Last year I was involved with helping Startup Iceland and Vodafone Iceland put together a way to help Icelandic companies scale internationally. In my humble opinion scaling is often the most difficult aspect of running an Icelandic startup and that’s why I was really happy to be able to work on this project. We ended up creating a startup competition called Stökkpallurinn (e. launchpad) that was meant to give startups access to the right mentors to help them understand scalability, we got in various experts to share knowledge on things like, marketing, PR, sales etc. and then we used our networks to try and help them find customers. Over all for a first time project it went really well and we got some awesome startups that we’re doing really amazing things but just needed a bit of help. The best part of this was that we weren’t charging the companies anything for this, they didn’t have to pay or give up equity in their companies and what’s more Vodafone was open to collaborate with some of the companies after the event and some of the mentors liked the companies so much that they continued to mentor them. So overall a great success.
Now Startup Iceland and Vodafone are going to repeat the competition and use what they learned from the previous time to make it even better. Tomorrow they will have an introduction to the competition at Bryggjan Brugghús and there’s even free beer and food there so you don’t have any excuse not to come. I will be there and I’m looking forward to seeing you all there. Sign up at our facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1339993002728985/
And if you can’t make it just apply to the competition online at: https://startupiceland.com/scaling-competition-application-form/
And if you need more information about it check this out:
https://startupiceland.com/stokkpallurinn/
