We’re female academics starting a tech business to sell erotic literature. Probably not the most traditional combination, but nonetheless that’s what we’re doing…

Ladies, ladies! After working months on end, we’re nearly ready to launch Lace, an app with erotic stories for women. Lace is our little darling, and we are quite excited to see what sort of splash it’ll make.

The funny thing is, I’m not the sort of person you’d expect to have a new app about to launch. My background is in academia – in psychology to be precise – and so is my business partner’s. If somebody had told us just a year ago that I would start my own IT-company, I would have probably just laughed at them.

I only had a vague idea of what an IT-entrepreneur was before I randomly got hired by a different IT-startup, where I worked with online literature together with Lace’s other half, Sara.

What we liked about the job was the contact with the users and working with writing and reading great stories.

At first we didn’t pay much attention to all the buzzwords flying around the office – talks about “going viral”, concerns about ROI, red ocean and blue ocean strategy and what not… That was something for the business dudes to worry about.

But slowly something started to change. We kept an eye on the different trends in online literature, and at some point the hype around a book called ”Fifty Shades of Grey” caught our attention. At first we just chatted casually about creating a great place for women to read erotic stories, but the idea grew bigger, and finally we decided we wanted to put our idea to the test and do something on our own.

Planning and collecting the stories was actually the easy part – that’s the world we know and understood. Our challenge was all the other stuff – the stuff they DON’T teach you at university. Like, how do you create a CVR-number? How do you find and hire a developer? How do you do accounting without getting insanely bored? And how do you pitch in front of hundreds of people when all you want to do is sit at home reading a good book?

Well, the answer is you’ll learn as you go along. And being able to shrug off all the buzzwords is probably also a good way to go – in my opinion they’re not that important if you have a great idea.

We’re looking forward to sharing our Lace development experiences with all you ladies!

 video via creative business cup

Or so I thought. It was much harder to focus on one specific idea. I saw tons of opportunities across several different product categories – design, travel, academia – but nothing set me alight. For a while, I believed I was incapable of feeling that deep connection with anything that “real entrepreneurs” so often talk about.

One day I attended a workshop as part of CPH Start-ups, run by the executive coach Stacy Townsend, and heard about the theory of BE-DO-HAVE (probably not the technical name, sorry Stacy). She described how most entrepreneurs focus on what they want to HAVE (a successful company, the respect of the start-up community) and then try to align their actions (what they actually DO) with these objectives. Who they actually become (BE) is not designed consciously, but is merely an outcome of the actions they take and results they strive for. This all sounded perfectly logical to me, until I worked out she was illustrating how not to do it!

Actually, she explained, the most sensible place to start is with the BE – in other words, defining who you want to become. And by BE, she wasn’t referring to your job title or the content area of your start-up… She was talking about foundational stuff, like values, beliefs and vision; the things that should be driving everything else. Once you have this straight it is much easier to know what you should be doing – today, tomorrow, with your life in general – and what outcomes or results will bring you most fulfillment

Following the session (and after a lot of reflection), I tried to adopt this framework myself, including while trying to establish what the content area of my business should be. I soon realised I didn’t need to be passionate about a particular product, service or function within my business. It sounds so clichéd, but I just needed to focus on being me. The rest would more or less take care of itself – I would be naturally be drawn to opportunities that excited me, to people who inspired me and to projects that spoke to my strongest values.

So, six months on, I have my company Scale Angel. My first partnership is with Besos, the scarf boutique, and I love it. It’s not like I woke up one day and realised I was that I was in love with scarves. Rather, it became clear to me that I am passionate about the challenge, creativity and fun of building a business. I’m contributing to building my partner’s dream and I’m proud of how authentically I’ve driven its growth.

Focusing on what I wanted to be, and building my business around the opportunities that were presented by doing this, has worked for me (so far). Do you think I’m talking complete nonsense or have you had a similar experience…? Spill your thoughts in the comments below.

