Start-ups Log: Stand out or blend in

Today’s blogger is Petteri Kontio, author of the Million Before 30 blog and a founder of FinderBase.com, a social search engine for finding your lost items.

Since this is the blog of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, let me start by a telling story I’ve heard about Alvar Aalto.

Alvar Aalto knew how to win an architectural competition

On a prominent architectural competition there are guaranteed to be a lot of technically brilliant entries. The judges take the functional elements of the design into account but can’t help their own emotional attitude towards the entries. Aalto had a simple solution:

Always stand out from the crowd.

Standing out means being memorable. Standing out means arranging something unexpected to happen. Standing out means doing whatever you want to do, not what is expected of you.

Today our team attended the BootCamp demo day. We were one of the 12 teams giving a three-minute pitch about their startups. The 11 other teams did a traditional presentation. We did something else:

Our service FinderBase.com helps people who lose their items, so everyone has a clear need to use it every now and then. People need to know they have this option. It is more important to our cause to be noticed than to prove that our business model is foolproof.

Using Aalto’s mentality, I will conclude my message:

Whatever you do, try your best to be remarkable. That means sooner or later someone will make a remark about what you do.