Ship it and Sip it

Late last summer, we welcomed Alena Lysiakova 🐉 to our content and marketing team 🤝 During the interview, we asked her what she thought about going public and sharing about the work on social channels. She seemed willing but not overly excited — but this year that all changed 🚀 And now she's flourishing with Copy & Coffee and inspires us on a daily basis 💪 Here's what we got into on this episode: • What kind of content she loves to write + what's the next experiment • Who inspired her to really go all-in on posting in 2023 • How people and brands grow in different and similar ways on Linkedin • Why you need to reach both potential customers and your tribe with content Enjoy the show and have an amazing weekend 🍻

How much progress can you make as a founder with 'just an idea' in one month? With simple tools, consistency building in public and grit — the answer is a lot 📈 "It's given me a chance to really focus on the MVP and where that needs to be niched down to. I had the pleasure of speaking to over 200 PTs — the waiting list grew a lot further than I expected." – Sam Cholera, founder of PT Fitness Coach "Talking about this idea in public was a big thing for me — when you go to the pub you might tell your mates about an idea. But going on Linkedin and telling your professional network about it is another level. It was always something I was daunted by before. But, having done it, it's been amazing the response I've got — it's just been incredible." – Christopher Elward from Myne ”That was the kick of motivation I needed — you get motivated by action. You see that ok, this is possible." – James Hutchinson at Lingoers I caught the founders James, Chris, Joe and Sam just after they pitched their startups to our selection panel at the end of Bootcamp Batch 1. Enjoy the show to find out what they accomplished and the traction they built for their idea in public. Join the next round at www.nanohq.co

What if you could make knowledge documentation faster, easier and more interactive in your team? That's what Ethan Summers and the team at Extelli do — and the solution sits right in Chrome ready to use in a flash. This interview uncovers: 🪜 Ethan's path to entrepreneurship from hardware to software + joining Harmony Venture Labs 🧠 How teams of all sizes use Extelli — from small startups to established orgs 💡 Why it's key to retain workflows, info and know-how in any team — hint: it saves time and $$ "It is magical to sit down with a developer, come up with a feature, identify an issue, fix it — and then they push it and it just works. If you've lived in software your entire life, maybe it can be easy to forget just how magical that is." – Ethan Summers Tune in and enjoy the show!

Check out https://extelli.com/ to try it out with your team.

Learn more about Harmony Venture Labs at https://harmonyventurelabs.com/

Subscribe to Shegun's Let's Build newsletter at https://shegun.substack.com/

Every time we kick off a fresh product build with a founder, a creative designer is one of the first on the scene. Most times, a quick design prototype is step 1 to a successful launch.

So how does it happen? And what does the environment that supports each product designer look like?

Let's pull back the curtain on our design process this week with Head of Design Lena Grechits 🥂

"I really like the atmosphere in our team because we're not only working on projects and sometimes see other designers, but we have special meetings twice a week … where we share our latest updates, our new projects, our maybe some tools that we found, some new techniques. We share experience and have one moderator every week who is responsible to find a newer topic, a new tool, something to share." – Lena

We also get into:

🤖 AI tools in Lena's workflow

🧱 The team's new design library Brick

👣 Lena's path to design leadership

Watch and celebrate the power of design with us 🙌

Thinking about creating a generative AI product — bringing imaginative stories to life with Stable Diffusion or Dall•e?

"You ask for something, and you don't search for it in the existing world — you create it from scratch. It's like high-tech cyberpunk or something, because we're gonna live in this world where you ask for something and we don't bring it — we create it." – Vladimir Panteleev

Our guest this week is Head of Research and Development Vladimir Panteleev and we had a whirlwind conversation about new and exciting tech, including:

🪄 How generative AI is like casting spells to create magic in the digital world
🤝 Why people, not tech, are at the center of the R&D mission
🚀 What Vladimir thinks about 'hardcore' engineering

And, of course, how the team vets and brings new tech into projects with a focus on maintaining product simplicity.

Enjoy the show 🎥

"If we speak about tech itself, I'd say that Portugal — for some reason — is becoming a second Silicon Valley. We even have a bridge like the one in San Francisco." – Konstantin Kariapin, Head of Business Development   

This week we have a special preview show ahead of Web Summit in Lisbon 🤝  
Konstantin has been in Lisbon for the last few months getting to know the startup scene and checking out local accelerator and incubators. Now he's ready for the big event.  