Motivation is not exactly a new subject within the field of management. And yet so few managers know how to motivate their employees. It is interesting to consider how so many entrepreneurs work for no money, sometimes for years. And how many people volunteer several times a week without getting a single dollar from it. Or the thousands of people who’ve spent a great deal of time and effort on co-creating wikipedia. So why do they do that when they could go work at a company and get paid?

For me, personally, it’s the freedom. Not the ‘I-can-leave-when-I-want’ kind of freedom, but the ‘there-are-no-limits’ kind of freedom. As an example, writing is one thing that makes me very happy, this is my creative outlet. My current employer hired me partly based on my writing and because of all the texts they found by me online. Which was of course a huge confidence boost. But when I suddenly got paid to do a certain job for a certain client, I froze. All my inspiration left my body and I felt almost sedated.

The other day I was reading this book about motivation and someone who had been doing research within this field. He had gathered a group of artists and paid some of them to do some work and some of them had not been paid anything. Afterwards he got some experts from the industry to look at the art and comment on which pieces they thought were made by the resourceful artists and the volunteer ones. You can probably all guess what art they found more creative. Exactly.

I happen to be very happy with what I do and I have some great colleagues to guide me whenever I feel a bit lost. But man, it can be really scary when you can feel your creativity disappear. I know that it’s because I don’t know how to work with the limits there always will be when you do pieces for anyone else than yourself. My teachers at uni hated me, because I refused to write academically. But come on, it’s so boring. Essentially I think that I’ve figured out that writing for someone else is never going to be my career. At least not until I get famous enough that people will pay me to write whatever. I just don’t think it’s fun.

Motivation is such a key-term in every successful career (at least in the long run) and I find this to be one of the most important parts of managing anyone. For young businesses it is especially essential that all employees work their hardest, because the company depends on it. Therefore we must consider what we do to motivate our employees. For me, a great approach is to ask yourself if you would be motivated by what you’re doing and if not, others probably won’t be either.

Daniel Pink, who’s written the book Drive I talked about earlier says that the largest misunderstanding is that managers think their employees are driven my money. The carrot-and-stick approach, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction – at work, at school, and at home – is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. I think and hope that he’s right. Let the creativity prosper!

I’ve never been one of the cool kids. And this fact, to this day, is why I do a lot of the ridiculous things I do. It seriously bothers me. I’ve always been friends with some of the cool kids, but never really one of them. Always just on the outside, not really invited to the party but sometimes I get to go by proxy. Do you know the feeling?

This year I’ve been really trying to work on distancing myself from that feeling. It’s hard, I’ll be honest, because the internet makes comparisons so EFFING easy. Just a click here, a url there, and boom! I can find 10 websites that make me feel like I suck, like I’ll always be picked last for kickball. (And I’m actually surprisingly good at kickball. No lie.)

I thought that maybe I’m not the only one dealing with this so I figured I’d share some of the things I’ve been doing to help remove myself from the comparison trap. Because let’s be honest, if I have no idea what the cool kids are doing, I won’t feel like I was left out of it.

1. First and foremost, I stopped following A LOT of blogs. I still check in on a few for people I find highly inspirational or for photographers who I know personally and want to follow up on their lives, but for the rest I’ve let go. There’s no need for me to see what every one of my peers did this week because inevitably I will compare it to what I did, what I accomplished, where I shot, where I was featured, who I got to collaborate with, etc. So step 1…. Clean out your rss.

2. Second, I hid a BUNCH of people from my facebook feed. And by a bunch, I mean hundreds. I did not un-friend them, let’s just clarify that from the start. Now I only keep people who I actually know and/or work with in my feed. It takes me about 5 minutes to catch up on their lives when I open facebook (instead of the hour or so it took me before to read about every single contact I had). And when I’m curious about a particular person, I just look them up. Step 2… Hide the people who you don’t actually know from your facebook feed.

