Former Slush CEO: Don’t Trust Your Ideas

High-growth technology companies share the ambition to create something unprecedented. When creating something new, there is a great deal of confusion at first. You gather lots of information and ideas and then you discover that you don’t have enough resources to follow many of them through, said Pihlainen and pointed out four practical rules to follow.

First you need to find your focus. To get the focus right, you need to think through the basics, which haven't changed over time. “Don’t trust your idea,” Pihlainen said. Testing your ideas and concepts was important a hundred years ago and it still is, only the tools have changed. When you're trying to build something then before you start test your idea on at least ten people. If they don't like it, it's probably not going to work.

The second rule that Pihlainen pointed out is to keep in mind the diversity of different characters on your team - designers and copywriters and the very different things that motivate them.

The third rule of Pihlainen is to use humor, not just because you’ll have fun, but it's actually cost-efficient. A cool example is how Helsinki City was trying to attract global tech talent to relocate to the city, so they packaged the city as a software as a service product with a premium package that included a demo of the city that you could apply for. Out of the 7000 people that signed up, 15 won a visit to the city, after which one family moved to Helsinki. This was a cost-efficient way to drive traction and engagement, Pihlainen said.