Harnessing the Power of Community

Writer profile picture
Sophus Blom-Hanssen
Operations Lead

Building it from scratch

Creating any type of company from scratch is hard, and few people truly understand the sacrifices founders endure. In the context of creating a business under capital constraints, e.g. without raising venture money, this can become amplified. It takes longer before you’re surrounded by a team, and you do not have a forum with other entrepreneurs (VCs) where you feel heard and recognized. We want to create a space for builders, where both the good and the ugly stories are shared

We think that community is more valuable to the builder (entrepreneur) than ever. Technology is advancing rapidly, prompting smarter, faster, and cheaper ways to operate companies. There are so many cases where someone also has faced your problem and found a solution, so it makes perfect sense to start with a proven approach and upgrade it to your own context. At Bifrost Studios, we always source and upgrade technologies, frameworks, and strategies from other entrepreneurs if possible. But on the flip side, we also spent hours each week curating these tactics, so you can imagine how much crap we also stumble across. Today, platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit are the ‘town square’ for builders where knowledge is shared, but these platforms are cluttered with noise (corporate nonsense on LinkedIn and trolls on Reddit). We’re certain there's a better and more valuable way to facilitate knowledge sharing between builders, and of course we want to be part of it.

©

The Studio Community

We want to make sure that our Startup Studio Partners each benefit from the deep knowledge shared between them, but perhaps more importantly that they feel a sense belonging to a group of like-minded entrepreneurs. To facilitate a pulsating community where ideas, learnings, and failures are shared regularly, we do two things.

Firstly, we invite our studio partners and occasionally key employees to four in-person quarterly events per year. Over two days, each studio shares their progress in the last quarter, and their goals for the next. They also get the chance to run a focused session on a specific topic. We’ve found the latter to be an incredibly powerful exercise: imagine having +100 years of entrepreneurial experience in one room, with experts who can each provide input from the perspective of tech, sales, branding, product, and finance. After solving some hard problems, we like to celebrate wins, typically over good food and wine.

The second thing we do is to run a slack workspace where we stay in touch in between the quarterlies. Here, we and our partners stay in touch weekly to share updates, ideas, etc.

5 year forecast

The Bifrost Builder Community

We firmly believe in the power of a broader builder community. We're excited to announce the upcoming launch of our public community – a space designed specifically for builders to connect, collaborate, and share their journeys. Stay tuned, and sign up in advance to join us on this exciting venture!

Sophus Blom-Hanssen

Operations Lead

Sophus