Creating ideas Branson would back
I am a non-tech graduate. It’s actually a business school I’m coming from. My thesis back in 2000 was semi-tech — modelling an internet infrastructure. I had to prove that it’s cost-effective to bring ADSL connections to apartment buildings.
I remember that there were only two guys in the room who got this. One of them was my IT teacher Taavi Tamberg. Another guy was my mentor, Angel Pärn. Today, he’s a lead engineer in Pipedrive, one of the Estonian unicorns.
Life brought me closer to tech 14 years later, in 2014. I was semi-retired and bored then. Not as bored as some Apes, but close. A friend, Taavi Tamm, invited me to take a part in my very first hackathon, the Global Service Jam. Today Taavi is a CMO of an amazing team MyGames. Then he was a marketing lecturer at Tartu University Pärnu College.
It was fun. We generated ideas and my idea got several awesome people around me. 48 hours later we had a mockup ready and uploaded it to the cloud. The GSJ is a non-profit and everything created there is shared. As freeware, it’s accessible by anyone. And we didn’t know that there are specialised accelerators that are hunting ideas and implementing them with their existing talents and resources.
Our idea was called BOX — storage service by the box. Sending, collecting and returning your stuff to your doorstep. Meaning its customers never have to visit a storage unit again and only pay for space they actually use.
After this hackathon, I tried to motivate my teammates to go for it for real. Only one of them showed some interest and we even got ourselves some publicity in the local newspaper. Unfortunately, we had no idea where to start or how to build a global service. We knew it should be some metropolis, and the closest to us was London. We had zero knowledge and experience in building scalable B2C services. Just some vision and curiosity.
A few weeks later, my friend Marten Palu (today he’s the founder and CEO of Gamecan) sent me a link. We were cloned by guys who were hunting the database of GSJ for ideas! These guys not only took the idea with every single detail, mockups and a business plan. They even didn’t bother changing the name too much. At first, it was a shock. But a few moments later, I found myself daydreaming about my next venture being backed by some eccentric billionaire and taking a picture with him.
There were three lessons I learned that day.
1. It’s all about execution.
2. It’s all about the team.
3. Richard Branson would back my idea.
A year later we founded Shipitwise, merged it with Speys 3/4 years later. I left Speys in early 2021 to pursue my dream of a transparent and affordable global supply chain.
And now, I am a part of the most amazing team I have ever worked with. People of integrity, passion, amazing work ethics. they are the fastest learners I have ever met. In less than 6 months, we have launched World of Freight, co-founded WOF Labs and started building Supplain. We have launched an amazing NFT Collection people are minting all across the world!
I am pretty sure that in a year or so, more than one eccentric billionaire will join our team as an investor. Without hugs, keeping the social distance of course.
Join us on Discord and learn more about how you can become a part of the change.
For additional information, contact me: alex@supplain.io
