Surely it’s not enough to think through all the details and fine prints but it’s definitely enough to get the ball rolling and deliver a first prototype. We guarantee that in some two days, backed up with a skilled team and an inspiring community, you can achieve so much more that you ever thought possible.

If the concept of a hackathon is unfamiliar to you, we suggest you take a look at some of the amazing events our Estonian neighbours Garage48 have organized in the past few years.

Below is a collection of feedback from people that have taken part in Garage48 over the past 1,5 years, to let you in on the kind of opportunities collaborative development weekends offer.

Aaltoes Build It, the weekend hackathon to build ideas into functioning life forms, takes place March 9th -11th at Aalto Venture Garage, in Espoo. Sign up: http://build-it.eventbrite.com/

Name: Jevgenijs Kazanins
Team: Campalyst / Garage48 Riga

“I learned that it is totally possible to find dedicated and enthusiastic co-founders right at the event! We didn’t know each other before G48, but it wasn’t a problem in building a very solid team.”

Name: Otto Laulajainen
Team: TurnStartup / Garage48 Helsinki 

“Garage48 was my first take on web development, so I learned a lot even though our project didn’t fly. The greatest learning experience came from realizing how much one team can do in such a short time, and getting some first hand experience of what working in a startup is like.”

Name: Valeria Gasik
Team: Wuppie / Garage48 Tallin

“Being a graphic/UI designer in Garage48 is fun and exciting task. I learned that even though under the pressure one is tempted to select the most obvious solutions, challenging oneself to create something unique really pays off. Working on an idea side by side with the team is a great experience.”

Name: Ilona Mäkinen
Team: Aidbrella / Garage48 Helsinki

“I pitched an idea at Garage 48 last January: it was about something that I had studied in my Master’s thesis. I got a team of some 10 people excited. I thought the group size was far too large, so I almost threw out one of the founders of Skype!

Managing the crazy and hectic working with so many different skills and personalities was at times very challenging,
but I also learned a lot and some I met in Garage48 are still
working with me. You to choose a small topic that can be made
functional within the 48 hours. And if you are debating whether
or not you should attend - I’d say go for it, it is a very unique
learning experience!”

With a few more weeks to go to apply for an internship via Startup Life, we decided to cross-post some tips and tricks in applying and working for a startup. Got more suggestions? Add in comments!

Preparing your CV for a startup is like pruning your resume for any other corporation – except this time your imagination, ability to ship and appreciation of building companies and products are the things that count.

As the application time for Startup Life summer 2012 is drawing to it’s end we encourage everyone to revisit their portfolios and check the following:

>> Have you included projects you’ve built, either technical or non-technical? GPAs or resumes don’t tell much, outside of school projects, clubs and activities much more. If you want to know more about building side-projects, check the following post
>> Can the reader understand the essence in less than a minute? Startups are in a hurry, so lengthy cover letters are not needed. Respect peoples time.

Want to put an extra spin to your application? Try building something small for your favourite. Inspiration from the intern guidebook that you can skim through on top of the post or download here.

50 things to do in a startup

Fun projects to add? For sure! Comment below or send us your ideas at team@startuplife.in

• Make a list of 50 most promising journalists in the field of your startup. For general leads, check http://goo.gl/veIQ8
• Find 50 most influential future users and contact them.
• Business students – learn basics of HTML and CSS.
• Start compiling a FAQ site of the product.
• Make screencasts of the new features of the product.
• Write an interview of an existing customer. Take a look at how 37Signals does it: productblog.37signals.com
• Make custom 404 pages. Or five. Inspiration from Github: https://github.com/404
• Analytics. Dive deep into the numbers. Present what you learned!
• Organize a Friday evening beers & pizza session for the startup.
• Document the company culture (photos, examples) and make a slideshow. Upload it to Slideshare.
• Learn to take product shots. Check out Etsy’s guide: http://goo.gl/5FGQl
• Plan and take press pictures of all founders.
• Write a 100, 300 and a 1000 word decsription of your startup in english and finnish.
• Collect related blogposts that are worth benchmarking.
• Compile a presskit for your startup. Check out http://goo.gl/4jU7i and http://goo.gl/piBmZ
• Paper prototype a new interface and try it out to at least 100 customers. Write three actionable items you learned.
• Do the same with Balsamiq or Mockingbird.
• Organize an open hackday for all the local developers.
• Organize a community micro-event for the users.
• Create a template for a newsletter.
• Make video-interviews of the founders & employees.
• Learn typography.
• Try A/B testing something with the website.
• Clean the pitchdecks. Inspiration from venturehacks.com and noteandpoint.com
• Find competitors.
• Plan a viral marketing campaign, measure the results.
• Find the coolest hackers and projects related to your startup from GitHub.
• Find the most interesting designers from Dribbble and see if they do contract work.
• Build an internal dashboard a la Panic board http://goo.gl/AHDX
• Do customer support for a day, whatever your main job is. Engage and ask a lot of questions.
• Put together a lead generation document.
• Update all the support documents.
• Learn to handle Google AdWords, banner advertising, text advertising etc.
• Research potential partners APIs and terms of service.
• Hack the officespace. Make it something like Zappos or 37Signals http://goo.gl/gks8N
• Plan a Jobs-section. Make your startup sound cooler than anyone else.
• Watch at least 10 customers use your product. Communicate your learnings.
• Retweet relevant Twitter-posts and schedule updates. Gather favourites!
• Scan and organize or those papers.
• Learn scrum.
• Design stickers and t-shirts.
• Make a cheeky robots.txt file. Check out flickr.com/humans.txt and google.com/humans.txt
• Benchmark the best internal communication solutions: Hipchat, Flowdock, Yammer, Basecamp, Google Sites etc.
• Try out Reinvigorate, Get Satisfaction, UserVoice, Geckoboard and other hip startup tools
• Shadow a user for a day to see where the pain points are.
• Survey people who returned the product or took a trial and didn’t continue.
• Digg deep into Quora, Digg, Reddit, Twitter. Identify super-users, twitter-lists, Facebook groups.
• Write a blogpost on your learning experiences.
• Make an internal Spotify list.
• Make a company blog (check out wordpress.com for hosted or tumblr.com or posterous.com).
• Plan a company summer party. Execute some crazy vision with zero-budget!

