Startup Window by VES - Pilot 1

The Idea

Finland has a starting problem. Not an ideas problem. Students have ideas. What they don't have is the trigger to actually begin.

They wait until after graduation. Until they move to a bigger city. Until the idea is ready. Startup Window was designed to remove every excuse by making starting the only option.

The format is simple: teams work in a public glass-walled space, visible to thousands of people walking past. No hiding. No over-preparing. The city watches you work, which creates a kind of accountability you can't manufacture in a university room. The only rule that matters: get a paying client before time runs out.

No prizes. No judges. Just: did you or didn't you?

How the Three Days Actually Worked

Day 1 — Ideation and Direction

Teams arrived with rough ideas and left with a specific target customer and a plan to reach them before the end of the day. We brought in mentors from the first hour, not to lecture, but to push. Kim Väisänen opened by challenging every team directly. By evening, each team had made their first real customer contact.

Day 2 — Market Testing and Sales

The hardest day. This is where the gap between "I have an idea" and "I'm going to ask a stranger for money" becomes very real. The main questions of the day was how to approach someone you don't know, how to ask for money without apologizing for it.

Day 3 — Execution and Demo Day

Final outreach in the morning. Demo Day in the evening. Each team got 10 minutes to present: what the problem was, what they built, who they talked to, whether they got a client, and what's next. No slides required. Just the truth.

The Demo Day was livestreamed and open to the public. Minister Joakim Strand and MP Noora Fagerström both attended and spoke. Joel Sunabacka, CEO of LähiTapiola Pohjanmaa, opened the evening.

What Happened

2 of 4 teams got paying clients within 72 hours.

Nordkap, a luxury hat brand built from scratch using a family sewing machine. They sold their first hat at a live auction during the event for €100. Myötä, a therapist-matching platform that signed five therapists and launched a working MVP.

The other two teams didn't close a client but made real progress: healthcare professionals engaged, regulatory pathways mapped, hardware prototypes in development.

~30,000 people walked past the glass box over three days. Five media outlets covered the event, including YLE. Instagram reach hit 212,000 for the month. The concept was the content, a glass box, students, 72 hours, one rule. You don't need a big budget for that to be interesting.

What I Personally Learned

Running this taught me something I didn't expect to struggle with: delegation.

I'm the kind of person who wants to be across everything. When you care about something, that instinct makes sense. When you're building an event with a full team depending on you to set the direction and then step back, it becomes a problem.

The hardest part wasn't the logistics or the partners or the media outreach. It was giving someone else ownership of something and actually letting go. Not checking in every hour. Not rewriting their work. Trusting that if you've explained the goal clearly enough, the execution doesn't have to look exactly like how you'd do it.

The second thing, related, is motivation. You can't just assign tasks and assume people are energized. Different people need different things: some want autonomy, some need to know why the thing they're doing matters, some just need to be told they're doing well. Figuring that out mid-event, under pressure, is harder than any operational problem we faced.

I didn't get this right every time. But I learned more about it in three days than I had in the previous year.

What's Next

Pilot 2 is confirmed for Autumn 2026. Bigger cohort, more teams, refined format.

The long-term goal is a permanent startup hub in Vaasa, operating year-round, built on the credibility and community that Startup Window is starting to create. This will be done with the help of other organisations in Vaasa.

Pilot 1 proved the concept works. Pilot 2 proves it scales.

Startup Window is a project by Vaasa Entrepreneurship Society (VES). Learn more at

startupwindow-ves.com