Icanpreneur Talks: Summer Vibes Community Gathering

Entrepreneurship is often a lonely journey. Self-doubt, lack of expertise, and lack of previous experience in a specific area are frequent companions of startup founders. When talking to entrepreneurs, they often express the need for mental support and sharing experiences with people like them.

That’s why the community is an integral part of Icanpreneur. There is a tremendous opportunity for like-minded people to support each other in getting from an idea to product-market fit. By leveraging the community's collective knowledge, experiences, and encouragement, entrepreneurs can overcome obstacles more effectively and feel less isolated, fostering a more nurturing and successful entrepreneurial environment.

At the beginning of June, the Icanpreneur community came together for another inspiring event — “Icanpreneur Talks: Summer Vibes”! Every time we have the opportunity to meet - it is a celebration, and no two gatherings are the same. This time, we focused on exchanging ideas and inspiring others to think big.

Summer of Ideas

Summer is the time to recharge, think big, and enjoy life. We have time to disconnect from everyday firefighting, soak up the sun, read books, and get in creative thinking. That's the perfect environment for new ideas to sprout. That's why Icanpreneur is declaring this summer to be "The Summer of Ideas".

Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, we invite you to join us on our mission to build successful products based on proven methodologies and a supportive community.

To kickstart the creative thinking, we invited some of our community members to prepare lightning talks and share with the rest of us what excites them at the moment.

Lightning Talks

1. Rositsa Fakalieva - "My Entrepreneurship Journey as a Self-Discovery Process"

Rositsa is an engineering leader with more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry. She kicked off the event by sharing her entrepreneurial journey with Programming with Rosi, a platform that helps women get their first job in tech. Her talk highlighted the importance of building a purposeful business and focused on her efforts to empower women to succeed in IT through her educational platform.

Key Insights:

• It’s essential to know and leverage your strengths.
• What are different strategies to mitigate weaknesses?
• Entrepreneurship can also be a self-discovery process.

Using the Icanpreneur platform, Rosi validated customer-problem fit and built a prototype of the educational experience she wanted to provide. Even though the first steps were very successful and Rosi managed to find her first client, she found out that entrepreneurship is not something that she enjoys. For more details, check out Rositsa's Presentation.

2. Aneta Natova - "Turning Ideas into Reality"

Aneta is the founder and CEO of LeadFit. Her expertise is in helping professionals develop their leadership and organizational skills. She delved into the human brain's response to challenges and how these responses can impact our ability to turn ideas into reality.

Key Points:

• Understanding fight, flight, freeze, and faint responses when facing an ambitious goal like spawning a new product
• Bring awareness to subconscious self-sabotage and disempowering habits like self-doubt, limiting beliefs, and limiting habits.
• How to overcome typical excuses and stories we tell ourselves.

Aneta’s talk was a deep dive into the psychological aspects of entrepreneurship and provided valuable insights into overcoming internal barriers. Check out the deck from her talk to learn more about the topic.

3. Yosif Yosifov - "Startup Ideas Evaluation"

Yosif shared his insights on evaluating startup ideas. He is an engineering leader who is working on his own startup after more than 15 years in scale-up companies like Telerik and OfficeRnd. He posed three crucial questions to determine if an idea is worth pursuing:

• How fit is the team to tackle this specific idea?
  • Founder-market fit: Do they have the required domain knowledge? How passionate are they to solve the problem?
  • Problem-solution fit: Is this a real problem? Is it feasible to solve it?
• Will it be easy to ditch? Is the potential solution to the problem sticky enough to provide a sustainable business model?
• Why now? Are there any timely criteria to consider, like marketing trends, technical trends, etc…

Through his experience and multiple pivots, Yosif provided a set of guiding principles for navigating the often confusing and ambiguous idea evaluation process. If you are currently evaluating your idea, check out Yosif’s presentation for more tips and tricks.

4. Deyvid Dimitrov - "The Search for a Successful Team"

Deyvid is a software engineer and an aspiring entrepreneur in his spare time. He shared with us his experience from the past months related to finding the right team to build a startup with. What are the essential traits of strong team players and the critical components of a successful startup?

Key Traits:

• Entrepreneurial mindset: proactiveness, adaptability, ownership.
• Balanced team composition: diverse skills with some overlap.
• Leadership: leading by example and strong decision-making.

The right team can make or break a startup, and investors prioritize a well-composed, motivated team. Although it will be hard to reproduce Deyvid’s fun delivery of the talk, you can catch up with the slides that he prepared.

5. Daniel Dungyov - "Idea, Strategy, and Product behind Figmaistor"

Daniel is wearing multiple hats, some of them being Design Leader at CleverTap, Lecturer at SoftUni, and cofounder of Figmaistor - a platform for teaching UX principles through Figma in Bulgarian. Daniel shared the story behind Figmaistor and the path from an idea to MVP.

Key Factor for Success: Clarity in idea, strategy, and execution.

The Figmaistor is a great example of employing the blue ocean strategy, avoiding saturated markets, and finding unique value propositions that lead to success. The presentation is in Bulgarian (in tone with the product) but you can check some key milestones captured from the evolution of the idea.

6. Trifon Trifonov - Demo of CraftGenie.ai

Trifon is an independent software vendor and founder of CraftGenie.ai. He demoed CraftGenie.ai, showing how to build a new application from scratch using a chatbot in just 10 minutes. This tool allows teams to quickly prototype, test, or create internal tools without engineering help.

CraftGenie.ai is a next-generation no-code tool that can significantly streamline the development process for non-technical teams or technical teams with high-velocity projects.

7. Faris Sweis - "Designing Defensible AI Strategies"

Faris is co-founder and co-CEO of Sentur. Sentur provides evidence-based digital trauma care. Faris concluded the series of talks with a thought-provoking talk on leveraging AI in product development. He left us with five critical questions to consider:

• What problems can AI solve vs. AI as a solution?
• Useful AI use cases vs. features built just for having AI.
• Prerequisites for achieving accuracy - unique data availability.
• Desired outcomes - significant product improvements or making the impossible possible.
• Measuring progress and integrating feedback mechanisms.

Clear strategies and measurable goals are crucial for effective AI integration. While most companies ride the AI wave, optimizing for short-term attention, building AI into the product strategy where it can add customer value can provide a long-term unfair advantage over competitors. Read more about Faris’ thoughts on the topic on his LinkedIn newsletter.

Investors Talk

In addition to the lightning talks, we had Milen Ivanov, a managing partner at Sofia Angels Ventures, with us. SAV is one of the investors in Icanpreneur, and Milen shared with us the investor’s perspective on hot topics like:

• how to pick the right investor for your company at its current stage
• What’s important to know about investors when looking for one
• What are the main factors for investing in a company
• What role does AI plays at the moment in the decision to invest

Stay Connected

We all had a great time thanks to the inspiring talks and active participation. For more insights and updates, follow Icanpreneur's LinkedIn page and stay tuned for upcoming events. Let's continue to ideate, innovate, and grow together!