Usually I’m both starving and lacking caffeine by the lunch time, which is around one o’clock. They’re all nice people, though. I’m just a little worried about their nutrition. The lack of food was the reason I stopped being hippie in the first place and decided to try this startup thing for a change. Other than that, the first month has gone fast and I’m really excited about the work. I work as a Designer at Ditto, we are currently a four-member team, located in the Hayes Valley neighborhood. I help the team to design new features to our social web products. We share the same office space with another startup, 2bkco

Three things:

• The work process is different from consulting work. It is faster and more iterative – there’s no point coming up with a product that no one uses. Client work consists of deadlines and checklists, in a startup the team can decide what to design and when.
• Coders are good in SF and they’re not nerds. It means new things can be tested in a very short period of time and the startups don’t usually have a conclave of non-tech founders.
• There’s a lot more experience of “what happens next”. Cooperation and scaling get much more notice than in Finland. It means better engineering and communication right from the start.

Here are some feel-good pics from the city, enjoy!

–Pekka

Me elsewhere: http://www.pekkahartikainen.fi | http://www.twitter.com/pastorator

Alamo Square in Hayes Valley near our office.

Lower Haight. One can lead very different lifestyles here – different neighborhoods are closely located to each other.

Stanford seemed to be a peaceful and study-oriented environment. You could sense the competition under the surface, though.

Ilkka, Hung, Anne, Raimo, Otto H. (Flowdock Founder) and Jussi in a park after the weekly Sunday brunch. 

In a flow at Ditto office. Our team consists of two founders and two interns at the moment.

Surfing gear check in Santa Cruz. The car belongs to my friend Rämänen.

I have feet. Somehow one’s thoughts become more sentimental when you feel the lawn.

MC Hammer

Bonus video: MC Hammer himself speaking at a Sopa protest near Civic Center. I had to bite my lip not to shout “U CAN*T TOUCH THIS SOPA”. Fortunately I succeeded.

So a bunch of us hopped on the Travelling Salesman‘s Landy yesterday, took the ferry over to Tallinn and drove down to Riga in the blistering cold for the TechCrunch Baltics event. It’s good to see the Baltic community come together for the event, the house is packed. And what a house! Here’s the view from the balcony of the hotel venue:

The event is looking good so far. Good discussions around running startups out of the Baltics and Northern Europe. A question on many people’s lips is how to best leverage our region and get all of our communities working together. Luckily we’ve brought a sauna along for the TechHub Riga launchparty afterwards to facilitate those long nude discussions.

Stay tuned for a blog post coming tomorrow from our new recruits Tatu, Tomas and DH (who braved the trip and joined us without assurance that they can get in! Entrepreneurial right?) for an account on the trip. Looking forward to hear their thoughts!

Tune in to #tcbaltics for more updates on the proceedings.

TEDxAaltoUniversity hosts their first event in Finland! February 29th 18:00 in Design Factory

TEDxAalto presents a live webcast from TED 2012 Global event in California. Inspiring talks, TEDx atmosphere and additional surprise programme.

The event is open for everybody, limited seats.

Registration: http://bit.ly/ABHYdB

More info: www.tedxaalto.com

The perks of being a small, volunteer-based organization like us include the sometimes slow speed of upload. We’ve finally gone through the ample video material from Slush 2011 and will go through the harvest in the next blogposts.

Taking place in early November, Slush Helsinki was a two day conference but most of all a startup expo; we had demo startups in the house that made up a lively corridor of new ventures from all over the Baltic Rim.

Pitch till you drop

The most followed part of the expo, however, ended up being the Slush100 Pitching Competition.

Like all pitching competitions, Slush100 was about clarity of the sales pitch, presentation skills and wow factors. We had a panel of investors and startup experts listening to each pitch and selecting the 20 most entertaining, captivating presentations to the semifinals held on the second day of the event.

From a hundred to twenty to eventually the Top 7 that pitched on the main stage on Thursday evening, the two days were packed with dramatic stage performances, addictive storylines, overselling with confidence and entertaining business ideas.

The cream of the crop in 2011 were…

• The winner, Ovelin whose guitar learning app Wild Chords was launched simultanouseously. Ovelin received 10, 000 euros as the first prize of the competition

• Runner up home electricity bill optimizer Asema Electronics

•  Leaddesk

•  SumoPaint

• TangaReef

• Runner up Transfluent, realtime professional translation service

• Zeighted

The rest of the piches can be seen from Aaltoes Youtube Channel.

The trendiest startups of the year

In addition to Slush100 and an Open Mic free form pitching during breaks in schedule, we also invited another category of startups to tell about themselves: Startups on the Rise. What these firms had in common were an interesting product in an interesting stage and well, we just wanted to hear more from them, hence they were invited to join the ride.

• Blaast

• Senseg

• Flirtic

• FAM Sports

• Kiosked

All in all, thoroughly enjoyable pitches – do take a look at them when you get a chance as these are the startups that will rock the world in future, or die trying’ as the saying goes

Thanks for everyone who took part in pitching – we hope you had fun & learned!

Photo: Tuomo Lampinen / Text: Lotta