Scale-Up the Best Version of Yourself — Accelerating Innovation in a Start-Up Company
By: Mika Tienhaara
Tags: Technology, Accelerator, Startup, Entrepreneurship

Every morning I wake up and some of my first thoughts are: “how can I make a larger impact with my big idea and what are the next steps of learning to get there”. Well, I need some coffee and some minutes of thinking, perhaps a way of mindfulness in the silence of the early morning, before I get going. Every day is full throttle, especially when scaling-up your startup company. But you need to have a strong team and good support to achieve your goals in the best possible way. I had been thinking about this when we suddenly got some unexpected help.

End of last year we were invited and selected to take part in the Silicon Valley accelerator program run by the Nordic Innovation House — the TINC. TINC aims to scale-up the best of Nordics startups. With the pandemic ongoing it was the first time this had to be run 100% virtually, so all of the participants from Iceland, Norway, Sweden and us from Finland ended up working 4 weeks late evenings with the accelerator team in California. That was a tough one, but there were some clear benefits — the “nighttime” learnings of tools, techniques and methods taught by the accelerator team, we utilized during daytime in our interaction with our trusted customers. Oh boy, we were trialing, building MVPs, pivoting, getting direct feedback. We had created a functional MVP on our data side and we were pretty excited about this! Our focused strategy became very clear quickly, why we are now putting our best efforts on conquering the beachhead market.

This all accelerated our creation of business value to our customers removing their pain points. It was continuous learning. It never stopped. After four weeks we were pretty exhausted, the usual working days started early morning and ended around midnight. And we made some great connections. We are looking forward to being able to go and meet many fantastic people post-pandemic in the Silicon Valley that we networked with and built incredible relationships with.

This sparked us to keep on working on our sprints and do agile development in a similar manner, engaging our team, having workshops and trials with customer to move ahead. Working in this intense way, which I would also dare to say is necessary for a start-up that wants to scale-up and grab the market opportunity fast, and this also knits the team together closely. We are on a daily basis doing progress, solving some problems and encountering a bunch of new ones. With our diverse team we could apply critical thinking, solving complex problems and collectively create unique knowledge, making us extremely hard to beat.

But we do not stop here; working with many customers in parallel (we probably are in various phases with some 50 customers), our name and brand recognition is quickly growing. We have a great brand recognition. Being a top innovator with a key scalable solution to improve society and industry that is good for our planet is great.

You can read more about

Nordic Innovation House TINC accelerator program under:

https://www.nordicinnovationhouse.com/siliconvalley/sv-programs/tinc

Our company:

https://www.rocsole.com

Note: Curious about the rest of my scribblings on the board — get in touch and I will tell you.