Final steps before WeTell Networks

At the end of my last blog post I wrote that you don't have to wait long for my next post. Well that was over a month ago, sorry about that. I have just been too busy with my work to write here. But here it is now, last 8 months of WeTell Networks and maybe something about the future.

After the summer of 2009 we were really excited because our case was sent to Helsinki Keksintösäätiö. We knew that if they said yes, we might get 30 000€. That would be enough to build our pilot product and we could start the testing with customers. We spend the whole fall talking with Keksintösäätiö and sending them new material. They also arranged us a meeting with a very talented and experienced consultant who had worked with several startups. This happened sometime during November 2009. 

This was also the time when we started to talk more about making WeTell Networks a real company. We started to plan where we could get the seed money, what accounting company would be the best, who would be our third person on the board etc. We talked about our idea with our consultant Ari Jämsen and he suggested that we should apply for Tekes PK-LTS program. It's a program to make a business plan with a consultant. We send the application and in few weeks we had our first meeting with our PK-LTS consultant Juha Puutio. We had great talks with Juha and because he was also a lawyer, he helped us with the papers we needed to fill to register the company.

On the 27^th of November we had our first board meeting, where we made decisions about the management team, chose the accounting company, the bank, the lawyer etc. On the 17^th of December we went to the city administrative court and registered WeTell Networks. That was a happy day for us because the plans that we had made for several years were finally true!

The beginning of the year 2010 was a busy time for our new startup. We had several meetings with our consultant and several VCs. All the meetings with the VCs were pretty much the same. They said that we had a good idea, it had market potential but at this point there were too many risk factors. They also told that if our product would be ready and we had people using it, they would invest on it. Also Keksintösäätiö told us the same even after we had positive feedbacks from two consultants. So no 30K€ for us. I'm not sure how many companies got the seed funding from them. I believe at this point many entrepreneurs would have stop trying but for us it gave a new drive to show those people they should have invested on us. We also realized that it is VERY hard to get funding when you don't have a pilot product.

From January to March we tried to get funding and also worked with our pilot customer, developing the product. At this time we also started to work with an AD agency Laboratorio Uleabårg, a group of very talented people. With them we developed the UI. They made us new sketches of the service and I have to say it looks great. We also made a decision that we will not see any VCs before we have a working pilot version of the product and customers testing it.

So finally we have reached today. At the moment we are doing product development with our cooperation partner. We have a few applications inside TE-keskus and Avera and we hope to get some financial support from them. But we can't trust on their support. If we get some money, that's great. If not, we will get the money from somewhere else. We have several pilot customers waiting for our product here in Finland. We are also discussing with UK based companies about pilot testing. Interest to our product has been great and also companies from fields we didn't expected have been very interested on it.

WeTell Networks is at the threshold of success, but to get there we need a lot of hard work, some luck, faith on the product and boldness. That we don't lack but so many Finnish people that are making the decisions do!

Juha Karppinen

WeTell Networks