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Never seen a sky like this before. Hundreds of planes paint mysterious forms to the sky with their trails as I write this blog post after spending four busy days in Frankfurt’s book fair trying to find new international partners and grow our company’s business. The fair was full of interesting people, jolly good books and new fascinating innovations on storytelling, which I really preferred as my cup of tea. Our biggest project at the moment, Pirunmeri that is a co-created book of all the Finnish people, has turned out to work well. I’ve just got an idea for my first book and I’m very excited about it.

Since I feel like I’m working on something I enjoy I thought maybe I’d write about a subject that’s often bubbling in Proacademy: How to succeed to find and get to do things that you like to do. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and my stupid sounding answer seems to be quite simple:

Maximize the coincidence by taking the chance. I’ll explain what I mean through my short career in Roisto Oy.

Volunteer to try out interesting things regardless of your skills or knowledge.

Roisto’s story began in February 2010 as MindTrek asked Proacademy’s Tiina Lindberg if there were people who could organize Mindtrek’s event for citizens. Tiina forwarded the request to our CEO-to-be Esa since he had arranged two bigger events, Beach Party and JTS City rail tour in Tampere, during his WeDesign times. Esa gathered a team that was able to create a cool digital campaign or an event. The team consisted of Ville, also from WeDesign, who provided coding and Antti, from Vastakaiku, who was Proacademy’s well-known social media guru. Antti was sitting in a train to Rovaniemi when he got the idea of uniting people to tweet a book together. We sent an e-mail request to all the authors in Pirkanmaa in order to find the main author to our Twitter-novel. Only two authors responded to our mail. One of them happened to be Mikko Karppi, who turned out to be one of the most innovative authors in Finland and during the project he proved to be an essential part of our team.

I got in since guys wanted to take one enthusiastic person from younger teams to learn things. At that time I actually didn’t know much about social media or putting up events, but I just happened to be in a right place at the right time. I heard about the project, thought the group was good and digital media event sounded interesting so I asked Esa if I could also be involved. Lucky me.

When we started creating the book, we had no big thoughts about it. It was quite a stupid idea, but we just thought it was fun so we decided to try doing it. Then we found out that no books had been created through Twitter before, so all of a sudden our book was the world’s first Twitter-sourced book. We launched the book in MindTrek conference in front of people and media from all over the world which eventually gave us pretty nice media hype also outside of Finland. We sold out 500 self-published copies of Twitter-novel From reality to Another in three months without any bought advertisement. That’s when we realised that there might be some potential in telling stories in a new way.

All I know about marketing and social media I’ve learned on the way of creating From reality to Another.

Tell other people what you’re up to.

Because of the media hype we thought we had the coolest startup idea ever so we decided to take part to Stream Tampere’s and Aalto VG’s Startup Sauna warmup to boost our business idea. We did not win the competition since we actually hadn’t got even a business model around our idea. But still we got much out of Sauna. After the event I happened to ask Wili, one of the coaches, if there was any idea to translate From reality to Another also to other languages. Luckily Wili was involved in a company called Transfluent, that crowd-translates tweets and blogposts and they were just about to launch. The crowd-translation of crowdsourced novel would be a good marketing campaign for them and us. He introduced us to Transfluent’s CEO Jani Penttinen and together we ran a campaign called 140story.com.

After four months From reality to Another was available also in Swedish, German, English, French and Spanish.

Believe in what you do. Aim high.

From reality to Another was done mostly by people in Pirkanmaa. Next we wanted to create a book that would unite people from all over Finland so we contacted almost all the publishers in Finland. First we thought maybe we should contact the smaller publishing houses since they might understand and adapt our concept easier. But book industry is quite traditional and even the small publishers told us that there was no need for these kind of new social media advancing story telling methods. Quite oddly it was WSOY, the biggest publishing house in Finland, who were smart/crazy enough to think that there is a great potential in our concept. They had just hired a new publisher, Harri, who is definitely a man who understands modern age and dares to think differently.

Six chapters have now been written and the story has come together a lot better than we expected. The book will be out for Christmas.

Meet people who do something you’re interested in.

I’ve been writing songs and doing music for a while now and I’ve always preferred it to be my thing. When I was a kid I loved writing stories, but somehow I quitted writing them in elementary school.

Because of From reality to Another and Pirunmeri, we’ve been privileged to see book industry and startup scene quite closely and meet lots of interesting people from authors to painting artist to TV-series’ scriptwriters to even Extreme Dudesons.

Meeting and having conversations with all those authors and other inspirational people have  made me think of trying out if I could change the world as an author. So next year I’m going to write my first novel and I think the idea of it is fascinating. I’ve also asked some of those people I’ve met if they could help me by providing a little coaching and succeeded to find very interesting mentors for my work. That’s truly something that inspires me. I’m not a professional author yet, but I think I might as well be and the book is going to be great. Wouldn’t have guessed I would think this way 1,5 years ago.

Conclusion.

Don’t get me wrong. Finding a job you love to do is often a matter of strong will and skills. But big part of it depends also on coincidence. Whether you’re in a right place at the right time with the right people or not.

At least I’ve found it possible to raise my chances and maximize the coincidence by keeping my mind and eyes open, trying out new things regardless of the failure, meeting people that do or are something I’m interested in, and telling what I’m up to and what I dream of.
It’s not always easy being an entrepreneur and I’m not a millionaire yet. Maybe I won’t ever be. But at the moment I do things I really like with people I really like and at the same time with seeking my dream job, I consider to have lived a remarkably experienceful, strange and rich life.

Which is nice.

Einari Stylman
Roisto Oy

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