On the 2nd of November ABC Night #2 took place. This was the first completely online ABC Night. We were very proud of how this event went! We want to thank everyone for participating in this event, a high number of visitors were there (60!).
At 19:00 we started with the first Business talk: Breeze.Social.
Thomas and Marco are the VP Business development and VP Data analytics and shared their story with us. They started with telling us about dating apps and about how they started their company.
A group of young people decided that they want to be entrepreneurs and that they wanted to start a business together. So in short this was done, by doing. First they had to think up what they wanted to do, they had no plan to start a certain kind of business so they started brainstorming. A dating app which will arrange everything for you with blind dates was the first concept and so they made it happen. Their first step was not to build a dating app but to form a motivated team and the idea will come later was their strategy.
Apparently on dating apps only 50% of the chats get a reply and go on dates seems to be not so easy. For Breeze.Social it works differently.
Stap 1. You see 2 profiles every day.
Step 2: You can chat, but you also have to pick a date right away.
Step 3: You are guided to a safe place for a date!
According to the guys a good team consists of multiple disciplines. Thinking about HR and a thick skin is very important.
Furthermore, how are you going to start? There are three important things: Is there a need for this? Is it doable and can you earn money with it?
After this upscaling!
Thomas and Marco also said that data is of great importance. What did it cost ? What did you make? A lesson that they also shared with us is that it is very important to give each other feedback, never stop doing this.
After their story, there was a great Q&A session and the second speaker started.
This was Theo Kik, director of Mr. Fill.
Theo Kik bought a company that was almost broke, but then turned it into a very big business. Theo told us that it is not important to have a nice education, but you have to go for it. Look at the market and see where you can make a difference.
Mr. Fill is a very big company in the meantime, it is about 10.000M2. Their main goal?
Be a solution for the waste problem. Mr. Fill is a company that produces bins for in the city. In Amsterdam you can find them for instance in the whole city already.
What Mr. Fill does is that they try to focus on the niches in the market. What can you do better than others? It is also very important to listen to your customers. For example Theo told a very funny story that he once said to a big oil magnate that he did sell a certain product, but he just blufte and made it happen afterwards.
After this, there were some very interesting questions for Theo. The most important lesson Theo told us was: Make it not too difficult for yourself, but make it easy.
At the end of the Night we had some nice networking in break out rooms on Zoom. We very much enjoyed it!
Hope to see you next time.
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