On this ongoing collection, we’re sharing recommendation, ideas and insights from actual entrepreneurs who’re on the market doing enterprise battle each day. (Solutions have been edited and condensed for readability.)
Who’re you and what’s your corporation?
My identify is Jesper Thomsen and I’m a co-founder and CEO of SOUNDBOKS (pronounced “sound-box”), a Scandinavian-based Bluetooth speaker firm. Our audio system are moveable, sturdy and loud!
What impressed you to create this enterprise? What was your “aha second”?
SOUNDBOKS began with three highschool buddies’ need to create the perfect occasion and campsite at Roskilde Competition, the oldest and largest music and humanities pageant in Northern Europe. Consider it like Burning Man meets Coachella, full with DIY campsites, all-night events, and a various combine of world bands and musicians. Lengthy story brief, I began hand-building audio system for Roskilde in 2011. (My first speaker lasted roughly 20 minutes earlier than somebody spilled a beer on it.) From there, I teamed up with classmates (some finally turned co-founders of SOUNDBOKS) to spend our summers constructing the loudest, most sturdy audio system we probably might. Let’s simply say individuals began to take discover. In 2014, we had over 200 individuals desirous to pay $800 for our handbuilt audio system. It was then we knew we had been onto one thing particular. We formally launched in 2015, and we have been on a loopy rollercoaster ever since. We have bought over 300,000 audio system worldwide.
Credit score: Soundboks
What has been your greatest problem and the way did you pivot to beat it?
I would say our greatest problem has been rising to change into the leaders that our enterprise wanted us to be whereas rising as much as simply change into adults. It is troublesome to determine who you might be as a frontrunner if you’re nonetheless determining who you might be as an individual. Surrounding ourselves with supportive board members, a powerful management coach, and workers smarter than ourselves has helped us a ton on this matter.
What recommendation would you give entrepreneurs in search of funding?
There’s an outdated saying from Y-Combinator that goes, ”If you’d like recommendation, ask for cash. If you’d like cash, ask for recommendation.” I actually consider that to be true in the case of early-stage funding. Our first funding got here from traders who we initially simply reached out to for recommendation — and once they then noticed that we took their recommendation, and constantly utilized it to raised the enterprise, they wished to speculate.
What does the phrase “entrepreneur” imply to you?
Briefly, I consider it is somebody who fixes a downside or a necessity. And should you’re one, you might be relentlessly resourceful in your pursuit to unravel it.
What’s one thing many aspiring enterprise homeowners assume they want that they actually do not?
Enterprise funding. I believe within the enterprise capital growth that we have had the previous fifteen years, many corporations that had been under no circumstances constructed for the expansion wanted to help enterprise capital economics went forward and raised enterprise capital. It ended up diluting them, forcing them to develop their firm quicker than what was good for it. Ultimately, which will have led them to chapter within the pursuit of big upside whereas it would’ve been so much higher for them to simply develop their enterprise slightly bit slower, after which handle their draw back.
Is there a selected quote or saying that you simply use as private motivation?
Leonard Cohen as soon as stated, ”Act the way in which you’d wish to be and shortly you will be the way in which you act.” I believe that is a reasonably superior, reductive strategy to break down self-improvement. He additionally as soon as stated that success is survival, which I believe is a wholesome method to have a look at life as a {hardware} founder in an financial recession.
