Part 1: The Manifesto
Please read our manifesto at the bottom of this page before going deeper into this article.
Have you read it? Ok, let’s go.
This was written very early in Workinlot’s journey. There was no product, not even a product design or workflow. Since then, we still read it every time we are faced with a difficult decision to make. This short text which can be considered an ancient relic in startup time, still stands, even after countless iterations on the business model, after countless changes in product design, after countless meetings that challenged our strategy. Now we want to give it to you with the directors’ commentary so to say.
DREAMS
Dreams are frequently too romantic for business. This is partially true, you can’t cash in on dreams quick enough to make business sense. That’s in most cases. We can already see outliers, dreamers who figure out how to cash in years ahead of expected schedule. Look at Elon Musk ad SpaceX for example. A dreamer who set his sight on colonizing Mars and a company he built to make this a reality, already cashing in by hauling cargo for the space programs.
Anyhow, for us, dreams are the most important assets. With dreams we envision things that are not there yet. With dreams we can visualize new realities and being able to visualize is the first step into create. Physicists later translate their dreams to mathematical formulas, artists to sketches, and entrepreneurs to business model prototypes.
Maybe most dreams fail to become realities, but this doesn’t change the fact that every reality was once a “romantic” dream.
EXPERIMENTAL PLAYGROUND
Some people have a lot of money, or time, or both, or the things that come with those, that enable them to entertain their dreams. Give them a go, baby steps to start with, nurturing and growing them so that they become realities. That “some” people are capable of creating an experimental playground. What a beautiful and suited word “playground” is. Because in the very early stages, the creative process resembles that of a child learning new things by playing games. Again, not very popular key words for the business world. Or are they? Have you ever heard about that guy who once said “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”? Have you heard about gamification yet? Don’t we all try to go back to childhood curiosity and learning skills?
We strive to make Workinlot a playground. A place where everyone is, as Albert Einstein put it very nicely, “passionately curious”. That’s why every member of the Workinlot platform is called a “Dreamer” without much presentation of what their other titles are. We invite every dreamer to play together.
CHALLENGES
We hear the word “idea” too often in entrepreneurship context. Most of the communication and activities honor the idea as the most important starting point of everything.
We respectfully disagree.
The starting point is the challenge. Even before a dream, there is a challenge. A kid dreams to fly, because she wants to get from one point to another faster, be freer just like the birds or be as cool as that superhero. The idea is a personal jetpack, maybe a set of wings, all satisfy the challenge and the dream. Ideas are many, challenges are unique.
On top of this, Workinlot stands for advancement. We use challenges to define in what areas we experiment and play. Take United Nation’s sustainable development goals for example. They are fantastic challenges. They are complex, they are meaningful, they mean a big deal to the advancement of everyone. None of those goals / challenges can be tackled with a single idea, they are wicked problems. Let’s not forget, these challenges represent some of the biggest business opportunities of near and far future.
Challenges can be as big as the SDGs or as small as a bad smelling kitchen due to water leaking out of the garbage bags (in case you don’t know, this challenge is what initiated Workinlot). They can involve a problem, a solution or many ideas. As long as enough people start looking for opportunities in challenges, we believe, we will see an enormous hike in creative output.
SOLUTIONS
The creative output can be one of two things. It can be a stream of ideation or a formulation of a solution. A stream of ideation can result in one thing only, a formulation of a solution.
In other words, if the right environment is there (along with a few other things), communicating and playing with challenges lead to solutions. Again, we don’t refer to ideas here. An idea is only valuable if it has a solution which serves a challenge.
Workinlot is a platform where the journey leads to solutions. Sometimes those solutions are also viable business concepts and they eventually transform into products or startups. But regardless, solutions always serve to tackle a challenge.
COLLABORATION
Imagine if you knew who would be interested in your challenges, or solutions. Imagine if you knew who had the skill or experience you lack to work on a solution. Now imagine if you could reach to countless number of such people and organizations. You are not brought together due to just friendship, just having the same company name on your business card or just being in the same social or professional circle. You are connected around a challenge or a solution.
We believe this is when true collaboration starts. True collaboration makes it possible that dreams are eventually transformed into realities, challenges are tackled by solutions. We also believe that without true collaboration, none of the ideals we stand for can become realities. So, we exercise our notion of collaboration in the way we build our platform, product, business relationships and partnerships. Collaboration is the answer if you were to ask how you could explain Workinlot’s DNA in a single word.
DIGITAL
Workinlot is a 100% digital platform. That’s because, to achieve our goal we need to enable as many dreamers as possible without any geographical boundaries. The only way we can do that is through the world wide web. The only way we can do that is by translating our business into a digital product, which anyone can reach and use. Currently we are limited to internet connectivity and access to an internet connected device, but we believe this limitation will soon change as well. Dreamers have been working on making internet and internet connected devices a commodity and basic human right, long before Workinlot was founded.
Being 100% digital, we don’t stand against physical. We believe in face to face interactions, we believe in breathing the same air when doing things. Workinlot aims to be landing pad to the physical world. We don’t want to replace any physical interaction. We merely try to extend the expensive physical touch later in the creative process, so that profitability of creating tangible economic value add is much higher and there are more physical support programs then ever before.
Sometimes we call ourselves a digital flat lego board, where every person and organization can plug their intended services to, so that everything is accessible to everyone.
WE
We is the plural of “I”. But there is also a sense of connection in “We” as opposed to just quantity. Workinlot strictly focuses on the “I”, the individual and strives to connect the individuals to meaningful “We”’s. Workinlot is sometimes referred to as a dreamer or entrepreneur accelerator, but we never call ourselves a dream or startup accelerator. We believe that we need more entrepreneurs (see our definition in part 2 of this series), and we assume the role of incubating dreamers.
We will help dreamers, bring them together with other dreamers in a fully connected ecosystem, we will enable them to formulate solutions and pass the solutions to the physical world to be accelerated.
HOW THIS ARTICLE IS IMPORTANT FOR US, AND YOU.
At a mentoring session we were told that we have many moving parts. This was stated as a criticism and a pain area. We carry that remark as a badge of honor. Yes, we do have a lot of moving parts, and we intentionally do so. Otherwise, there is no way we can proudly stand behind our ideals and what we want to achieve.
