Last Minute Winning: It's all about the STORY

SARASOTA, Fla. - April 3, 2013 - PRLog -- The adventurous story of how iLandGuide became the winner of the StartUp Sauna competition in Zagreb, Croatia started about a week ago. My friend and Board of Advisors member Peter Szanto sent me a link of the registration to this event, on the day of the deadline. In his take this is a great opportunity for us if we practice and Startup Sauna is a great accelerator. So why not?

StartUp Sauna is a finnish, non-profit accelerator organization for start ups in Europe and Russia. They organize competitions in many countries and the winner gets the chance to spend a month "internship" in Finland, mentored by experts.

After filling out all the details about our company and sending the registration a few hours before the deadline, next day I got an e-mail from the organizers who informed me that we are one of the lucky 10 participants! Felt like a good start :)

This was also the moment when I realized that this event takes place in Zagreb, on Tuesday! The next day when this info crossed my mind was…hmm..Monday morning!:)

Let me add a bit of a bypass here. During the registration a recent presentation I've seen came to my mind which was about the importance of personal branding. It highlighted the value of story telling, and explained how important and efficient it is to make a good, and memorable (first) impression.

Therefore, I decided to use this method in my presentation in, because all we had was 3 minutes to present our company and catch the attention. A typical investor pitch would focus only the product, the market, the numbers but I more felt like adding a little bit of sparkle.

With these thoughts, I was thinking about the possible basis of my presentation at the weekend when suddenly I found something. Randomly. A very nice childhood memory of mine, hiding in an old, dusty box on the top of the wardrobe. A real pirate map! A small, hand made, little piece of textile with my drawings on it. I made it to my very first trip abroad with my parents and it was an "extremely helpful tool" during our vacation in Crete, but never thought it will guide me to Zagreb as well, 24 years later.:)

Finally the personal branding topic, this pirate map, and the famous speech of Steve Jobs at the Stanford Graduation ceremony gave me the inspiration to get this done.

On Monday morning I realized that someway we should really get going, because Tuesday 9am we have to show what we got. After checking the train-schedule I realized I have only two hours left to catch the last (and first as well) train going to Zagreb, well, that was quite last minute. I wish I could say we made it, but we didn't! That train closed the doors just in front of me. Thanks God my mum's car was available, so in the light snow we got ourselves into a loooong trip to Zagreb. (I have to tell you that it was quite a reckless idea regarding that one week ago hundreds of people were stucked on the roads for more than 15 hours because of the unexpected rough weather conditions.)

The only problem with going by car was that we thought we will write the presentation and book the accommodation on the train, so when we arrived in Zagreb around 11pm, we had no idea where to stay. After driving an hour in the downtown without seeing any hotel sign at all we asked a girl on the street who said "come with me". Of course  instead of inviting us to her place, she just showed us a nice hotel next to her apartment but it was a big help on that late hour. Finally we got ourselves a room, and some hours to make the presentation.

In the morning we were just as much excited as tired we were supposed to be after 3 hours of sleeping but there were no stopping! I presented our company and also told the story of how a childish dream about traveling to islands and find the hidden treasures came to reality and became my living. The friendly and very welcoming audience really appreciated the personal branding idea and the story telling feature of mine (haha, let me advise this to all of you who want to make a memorable presentation!) After this we had a 20 min face to face conversation with the judges when we get the chance to talk about our business in details.

The announcement of results just crowned our day…YESSS, we won the competition!!!! iLandGuide was one of the three winner teams! I can't say we could not believe it, because we felt so good that our hard work got an other reward!

But it was such a good feeling because we've never ever competed on any start up competitions before.

In my opinion the story telling was a very effective way of presenting, but our key of success was also the fact that we have proven numbers and franchise partners behind us, which clearly means that this business is on its way to become worldwide known!