ThoughtBox wins Blueface Business Elevator Final

This is a cross post from the ThoughtBox Blog.

I have some more great news to share with you: last Saturday ThoughtBox won the Blueface Elevator Competition! We are delighted with this achievement which will give us a great boost as soon as we launch our first product Numerosity, in September. 

We would like to take this opportunity and thank all the people that helped us along the way starting with Dr. Christian Luedtke, The NDRC LaunchPad team: Gary Leyden, Sarah O'Farrell, Emma Wilson, Harry Largey, Paul Heyse, Nicola Riordan, Barry O'Neill and the list can go on. Thank you so much everyone!

For the people that are curious about our win, please find below a newspaper clipping and some links to articles from today's newspapers.

The Irish Times

Silicon Republic: Educational software start-up ThoughtBox wins Blueface competition

Inside Ireland: ThoughtBox wins Blueface Business Elevator Final

Digital Times: ThoughtBox wins Blueface Business Elevator Final

That's Math!

For a while now I have been chatting with my friend Bon Crowder about Math. We both see math as a fun activity and look for it in our daily lives... (yes, I admit... we are both math geeks) We believe that children need to be encouraged to question and discover the math around them rather than being told how difficult math is. Lets be honest here: how many things worth doing are very easy to achieve? Any way, this is a different topic for a different time.

Today I would like to tell you more about That's Math!. Bon has taken the challenge of helping parents show their kids that math can be loved. With this in mind she has built a brilliant resource for parents to help their kids become more confident and engaged in maths.

That’s Math! contains guided steps to SEE MATH and SAY MATH out loud to your kids. This includes instructions, printable quick reference cards and lots of opportunity to develop your positive math influence! In addition, That’s Math! includes printable sets of DO MATH worksheets, activities and coloring pages that your children can do with you or by themselves.

In other words Bon has managed to create an amazing resource that helps parents identify educational activities to engage their kids around the house, outdoors and grocery store.

Why don't you check it out by yourself and let me know what you think in the comments below. Both Bon and I would love to get your feedback on this.

C.

Launch of ThoughtBox Blog, Twitter & Facebook Pages

As you already know, it's almost a year since I've started my own business: ThoughtBox, which is based on the very simple notion of letting your imagination run wild with a cardboard box. Something as boring as a cardboard box, in the hands of a child could be a playhouse, a defendable fort, an evil robot or a ship sailing the seven seas.

ThoughtBox is about creativity, imagination and gameful learning. With this in mind we build learning experiences by making subjects such as maths and science into games.

We are still at the very beginning but soon we are planning to launch our first product: Numerosity, an iPad app that makes Maths into a Game. Until then we will be sharing what we learn along the way, our best practices and latest news on our Blog. You can also keep in touch with us on Twitter and like our page in Facebook for the byte size news.

We believe that learning is fun and we love to hear from people that share our passion. So don't be shy!

C.

It’s all about the story

With my last post in mind I would like to share a Ted video of Simon Sinek talking about the way great leaders inspire action. According to him it’s all about the WHY, not the HOW or WHAT. He explains how the reason your are doing something is more important than what you are doing or how you are doing it. People buy into your beliefs and not in your logic. 

Bill Liao gave a talk for the LaunchPad businesses a couple of days ago, inspiring us to tell the story. He made a similar point to Simon Sinek: people respond to and invest in the story. This is why Aristotle's book The Poetics is the most important book you could read when starting a business. It teaches you that every story has 3 components:

• a crisis – which in our case means solving a customer problem
• the protagonist – which shows why you are qualified to solve the problem.
• the resolution – which is equivalent to the emotional value of the product: how you leave your customers feeling

Bill Liao also gave us the secret to an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and an MSP (Minimum Successful Product):

• MVP = any action you can get a user to repeat.
• MSP = any action you can get a user to repeat and feel good about it.

So what’s your story? Why do you do what you do?

Do it for the right reasons

I have always been attracted to education. I guess a pretty good clue to that is the fact that I’ve been studying all my life… but my first love of education started with math. I was always a math geek. I loved math in primary and secondary school and never understood why other kids wouldn't enjoy it as much.

