SUP46, the self-billed startup people of Sweden, have been in business for just one year and have already brought more than 30 new companies into contact with investors in Stockholm’s booming entrepreneurial scene.
SUP46 CEO Jessica Stark drew on her background in providing entrepreneurs marketing and communications support to assemble the incubator.
“Stockholm really needed a place like this, a meeting base for awesome startup people,” she said. “We didn’t have like a real meeting base here in Stockholm so we took the inspiration abroad from like London, Berlin, San Francisco, other great startup cities.”
She said new companies can use SUP46 to network with potential partners or investors while company staff can work in a shared space and support one another.
Stark said the company is going to have to physically expand in order to serve more burgeoning businesses.
“We will soon launch our expansion plans. We have a long waiting list. There’s so many great startups now in Stockholm. We will get more space; that’s in the pipeline and it will happen real soon,” she said.
Michael Weinstock, SUP46’s service manager, provided a tour of the 4,200-square-foot office complex, which hosts 38 companies and 15 investor members.
“We figured it’d be good to have the open hangout space … where startup people can come, entrepreneurs, programmers, techies or whatever you have, and sit here for free, play some ping-pong, use the Internet, buy a cup of coffee and just hang out and make things happen, which they do.”
Resident companies include FishBrain, which operates a mobile app that allows sport fishermen to share information about catches; open-source Wi-Fi access app Instabridge; and crowd-funding platform FundedByMe.
FishBrain CTO Brian Jakob Mattson traced the evolution of the app, which allows fishermen to enter time, location, lure and other details of a catch, from beginnings as a shared spreadsheet then into a Web forum.
“Obviously they realized, well, it should be mobile. When you’re fishing you don’t have a computer and you can’t take photos and do things in real time. It turned into a full-time project.”
Instabridge provides a mobile app in which users can load Wi-Fi locations and passwords for access by other users.
Company CEO Niklas Agevik described the product as “crowd-sourced, free Wi-Fi networks. It’s a complete replacement to the native Wi-Fi settings app. But there’s a twist to it.”
“Whenever I connect to a network, I can also choose to share it with the Instabridge community. Once I do that it becomes available to everybody else who is running Instabridge. We have a pretty active community that’s basically going around to restaurants and cafes and adding every single Wi-Fi [network] they can.”
Stark summarized the advice she gives to startup managers: “Talk to investors real early. Don’t wait. Get a great network and talk to a lot of people who really can support you and don’t be so afraid to talk about your concept. You’re not alone. It’s like four or five other companies around the world that have the same business idea. It’s about getting the best team.”
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