But he won't be alone! Victoriya Antonovich and Victoria Barouskaya are going to find more founders, investors and partners for our community.   Besides the team and their goals for Web Summit, they discuss:  
- Konstantin's first experience at a conference and what he learned  
- Why it's easy to shake off the nerves at big events  
- Whether the investing slowdown will sour the mood  

"Before I went to my first conference I was a bit nervous. But you know, it's so easy to overcome these feelings because all you need is to just start talking to someone. Then  it goes by itself like a flow — you don't even have time to think that you're nervous — it all happens so naturally."  

Have fun and if you're going to be at Web Summit or in Lisbon anytime soon, just shoot a message to Konstantin, Victoriya, or Victoria to meet up!

What's it take to build a startup venture studio?
How do you go about creating a sustainable, local tech ecosystem?  

We set out to find answers to these questions and more in the latest Ship it and Sip it.   The guest is Trevor Newberry, Director of Product Delivery at Harmony Venture Labs. Over the past year, we've worked with Trevor and the team to launch startups including Cowello and ListedKit.   

"One thing we've experimented with is actually bringing entrepreneurs in before we actually have a product and saying: 'look, we've been watching you, seen the decisions you've made. We really have a lot of confidence in you as an entrepreneur and we'd love to build something with you.'"  

Beyond ideation and building products — Trevor has co-founded the cohort course AppThink to train the next generation of startup leaders to create winning products.  

Dive in to learn all about quick B2B product launches, ideation + validation, and what's coming up next from Trevor and the HVL team.

Meet Irina Demidova, Senior Business Analyst at Paralect.  This week we invited Irina to "Ship it and Sip it" to talk about her experience in ProductLab, Paralect Accelerator and Startup Summer courses.  

Watch the video to find out:  
👉🏽 How to understand that your startup idea is brilliant
👉🏽 How to define the MVP scope and prioritize features
👉🏽 What are the ways to communicate efficiently online
👉🏽 Why Irina decided to become a business analyst
👉🏽 How to become a professional Business Analyst and much more  

"Despite everything what is happening, we need to move forward because it makes our world a little bit better" − Irina.

"In the last couple years, we've been in an unbelievably long upwards spiral in the venture market which was mainly driven by cheap capital. I wouldn't go so far as calling it a venture crisis or venture winter, more-so a market correction back towards normality." – Konstantin Lotter from Trustventure.

This week we sat down with Konstantin and Konstantin Kariapin to talk about:

- startup fundraising and the challenges of current market conditions

- hows and whys of startup financial modelling + investor relationship management

- how to position early-stage startups for successful fundraising.

With base in Berlin and Cologne, Konstantin and the Trustventure team are in the thick of the European startup scene.

"Your main task is to actually portray your business model in a quantitative form — the beauty of that is that you can uncover your most important value levers for your business model."

Want to know how to raise funding faster and maintain healthy investor relations right now? Have a listen 👀

"The most essential part is to ask your users the right questions — think twice or three or four times about the questions you're gonna ask." – Lyubov Dementyuk

This week's guest has been a co-founder at a few startups, helps lead us as Managing Director at Paralect and most recently joined Founder Institute Bali as a mentor!

That's a lot! So we tried to get through the highlights and most valuable experiences along her path so far, including:
⚖️ How to prioritize features for new products
📞 Talking to users and making the most of these interviews
🌏 Life as a digital nomad in Bali + the startup scene there
🚀 Her vision of the future of Paralect Global

"When you think from the perspective of partnership — that you are working with the company, not in the company. I always pay attention to the idea. What do people do here, why — do they believe in this? Are they ambitious? And I pay attention to the team. And for me these two things matched perfectly at Paralect."

"We still want to think in terms of the one single offer for the founder. To the person who'd like to start their own business … and go all-in with the product." – Dmitry Schetnikovich, Founder and CEO of Paralect.