3. I’ll be honest, I wish there was a way to do the same thing on twitter because twitter is even worse. One big bragfest. One big constant name drop. But… twitter is a necessary evil in my life and I love the way I can communicate with so many people so I deal. Step 3… Take twitter with a grain of salt. Everyone wants to appear wonderful and successful so they will usually only share the best. Remind yourself that they have shitty days/months/seasons too.

4. To allow myself a positive form of internet distraction, I started branching out. I added so many personal blogs, design blogs, fashion blogs, and inspiration blogs to my reader. I’d say only about 10% of them are inside my own industry. I now love my time reading them and come away inspired instead of frustrated. Step 4….Find whatever inspires you and start spending more of your time there.

5. This is what I’ve been focusing 100% on recently… What do I like? What do I want to do? What do I do well? What do I think is bullshit? I’ve been doing more of the first three and cutting out that last one. At the end of the day, I’m never going to really leave an impact on this world by being a collage of all the other people who I think are better/cooler/more successful than me. I’ve got to do my own thing. Dance to the beat of my own drummer. Step five… Stop trying to be like your idols, stop trying to copy the trends, do what you love whether it’s in style or not and do a kick ass job at it.

I hope this helps those of you going through the same comparison trap that I go through. If you’ve got any other tips, let me know them in the comments!

Becka Robinson is the awesome lady behind Life as an Artistpreneur, where this was originally published. All photos from her portfolio.

PhotoPitch is now nominated as a finalist in this year’s Creative Business Cup. That is amazing. And I am so proud! And very very nervous.

Just the thought of pitching my idea in front of the entire Iværk & Vækst exhibition in Øksnehallen on Friday makes me scared to death.  This week has been meditation, practice, yoga, deep breaths, practice, practice, practice – how can I ensure that everything will be ok on Friday? Where should I start? How can I best prepare – make a role play? Visit my guru? Hmm let me know if you have any thoughts on that!

But when it comes down to it I guess  this nervousness is just because I am very excited! I will highly recommend you guys out there to also attend idea competitions – you really get a lot out of it; twice I´ve gotten the chance to pitch in front of a Connect Denmark Springboard, got great feedback from Venture Cup, got potential advisors in our advisory board and … – so with a little effort you can open a lot of doors!

Please have your fingers crossed for me and my business partner on Friday! :)

Want to attend the finals? 

Becka Robinson is awesome. On her blog Life as an Artistpreneur she writes these bi-monthly features called Coffee Cup Chats where she tackles the issues around creative self-employment. We Unite is super super happy to share a selection of her Chats over the next while. Enjoy!

Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot, albeit it accidentally, about how to effectively block myself creatively. And, to help all of you out there who may be struggling to keep your earth-shattering, art elevating, industry changing creativity at bay, I’ve decided to share a list of the most effective techniques I’ve found. So fear not, follow these easy steps to live a more mediocre creative life…

1. Overbook yourself. If you want to effectively hinder your creative juices from flowing, you need to book every spare second of your life with your work. Do not, under any circumstances allow yourself to deviate from this work. Fun deviations will only allow your inner child to flourish and that will likely result in original ideas and creative bar raising.

2. Compare yourself to as many contemporaries as possible. In those rare moments when you break from work, take a moment to compare your artwork to that of your more successful contemporaries. Remind yourself of why they are better than you and why you will never be able to accomplish creative success. This practice will knock the foundation right out from under your self confidence sabotaging yourself from the beginning.

3. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle ideas. Whenever possible copy the ideas of other artists and loosely reinterpret them as your own. (Bonus points if you blatantly copy without even attempting to interpret the idea for yourself.) This practice allows you to slowly silence your own (pesky) artistic voice by creatively strangling it.

3. Never, ever practice. This can be tricky as you may feel as if you are always practicing your craft by overbooking your schedule with work. But do not be deceived, if you are correctly killing your creative fire your constant work schedule should not include practicing new techniques or bettering yourself at your craft. If you can dedicate yourself to this, your inner artist will never be able to turn its dreams into realities in your life leaving you free to live in a much more boring and safe artistic zone.

