March 1st is the date that we intentionally (and I guess this makes it official) lose the beta in front of our domain address. Let me tell you what this actually means.
About a year and a half ago, we were discussing what our red lines for our first MVP was.
We came up with the following:
1. All Workinlot elements, ranging from an ideation platform, team building engine, digital acceleration and project marketplace have successful examples currently available to startups. It doesn't make sense to start with any of the desired elements alone and move to adjacent elements until we cover the whole journey. We will start with a product which enables the whole from day one.
2. Up until now, we have validated that we can physically facilitate ideation, form teams on the spot, accelerate business concepts and prepare demo presentations. We will not outsource any of the elements to physical interactions, each element will be a digital tool or service on the platform.
3. With the above two criteria in place, it becomes impossible to use out of the box free plugins because customization of them would be too costly. It is also impossible to buy or rent an available similar solution, because we don’t have enough funds for that and again customization is still required.
4. With our MVP, we will attempt to validate that entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial mindset can be accelerated in a 100% digital journey involving all the elements we have in mind. If we can manage to validate this, we will continue with the development keeping in mind that most parts of our MVP can go to thrash.
So, we started with the development. We were lucky enough to be introduced to a development lead, who had experiences such as product management of an online business model generation tool and development of multiple corporate idea management systems under his belt.
I can’t say all our days were sunny and happy. There were many many downs as there were ups. But in August 2017 we launched our alpha platform, followed by the beta in October 2017. After that point on we had 400 testers actively ideating, setting up projects and using our digital incubation area. Many many bugs were identified and fixed. At one point, our users couldn’t set up projects, at another point, they set up the projects, but they were not assigned to them.
However, once everything was fixed, our users completed the journey. We have some dreamers who hold a dear place in our memories, like the girl who for the first time in years, dared to explain her project to other people, connected with a founding team and started acting on her dreams, or the hiking and motorcycling lover duo, who, quote “we didn’t think much of entrepreneurship before, but now we are really excited to work on our project”.
We learned what ticks people. We learned how they interact with the tool. More importantly we validated our assumption:
ASPIRING ENTREPRENEURS CAN BE ACCELERATED USING A DIGITAL TOOL, WHICH ALLOWS FOR UNLIMITED SCALE, MAKING TRUE GLOBAL COLLABORATION AND OPEN INNOVATION POSSIBLE.
On March 1st, we are getting together with people in the entrepreneurship ecosystem, we crossed paths during the past 2 years, to say three things:
THANK YOU!
Thank you for allocating your time for a coffee and hearing us out. Thank you for believing that Workinlot is set out to grow the ecosystem and make it more effective and powerful. Thank you for opening your expertise, network and time to our use. Some of the people will not be present for the get together, because they have other obligations. That’s sad, but that’s ok. We will cross paths many more times in the future, because…
WORKINLOT IS HERE TO STAY!
We validated that our calling is true. We validated that we can offer our platform free to all aspiring entrepreneurs anywhere on the world, as long as they have internet access. We validated that we can host our partners on our platform, again absolutely free, so that they can engage with the community. With all these free things, we also validated that we can make money to make ourselves sustainable by our open innovation, corporate entrepreneurship and digital acceleration PaaS offers. All these merges to a single conclusion. Workinlot is here to stay. We are launched out of Istanbul Turkey, looking to expand globally as soon and as fast as possible.
LET’S GET TO WORK!
You gave us the benefit of the doubt and we seized the opportunity as best as we can. Now it’s time to build on what we have already built and start creating more and more impact. Our vision statement says that Workinlot is a natural partner to any likeminded individual or organization. Since you are one of those mentioned in our vision statement, let’s take action on those partnership.
We do everything we do for the dreamers in mind.
This mentality keeps our team intact and motivated, gives us purpose and direction. Also, it makes it easier for us to make decisions, if a change is for the benefit of the dreamer than yes, if else no. March 1st is no different. Our underlying purpose is to strengthen and expand our partnerships in the startup ecosystem so that we can build better and more effective bridges between the ecosystem and our dreamers.
March 1st will carry some news for dreamers as well.
Also on March 1st, we will communicate all the changes and updates we made to the tool. Going forward we will have weekly or biweekly periodical communication about everything that’s new, including updates, features, partnerships, perks, corporate challenges and success stories. Without the 400 testers we have today, Workinlot would have never reached this point. We will grow as a community, but we will always try to stay connected to and find a way to honor our first 400.