We got Dmitry into the Ship it and Sip it studio to dig into Paralect's history, understand his perspective on launching products and explore his vision for our future 💡

We dove into many topics — Dmitry's pre-Paralect days, the 5th year of Startup Summer, growing through failure as a founder, and what our concept of a venture studio looks like.

"The stories everyone shares on this show are all enabled by the culture, teams and people that make up Paralect. Even the inspiration to start Ship it and Sip it came from Dmitry's podcast." – John McTavish

Enjoy the show 🙏

"We keep trial and error — we have a couple sets of ideas, then we change it, we test them and make sure this is what we need." – Mohamed Abosbanab, VISXA founder

We caught up with Mohamed to see the progress the team has made in phase one of the Paralect Accelerator 🚀

This product discovery and design phase includes:
🎉 Design and launch of the VISXA website with sign-up forms
💡 Refining the product requirements for the MVP
🤝 Talking with potential partners and users to improve the solution(s) VISXA brings to the travel and immigration market

"I've gone to talk with the partners and people who'd like to relocate to try to see how we can — when we build the MVP — actually help them. And I've discovered that the market is changing rapidly. When you design something, you should be flexible — you can pivot — and you have to keep learning." – Mohamed

Enjoy this clip and stay tuned for more from VISXA 🙌

"We made sure that everything there had a purpose, that the flow was seamless between the screens, and we tried to tackle edge cases as much as possible. So I feel like for the developers it's going to be a lot easier to work on this." – Julie Landeroin, Founder of Nudge.

We caught up with Julie to check in on Nudge's progress halfway through the Paralect Accelerator 🚀

Find out:
✨ What special touches Victoriya Antonovich’s design team added to the website and app
✍️ How Kseniya Starodubova and Pavel Prata helped refine Nudge’s value proposition
💡 What ideas came from prospective users that helped shape the MVP
🤔 Why Nudge is designed with every user in mind
👉 How Nudge supports the transition towards workplaces every Millennial dreams of

Nudge is flying towards its launch and we can't wait to get more feedback from the early user community to make it even better along with Julie 🙌

This week's episode of Ship it and Sip it is fresh and cool like a perfect gin and tonic on a hot day 😎

John got fellow vlogger and front-end code-maestro Mike Gagarin in to chat:

💡 How he moved from design to development
🤔 What one important concept he teaches to new engineers
🙏 Why Paralect is still exciting and engaging for him after almost 5 years

And, of course, his (relatively) new video series Bukhlonautica 🍻 where he shares recipes and secrets behind famous and up-and-coming cocktails.

Shake yourself a tasty beverage and enjoy!

Time for Episode 7 of Ship it and Sip it with special guest Victoria Barouskaya 🤝

We explore 🧐
🧭 her journey into project management and Paralec
👉 how she dealt with imposter syndrome at the beginning
💪 and how she's involved with growing the startup ecosystem at her University

"I'm really grateful to our team of developers at that time because whenever I had questions about the tech side — this was a whole new world for me — everyone was really understanding and eager to help me with anything I wanted to know." – Victoria

We hope you enjoy this chat as much as we enjoy working with Victoria 🎉

Happy Friday, friends! Time for Episode 6 of Ship it and Sip it 🚀

This week Alena Timofeeva, Head of Marketing at Paralect, joined the show to talk brand positioning and more 🤝

From organizing our distributed team to her ideal home office setup to how we can best connect with new and ambitious founders around the world, John and Alena covered a lot over their cuppa tea.

Enjoy this sneak peek into Paralect Marketing and have a lovely weekend 😎

Welcome to episode 5 of Ship it and Sip it 🚀

This week, John sat down with Margo to have a look at finding new ideas, making connections with founders around the world and the importance of an inclusive workspace for us at Paralect.

Thanks for watching and have a lovely weekend ☀️

Ever wonder what goes on 'behind the scenes' in the design dept of those cool tech startups 🤔

Who are these artsy folks in black t-shirts?

John invited Paralect's Head of Design Victoriya Antonovich to Ship it and Sip it to dig into product design and our approach to beautiful, intuitive solutions 💡

They focused on the early stages of product discovery, the tools we use to turn ideas into mockups and clickable prototypes, and how our design team supports each other despite being on different product teams 👍

Enjoy the show 🍻

Want to know more about our design process? Check out paralect.com/design to learn more.