4. Avoid outer influences. To keep your brain free from inspiration, you must be diligent in avoiding positive artistic influences. That means you must avoid whatever it is that you previously found stirring something inside of you. This can include, but is not limited to: music, art, love, happiness, food, literature, poetry, movies, nature, magazines, and the work of the masters.

5. Safety in numbers. Surround yourself with likeminded, and even more mediocre people than yourself. The less driven they are, the better. Look for those who other’s might describe as “set in their ways”, “refusing to grow”, “unbending”, “average”. These people will help you continue to work in circles and avoid growth. They will also cheer you on in your averageness because they do not want you to succeed or be inventive at all. By avoiding those that might push you to be better you can rest peacefully on your laurels.

*Obviously, I’m completely kidding. These are all mistakes that I have made and have seen others make. Please do the opposite of everything in this list. The world (and your industry) needs you to be inspiring, creative fire-sparking, industry-changing, and mind-blowingly awesome.

If there ever was a magical triangle of entrepreneurism, this is it. Opportunity, talent, and money — you need all three for a balanced startup, but can you ever have ‘em all at once?

As an entrepreneur, you’ve probably learned that running a startup is a balancing act. Or perhaps on some days it’s managing disaster control. And that’s all because, at any given time, you’re likely lacking one of these three key things.

It was Tine Thygesen at last night’s event who revealed this, after she realized that a speech listing her first 500 mistakes as an entrepreneur might get a little disorganized. So she came up with this triangle. You need talent, a good team you work well with; you need an opportunity — a gap in the market, a new partnership; and you need some money.

If you’re missing one of them, you’re probably doing alright (like this is actually pretty normal, according to Tine). It can happen that you’re missing two, but if you’re missing all three…well, as Tine said, then it’s probably worth starting over.

I think the real lesson here is that it’s okay if you’re not in perfect balance. Actually, that’s perfectly acceptable. You just need to practice handling that and being prepared to live and work in a constant pendulum.

We Unite is brimming with stories about strong girls finding their way, building up businesses and following their dreams. Whenever I talk about the network, everybody thinks it’s great, inspiring and uplifting – just that some get this sad, longing look on their face. The melancholic, slightly envious one that says “I want to have a dream, too – a cool job, a brilliant idea, something that motivates me and gives me direction. I just don’t have a clue about what I’m good at.”

So, if everybody is talking about talent, then how do you find yours?

It seems like for a lot of people the endless possibilities existing nowadays are more of a threatening thought than an opportunity: If I have the chance to be the best possible version of myself and I don’t take it because I don’t have a clue about what the best version is, am I a failure? Why does everybody else seem to know what they want to do, what their calling is?

Because they figured it out in some way. They tried stuff, they failed, they tried something else, it wasn’t quite what they imagined, they made chance encounters that sparked new interests and pursued them further. For some that process started quite soon, others just knew what they wanted since they were five and some are still looking.

What are you good at? What are the things your friends always ask you (and only you) for help with? Pursue these talents and interests, take aside two hours per week and see where it leads you – if you feel comfortable and motivated, those two hours will quickly expand.

I’m not going to give you the whole “make a blog, the internet is a wondrous place where everything is possible” speech (even though I love blogging and it’s the perfect tool for me) – if you feel more comfortable keeping an old school notebook, writing short stories or volunteering in a completely offline neighborhood association, by all means DO IT.

You never know where it might lead you and what it might develop into. But thing is sure: if you do nothing, nothing will happen – if you do something, something will happen. A lot of people I know sometimes think you have to have the perfect idea, the great concept, you have to do something bold, make a statement before you can actually start doing something. It’s the old ” well if I go to the gym, then I have to go at least three times a week and I already know I’m too lazy for that so I won’t sign up” thing . How about starting to go to your own personal “mind gym” once a week?

