Why would inhabitants of Tenerife, Almeria or Seville come to Gdańsk? Well, there is probably about a million reasons why they should 😉 A beautiful city, wonderful beaches, picturesque views, an extremely interesting history… However, four start-uppers from the Spanish land came here for yet another reason: they want to develop their business and learn how to do it from Gdańsk experts from O4 Coworking!
European Coworkings EOI
This is another time for us to become a partner of a new edition of the European Coworkings EOI program. What is this project exactly? Its purpose is to support international entrepreneurs who would like to develop their businesses, gain key skills, knowledge and international experience shared by practitioners. Four extraordinary entrepreneurs came to O4 Coworking for 5 weeks during which mentors and experts from O4 shared their knowledge and experience with participants in the program, offering practical guidelines to help them strengthen their businesses 🙂
It was a very intense and inspiring time; we prepared a lot of development workshops for our thirsty-for-knowledge entrepreneurs; expressions such as: the Business Model Canvas or MVP ceased to sound like spells straight from the book series by JK Rowling. Online marketing, sales, financing or public presentations no longer cause sleepless nights and many individual meetings with business practitioners helped our start-uppers analyse their ideas and plan development paths for their products.
Even the Pitch could not be an ordinary presentation in our O4: participants in the project had exactly THIRTY FOUR floors to convince us to their product!
Wait…34 floors? Yes, exactly! We rode to the highest point of northern Poland, i.e. the 34th floor of Olivia Star and the journey to that highest floor and the Pitch lasted only one minute 🙂
One minute to sell one’s product.
One minute for Pablo
Have you ever been to Almeria? According to Pablo, that incredible place (we will check that personally! :D) has a huge unused potential; his goal is to make the inland rural areas of Spain attractive for visitors (including digital nomads – yeah! :)). He is intent on making people notice value beyond large cities, make their lives complete, calmer and of higher quality. “Pablo has a superb idea and, in particular, it is a socially involved idea. He is intent on making people notice value beyond large cities, change their lives to be complete, calmer and of higher quality. And he wants to change his region for the better. It is a really important and much needed project being a pure “win-win-win” – the region gains new inhabitants who, in exchange for preferential terms, render fine services for the local community, local authorities show in their statistics that, instead of losing, they gain new inhabitants and the local population gets real benefits from the visitors”, says Marta Moksa, Pablo’s mentor.
One minute for Jeremy
Three components are necessary in the game development process: an idea, knowledge and skills – and this is what Jeremy has. An enthusiast who is developing his business creating innovative solutions related to computer games. “Jeremy is planning to develop 2D video games focused on sports; he would also like to create a game for the blind and produce a game you can play in a few ways depending on preferences: on a smartphone, computer, with the use of cards or as a board game. His ideas are remarkable and have an enormous target group because everybody needs to entertain oneself from time to time… And the idea of a game for the blind is purely good!”- says Anna Maria Wiśniewska, Jeremy’s mentor.
One minute for Agnieszka
The purpose of Agnieszka’s start-up is to help couples whose relationship is deteriorating; she wants to help them take care of the relationship or regain trust with the use of education, workshops and awareness development. “Agnieszka’s project is surely a niche one, slowly gaining momentum in Europe and having many supporters in the USA. It is a sort of a mission Agnieszka can handle very well; there is passion, positive energy and willingness to help in it”– says Paweł Wasiewicz, Agnieszka’s mentor.
One minute for Adrian
Private education and online learning take over more and more of the education market. And such a market, as each modern system, needs tools to facilitate the use of services – and this is exactly what Adrian would like to offer. “An idea to build material plugins to the largest educational tool on the market (Moodle) is a good starting point to build a company that will be implementing and supporting schools and institutions in their daily work with the Moodle system” – says Maciej Pokojski, Adrian’s mentor.
The O4 EOI project in one word? Awesome!
The project would not have occurred without the Spanish entrepreneurs thirsty for knowledge; however, there is one more factor without which it would be a failure, namely specialists: mentors, those whose knowledge is enormous and they want to share it!
“For me, it is mostly mind opening and inspiration. Plus huge satisfaction when I can see someone having a very positive reaction to my suggestions and ideas. The project by Pablo I have been mentoring is very close to my heart, it has a lot to do with the operation of O4 and working on it additionally reminds me about things we have to take care of in our place. A very interesting and positive experience”, says Marta Moksa, O4 CEO.
Let us not delude ourselves; in addition to hard work, we also offered many attractions to our guests: sightseeing in Gdańsk, joint bowling, many excursions… But they offered the best and unique attraction to us, namely the true delicious and amazing Spanish breakfast!
These 5 weeks were intense and very inspiring and gave us the power to act and a lot of excitement! We are thankful to our Spanish friends for opening our minds, joint laughs and a lot of joy; we are looking forward to observe their international success!