I believe that maths is very important in our day to day lives as it fosters strategic and critical thinking. Maths is at the base of our economy and allows us to compete, innovate and evolve.

Unfortunately the current way of teaching maths has been proven to fail. In 2011 over 10% of students failed ordinary level maths within the Leaving Cert: this number has been growing every year.

My main reason of starting this business is to try and find a new way to teach maths in order to show kids that maths can be loved. To be honest… this is the only thing that kept me going so far and I am hoping it will keep me going in the future as well.

Rule no. 9:

Make sure you do it for the right reasons.

I believe that once you do it for the right reasons you will try to build the best product that would solve the problem you are addressing. Doing it for the right reasons will ensure you will always have your user in mind. In order to solve their problem you will need to understand who they are, what they like, what they don’t like, what they do in their spare time and where does the product fit in their life? These are the questions we started with and we tried to find answers to in order to ensure we understand our users and their needs.

Rule no.10:

Always start with the user in mind.

We also took some time to think about the personality of what we are trying to build: what do we want to inspire, what do we stand for, what do we like, what we don’t like, what would we like people to say behind our back in 5 years time. This allowed us to create a set of values that will constitute the core of our products from now on.

So what defines you? What do you stand for? Why are you doing it? What are your thoughts?

Don’t engage in more than one stressful activity at a time

Picture by topgold

Still out of work, realising that I might not be entitled to social welfare, knowing that I wanted to start a business but having no idea what I wanted to do I decided to apply for the NDRC LaunchPad programme. The only thing I knew was that I needed to get on this programme in order to move forward. It seemed like the next logical step. So I took a week to do a lot of research, come up with an idea and completed the registration forms. I had no partner and no clue if I stood a chance. The luck was on my side and a few days before I was called to present my idea, I met Claire Burge, an entrepreneur that just sold her own business and offered to help me out. We have done the pitch together and fortunately won a place in the LaunchPad programme.

The programme started on the 5^th of September for 3 months and at the same time… I decided to move in with my boyfriend.

Rule no.7:

Don’t engage in more than one stressful activity at a time.

I guess I was a bit naive thinking that moving in with my boyfriend was going to help me a lot. Don’t get me wrong, it did help to have someone that believed in me when I was coming home wrecked and stressed and having no idea how I was going to pull things through. At the same time I didn’t account for the accommodation period when each of us had our own patterns and habits and we were driving each other crazy trying to change or find a way to work together (I have to say it takes a while when each of us is really stubborn).

Going back to Launchpad I started the program with a specific path in mind, having milestones and a plan of how to deliver the minimum viable product by the end of the 3 months… You can already guess that this wasn’t going to be the case. I didn’t account for all the time we were going to spend in workshops and meetings... I didn’t account for the pivots and business plans or for the product – market fit.

Rule no.8:

Always add 1/3 more time for development and 2 times more time for defining the concept and product – market fit.

What are the rules and life lessons you have learned the hard way? I’m really interested in your wisdom… so please drop a line below.
C.

Related posts:
1. My Experience of Starting a Business
2. Create Your Own Opportunities
3. Take Some Time Off

We made it to Galway!

As promised I would like to give you an update to the Galway Cycle and the weekend we spent on the road. So here are some Galway Cycle facts for 2012 some of which are pretty impressive and some of which you might know already:

1. this was the 25th anniversary of the Galway Cycle
2. 214 cyclists took part this year – which is a record so far.
3. 22 support vehicles were on the road with us to get us to Galway safely.
4. 1km – the length of the cycling “snake” at it’s best and 1.5km at it’s worst.
5. 11.5 hours – the time it took us to get from Maynooth to Galway with 2 short 15min stops and 2 longer 40min stops
6. 25km/h – the average speed we cycled at
7. and finally we broke the record with a running total of over €122000 raised for Down Syndrome Ireland.

Thank you all so much for supporting me and helping raise this incredible sum!

C.