OpenCoffee in Tallinn

For almost a year now we have regularly had OpenCoffee meetings in Tallinn. From here you can read more about the global OpenCoffee movement. Shortly: The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.

In Tallinn we meet once a month, 9 o'clock in the morning. We have met at the Scotland Yard pub at Mere puiestee. No registration, no fee, just turn up and meet people. The meetings have been very interesting and you can always meet somebody with a new and fun idea. Usually there have been 10-20 people there. For the last half a year there has always been somebody from MicroLink's incubator team. Either Rauno, Tõnis or me.
The main organizer behind the Estonian OpenCoffee is Jüri Kaljundi and a big thanks to him for bringing the club to Estonia!

The meetings have been really positive. If estonians (or finns for that matter :-) usually need like 3 beers before they start to talk to strangers then at Opencoffee there are no such ridiculous communication barriers. Really open, really intelligent and really interesting people who all want to share their ideas and opinions. To be honest I was surprised by that at the first meeting. :-)

So if you are near by for the next meeting, come by! We can all speak good english and many of us also Russian. You can find interesting people and ideas there. The next meeting will be announced on our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6854479626 or if you are interested then send me an e-mail and I will let you know.

Should you keep your e-service idea as a secret?

Many people with new e-business startup ideas have come to us (MicroLink Estonia's IT and e-services incubator) and wanted us to keep their idea as a secret. I have once even signed a paper claiming that I will not use that idea.

In my opinion and experience keeping an idea as a secret is completely useless. The world is full of free and good ideas, but the resources of people willing and able to make them happen is really scarce. Besides everybody wants to make his own thing happen and not somebody elses.

So my advice to all the people with ideas - talk about them to as many people as possible. Talking with them helps you refine your idea, combine your idea and make a much better thing out of it.

And there are a load of web sites giving away free ideas or new ideas currently in realization.

When I published some good ideas on my blog and asked if anyone would be interested in making them happen... I got an absolute zero response. Everybody believes in his own ideas.