The Golden Egg, Innovit’s Entrepreneurship Competition ended the other day with the following winners:

In third place we saw Nude Magazine, A great new Icelandic online fashion magazine and in first place where ReMake Electric, saving you loads of money and making your house safer by bringing us the next generation of electric safety. Unfortunately not everybody can get the great runner-up, this years runner up was the Transmit Team with Brand Asset management program Brand Capital. I’m looking forward to the Beta!

I was asked to talk my experience during the last two years and share my thoughts on what we thought was important in starting a startup. 

The following five points are things that I believe have helped us a lot;

1. Talk.

Whenever you get the chance, talk about your idea with all the enthusism you’ve got. You will get better at explaining your ideas, get great advice about your next steps and people will gladly introduce you to people who can help you.

2. Speed.

Do everything as fast as you can and in as little time as you can. Build a prototype and throw it out there to get feedback. Fix it as fast as you can and iterate. You should always have something new to say to the people asking you, especially if they are investors, they love progress.

3. Honesty.

Although you want to hype your idea or product, building to high expectations is never, ever, a good thing. You should be very proud of the what you got today and talk very highly of those things.

4. Team.

When everything is going great, you will run out of time and will need more talent to join you. When you get to that point, hire people that are way smarter then you. 

5. Have Fun

Starting a company is just about the most difficult thing I can think of. It’s going to take way more time then you can ever imagine. So you’ve got to have some fun while doing so. 

This is translated from Icelandic. This is also just a short recap. I hoping to spend some more time on writing this.