We had our fist Helsinki OpenCoffee MeetUp tonight at the cozy premises of Cafe Luft in Kallio, Helsinki. And the Meetup rocked! Not because of the organizers but because of the amazing and high spirited people that showed up.
To quote myself ‘OpenCoffee Club is a simple but powerful idea – have a fixed time
and place where entrepreneurs, investors, developers and visionaries
interested in startups can get together in a truly informal setting to
meet, chat and make connections.’
Where the social object that we build our community on was Finnish Entrepreneurship, Meetup.com -the social networking tool we used- or its free Yahoo equivalent Upcoming.org, can be used to mobilize or create momentum for nearly anything.
It all started when Meetup.com took center stage in the American politics in 2003. It attracted the attention, first of campaign staff for Presidential candidate Howard Dean, then of pundits in New York City and Washington DC. Soon it was being used by a number of candidates for the Democratic
nomination, to build and energize their grassroots support.
This grassroots support can be many things to many people. I can not see why it could not be used in European political arena, or even in Finland, when it has clearly showed its usefulness. Ok, I do admit that US has much stronger traditions in mobilizing the base to elect a representative to go to the state or national party convention, but it would not hurt to try.
Rather more interestingly, based on my experiences tonight, I could see a powerful role for such a tool in the corporate sphere in reaching out to the customers. The tool could be used to create a humane face for the cold capitalist machines that the companies are many times perceived by some of the rather disturbingly active customers.
Why not to set up informal Meetups in small cozy cafes where interested customers and other mavens could mingle with the shop floor workers, coders and middle level managers of a given company. And if you run your company as you should, your employees should also be enthusiastic to tell about your products to the potential customers and get first hand feed back from them. If you can’t get your front line employees to go, the opportunity might be even more valuable to the execs to see what real customers really think far away from market research firms and other bogus questionnaires.
Such tools as Meetup.com and Upcoming.org could work in the same way as employee bloggers who penetrate the corporate membrane to reach out to customers, sometimes being even critical towards their own employer, and thus letting the customers assimilate with the fellow ‘little people’ that work in the microsofts and exxon mobiles around the globe. Customers hearing that your employees have similar problems with their daily work and life, when developing those monopoly-making products could just be the best PR you can ask for (assuming you treat your employees well of course).
Ok, enough of my rant. Long story short, I am planning on making Helsinki OpenCoffee Meetup a tradition, so join the community and stay tuned for the next Meetup.
Thanks for everybody who attended tonight. Was great to meet you all!
Pics from the 1st Helsinki OpenCoffee MeetUp ->
3 Comments
Congratulations, Ville! I went to my first OpenCoffee meeting yesterday also and really enjoyed the format. Now I’m going to try and bring Lunch 2.0 to Amsterdam.
Hi Ville, At the recent meeting, it is refreshing to see a bunch of folks overfowing with enthusiasm and creativity…and almost every second person is coming from a different country…that’s a great start because there is excitement in diversity for example of individuals and opinions…it feels like a Business Strategy Course from one of the best universities and yet there we were…all intent to share and create value for each other…kudos and goodluck!
Thanks guys! I share your enthusiasm and hope we will be able to make it a bit easier to chase the dream …and if nothing else to share the difficulties of bootstrapping in the land of the thousand lakes.