Just do things that interest you, there doesn’t have to be a master plan behind. But it might develop into something truly great. One of the best examples for this has to be Hege who just asked people to contribute to her blog and propelled her network into new dimensions through that simple idea that was born out of interest in other people’s view. Now she’s developing audio guides for a museum in Norway.

What’s stopping you from just going after what interests you?

Read more from Alexandra here

Photos credits here

Our new bloggers, Lauren and Rebecca, of Copenhagen’s The Green Suitcase, explain the process of pairing up in business

Being an entrepreneur can be SO lonely. It’s fantastic in a thousand ways, but it’s alot of pressure for one person to handle.

Many entrepreneurs, like me, get to a point where it’s impossible to grow the business alone, but you aren’t far enough along to employ someone. I spent the last six months trying to get tabs on the everyday and didn’t have time to think big and grow my company, The Green Suitcase.

So naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to bring Rebecca on as a business partner after two-and-a-half years of solo work.

But then after I jumped there were all kinds of fears! Thoughts of losing control of my business, losing all my money, losing the POWER!!!

I felt better once I realised that these feelings were natural. Being an entrepreneur is so very personal – I think it should be – so it’s natural to take things personally.

Luckily I could talk through all of these feelings with Rebecca & of course she had fears & doubts of her own, like giving up a good job and steady salary for the unknown! But I eventually realised that together we can achieve much more with the business and create an amazing quality of life for both of us.

Based on our experience, if we were to give some advice about finding a business partner it would be:

Be Honest From The Get Go!

Many women like me suffer from serious people pleasing problems – we like to cover over the bad bits to make ourselves & our business seem as attractive as possible.

Make Sure You Are 100% Satisfied With The Deal

If you aren’t it will come back to haunt you later on down the track when you’re making millions.

 Be Prepared That You Won’t Always Agree

Rebecca & I have made a back-up plan for when we don’t agree. If we find an issue we can’t resolve between us, we present our case to an elected mentor who will help broker a solution.

Don’t Be Clones of each other

In a partnership your differences are your strength. Rebecca and I have complimenting skills and experiences. We use this to our advantage, structuring our tasks and roles to match what we are good at.

We are starting our partnership with the opening of our showroom/boutique in Nansensgade 38 in Copenhagen. We’re open now so please pop in for a visit! Plus if you mention We Unite we’ll give you a 15% discount!

*photos by Leslie MK

A lot of entrepreneurs have many great ideas and huge potential of succeeding with their product. However, there is typically one thing that we aren’t to keen on: sales.

This is a huge problem, because sales is essential if you want your product to succeed (I assume no further explanation needed). Many people feel that sales is a dirty job all about cold-calling prospective customers and push a certain product on them without recognizing if they actually want the product. Some sales people do work in that way and yes (I think) that sounds like a horrible job. But after having worked with sales as a large part of my job for the past years I’ve realized that sales does not need to be reminiscent to what has been described above.

From my own personal experience and from knowledge I’ve gathered from others, here are a few pieces of advice when selling a product:

* Product knowledge is key. This is probably not an issue if you’re selling your own product. But if you hire someone to do it, make sure they know every single little thing about the product. It will make the customer feel safer when the seller seems confident.

* Make sure the product is actually relevant to the buyer. It’s expensive and time-consuming getting new customers. There’s no point in wasting time on customers that will leave again in no time. Spend time on customers that will actually use your product again and again – they are the people who are going to make you rich!

* Think customer service just as much as you think sales. This is also called soft selling and has always been my strategy. I realize in some cases it will take longer to get a client to buy your product, but if they do go ahead and buy after feeling acknowledged, helped and understood the chances of them staying with your company are a lot bigger.

Don’t push, brag or give discounts to close a deal. Trust your product and your knowledge of it and be aware of your target market. And don’t be afraid to sell – your product is amazing and people should feel lucky to get the chance to buy it!