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.

Beware consultants and agencies
There is really no way to be coy around this issue so we wont. It is very rare to find an agency that understand what you are going through as an early stage business. They will respond to your brief even if it’s inappropriate. Rarely is there ill intent here, more likely inexperience - to you though, the effect is the same.

Figure out your core proposition and don’t loose focus
If your idea is to sell and deliver warm doughnuts you really don’t need to think about how to build a doughnut-selling white label platform. Instead ensure that you have damn good doughnuts that people want and that you can deliver them warm every time.

Don’t be secretive
In the end ideas have little to no value so don’t keep them to yourself. Chances are there is a better angle to your idea, a better execution or smarter people for your team. All of which may pass you by if you don’t share.

Enter startup competitions
Even if you do not make it to the finals your idea will still be reviewed by leading VC’s, corporate investors and Angels. And for those who make it to the finals you can look forward to a network which could take years to get access to.

Ask for help
It’s very rarely we see someone reach out for help considering that most decent people’s reaction is to step up to the plate when asked. Do ask.

BaseKit are undoubtedly one of the strongest teams to come out of Seedcamp this year. This is good as we really enjoyed working with them on solving some of the challenges they are up against. So much, in fact, that we decided to give the team a bit more time to flesh out some ideas.

We helped the guys look across their business at Strategy, Communications, User Experience and Packaging.

I liked UberVU from the moment I met them at Seedcamp. They’re soft spoken but straight to the point and very confident - they know they have a great product and if you’re not interested they won’t loose any sleep over it. And there is definitely something here to be interested in; in fact I believe we’ve only scratched the surface of what these guys can do. With that in mind we decided to invest some more time with the team to explore the future potential of UberVU.

We helped the guys look at Strategy, Communications, User Experience and Route to Market.

We are only really at the first phase of the mobile applications market and as with any emerging market, things are made up as we go along - and although there is a growing interest from both consumers and advertisers so far no one has taken the market lead.

By offering unrivaled tools for developers, targeted analytics for advertisers and researchers as well as guidance on what apps to use for consumers Mobclix is setting themselves up to be a force to be reckoned with in this rapidly shifting marketplace.

In the end it’s clear that these guys understand their market and the core of their business; helping developers make better apps and tapping everyone else into the greater potentials of the mobile applications market. But they do have some specific needs and we’ll help those - looking at how to best convert developers, consumers, advertisers and researchers to Mobclix users and giving advice on the user experience of the analytics tool.

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.

The early morning took us through some interesting discussion on Basekit’s target users as we looked beyond the developer group to a mass market audience. Approaching it from this angle changed how we described the current state of the market as well as the one year vision of the product - leading us down a path where considerable effort was spent at visualising how to communicate a proposition like this, something we’re pretty excited about - watch this space.

All in all, another great day with inspiring people - check Basekit’s comments on their Blog.

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…

A future where people can form their identity and aggregate all the other tools used to project themselves. An environment where we can be part of a group, defining ourselves and sharing, removing any pressure or intimidation this individual may feel associated with blogging.

Who am I? Who are we? How do we define ourselves publicly or privately? The future Soup could become a virtual scrapbook, a space to combine all online personas, opinions and interesting snippets you want to share with the world - Maybe then Soup will find an answer to finding a true representation of oneself online

That’s it for now swede absorbers. We’ll be back soon with more Soup.

Let’s go

UberVU in 1909…
Conversations, influencers, opinion formers and evangelists - our brains juggle them on the fly; analysing and shaping our view of the world. Interesting conversations are taking place and we wonder how to find those most relevant to us.

We are concerned with our image - we wonder if our opinion influences those around us, and if it influences them enough to echo what we say accurately when we are not around.

…to UberVU in 2009
The future UberVU vision is to help us manage these intricate parts of an online conversations. For UberVU this means a much more effective and thorough analysis of the complex web being spun around the topics we discuss than can ever be achieved off-line. Who is the source? What is being discussed? When did the direction of a conversation change? Who are the influencers? Who values my opinion? Who are the evangelists?

UberVU as the conversation index on which your value as an influencer or opinion maker is clearly visualised and measured.

In the next phase we will look at how to create valid user experiences that matches the product vision above with sketches and stories.

Today is Soup.io - if you are interested in taking part in the workshop it is now unfortunately too late! Get in touch with Gabriella to find out when the next workshops are being held.

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!

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!

A space full of life that constantly changes based on the users interaction, a rich interface with possibilities instead of boundaries. A space that showed much more about a person than their name and interests…

This is what we came up with. What are you doing to move away from profiles that feel more like CV’s?

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.

If you were part of Seedcamp and wish to help mentor these guys further or you missed the show and want to share your experience then we will be offering a limited number of seats during the workshops with each team.

Get in touch with Gabriella at swedecamp@weareswede.com

PS. To all Seedcamp finalist we’ll be offering a great discount to the same process so contact Gabriella if you’d like to chat about that.