Some of you may have heard the story of Jolla, a small company from Finland with a bit more than 100 people. Some may have not.
Jolla started 3 years ago after a big change in the history of Nokia and Finland. First we made a smartphone (aptly named Jolla smartphone) and an operating system called Sailfish OS, which launched in beta in November 2013, also the date when the smartphone started selling across Europe.
After 12 months, 9 software updates, 3 hotfixes, a huge amount of coffee and a lot of sweat poured over, we announced a couple of weeks ago at Slush 2014 a crowdsourcing and crowdfunding campaign for our next product, a tablet – called, guess what, Jolla Tablet.
The three-week crowdfunding part of the campaign just ended last week, and we are very happy to say that the campaign was a huge success! BIG thank you to everyone who contributed! Already during the campaign a lot of people were asking: why? Don’t we have enough tablets in the world? Don’t we have enough operating systems? Do we really need yet another App Store?
“Oh gosh, don’t tell me I really need to download a new SDK and start learning a new coding language…,” some developers might think.
Sure we do have enough tablets, operating systems, App Stores and SDK… so why exactly was The Jolla Tablet Indiegogo campaign such a success?
Not just words
Let’s go back to a point in time when we at Jolla sat down and asked everyone in the company what were the things that were important to us. We answered: Transparency, Love, Passion, Respect. Those were and are our values. Those are the things that are important to us, as individuals but also as a company.
And that is also the reason why the Jolla Tablet campaign has been a huge success. We just stuck to those values and we communicated them out loud, not just with words but with our actions. And all with a nice tagline: #PeoplePowered.
While you were not watching (which was very probably until now) Jolla was slowly, steadily and silently nurturing a core bunch of people that have been our ambassadors, testers, key journalists, harshest critics and most hardcore fans. All at once.
With the limited forces of a tiny startup we went out in the world and said what we believe in. We believe that people can change the world with Passion and Love. Respecting each other and being Transparent we went out with our beta software back in November 2013 and when people started saying that it was buggy (thanks to our community for reporting each and every single bug!) we said:“Yes we do have bugs and we will fix them”. And of course we really fixed them later (and still more fixes coming!).
Connect at a deeper level
When preparing the Jolla Tablet campaign we looked each other in the eyes and went back to the same whiteboard where we wrote down our values and asked:“What is this tablet really going to be?”
Sure the Jolla tablet has specs: a screen, a processor, connectivity and whatnot. But would people have pledged for it if we were only going to say that? I don’t think so.
We put our beliefs, our values in the center. Our why. By doing that we managed to connect at a deeper level with the audience, we touched that tiny little thing in the center of your brain called the amygdala, which is the center of your emotions. It is not just a tablet, it is not just Sailfish OS. People that pledged for our Indiegogo campaign pledged because they believe what we believe in. The tablet is a demonstration of our values, it is not simply a product. It is what that product stands for that ignited the campaign.
Whether you are a startup, a big. corp. inc. or anything in the middle, think at why you do the things you do and start with that. Start with your why and then go from it. Finding your why will be difficult at first, but once you have it, and you have the right guys around, everything else will come natural.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Simon Sinek and his book “Start with Why” for the gigantic inspiration.
Thanks to the Jolla marcomms crew for putting together a fantastic campaign.
Thanks to co-founder Marc for being the showman he is.
Thanks to the other co-founders Sami and Antti for pushing this project to our limits.
Thanks to the whole Jolla crew (the list is too long) for being such a bunch of professional, dedicated, passionate guys and girls. This company would be nothing without the great People (with the capital P) we have.
And last but not least:
HUGE thanks to our community (the list is even longer) for pushing us to be better and supporting us so far. You guys rock!
