - Newseri #1

Describe yourself and your project. How did you get the idea? 

I´ve always read alot of news throughout the years and lately I started to think more about how the news are actually consumed. Me and my friend started brainstorming ideas how to make the news-reading experience better and that´s how we came up with the idea. Our idea is to develope a commentary field customized for digital media. We think that the commentary field is an incredible tool for creating debate and promoting democracy, it´s just very poorly used today and we will change that! 

Who are you? Previous education/jobs/ experiences etc. 

My name is Adam Lindholm, I come from Anderslöv in the most southern parts of Sweden. I am 22 years old and I love sports (especially Hockey), digital media and business. I study business and economics at Lund University. I have´nt had any sparetime inbetween so as far as Job goes, I´ve only summerworked at a local furniture-shop. Right after highschool I started an internetshop selling ties.

What will you do during these three months? How will you spend the time? 

We will work with our programmer to finish our first beta-version and run the commentary field at Lundagård. Our main focus after that will be to work and come up with a good design, typography and logo. I will constantly throughout the 3 months initiate contact with new potential customers and media-sites to get feedback and verify our idea further. Hopefully, we will find at least two other websites that can test our product. I will also see if there is other ways to make money than just regular ads/statistics. 

What do you expect to achieve during Leapfrogs?

I expect to have a well-funtioning product and a very good design, giving us the best possible platform, so we can launch our product on the market after the summer. Hopefully we have talked to alot of digital media sites during the summer, which will smoothen the selling-process and give us a stable foundation for our commentary field and external community site from the very start. I also expect to make new friends and meet new interesting people.

Adam Lindholm - Newseri #2

Tell us what you have done on your project so far during the Leapfrogs time.

During our leapfrogs time we have mostly focused on completing back-end functions and develope a design for the comment field. We have also searched for an additional partner with versatile programming skills, both back and front end. We have met a programmer and hope to welcome him as a partner this upcoming week. We have also introduced a cooperation with a designer from Sprinkle AB.

Has everything gone according to the plan? Has anything unexpected occurred? Has something been easier/harder than expected?

Roughly our main objectives has gone according to plan. But timeschedule-wise, in this stage of our project, pretty much nothing is going according to plan, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Due to the fact that alot of people are going on vacation over the summer, things are moving slower and taking more time than usual. But it often also means that people have more unschedualed worktime and that means it´s easier for us to schedule meetings.

What will you focus on during the remaining time? Will you follow your original plan or has anything changed along the way? 

During the remaining time we will focus on our beta-test at Lundagård, engage people and make sure to get alot of feedback. We will also finalize our new design and start to develope a brand strategy.  We will follow our original plan, but we will focus more on the front-end development then we originally thought.

Adam Lindholm - Newseri #3

How did you experience the three months?

It has been three interesting and fun months. It has been very nice to be in a start-up environment and to meet other people in the same situation. It have also helped us a lot that we can say that we are “within the leapfrogs-programme from lund university” when we have tried to set up meetings with big companies. We are more than ever convinced that our product is great!

What has been hardest/most enjoyable?

We finally have set and verified our business idea and all the functions we want to have in our product. We have talked to a lot of potential partners and set up goals for the company for the future. Through the leapfrogs-programe, we really have felt that we are starting to become a legit company. The hardest has been to structure the design and the functions due to our very limited budget.

Did it go as expected? Will you continue working on your project in the future?

We did not expect a delay for our betarelease with 1-2 months. We will continue working on our company harder than ever. Leapfrogs for us have been a very important step now in this very early stage for us.  But, what is happening after this with our testing with Lundagård is extremely important for us and we have been using this summer to build up for this.

What would you say is the most important lesson learnt while working on your project?

The most important lesson is that everything takes 100 times longer than you think and that everything can happen.  Also, it takes a lot of time, especially meetings. Most of it is actually quite unimportant. It is mostly filled with unproductive stuff. The biggest problem is that it is very disruptive for normal working. It is also very important to have instant and direct communication.

Do you have any tips to other ”new” entrepreneurs?

I think a good tip is to always be open to new opportunities. A very good thing that helped us has been to start talk to relevant people associating with the product/service in the very early stage so you can get your product/service verified by others. I think the key is to get feedback from as many different places as possible. To be open for advice is very valuable.