Six months. That’s the time that has passed since we first set the foot out on a journey to promote Slovak startups on the global level. And that is as well the time you have spent with us. Thank you for that! After half a year of the work, you can now find out what Slovak STARTUP has achieved, and become aware of our mission and which activities we want to expand our brand with.
Oh, and by the way, if you share our vision and would like to become part of our team, carry on reading until the end.
At the end of 2015, we were a bunch of guys interested in innovation, technology and startups, very much inspired by great visions that surrounded us. We had been directly or indirectly supporting startup ecosystem in Slovakia and some of us had even launched our startups on our own.
We saw many engaging ideas and projects popping from Slovakia and from the surrounding countries. But there was almost no way how to share these with the outer world, so it got us to think “How could we fill the gap?”
We bought the slovakstartup.com domain, planned a strategy, brainstormed all the important steps, addressed several notable people to ask for their opinion, designed and launched a website, and we took the shot.
It was on St. Valentine’s Day of 2016 when our first article was published, and you could have read the story of Megaupload co-founder and designer, Julius Bencko.
We think that we can all agree that there is a great potential in Slovakia and the whole Central Europe. People from this region have great capacity to generate awesome ideas, create impressive prototypes and implement these well enough to be able to compete in the global markets. However, not everyone necessarily speaks Slovak language, right? Therefore a platform to tell the world about these people was needed.
On the other hand, there are many Slovaks living all around the world we don’t even know about here in our country. Living in the globally significant economic, technological, financial and startup cities, working for renown brands or expanding their own projects and gaining valuable and unique experience, they have become great examples and role models for all of us. And so we decided to bring the stories back to Slovakia to inspire everyone else.
Now the geeky part. After the first six months of our existence, we have:
The response to our initiative was very surprising. Many people shared their enthusiasm for the project as they felt it was one of the many pieces of the puzzle. It gave us courage and motivation to carry on and work hard on supporting and promoting the whole Slovak startup ecosystem.
We have successfully blasted off the online part of the SlovakSTARTUP initiative, we have managed to share the awareness and our intentions throughout the community and jumped up on the train of publishing regular interviews, guestblogs and news on our website.
However, we are eager to move on and get the word out into the offline world as well. What do we mean by that?
The plan is to create a set of engaging, interesting and funny promotion materials which will help to gain awareness of the most promising Slovak companies that are on the way to leave their footprint in abroad. What is more important, however, is that we are going to distribute them on various startup and technology events all across the world. We would also like to actively take part in creating a great network of Slovaks from all around the world while as well spreading the word about Slovak startups and projects throughout various relevant networks.
Bridging Slovak Diaspora with local startup community, active attendance of different startup and technology events, international cooperation, open communication and being helping hand for projects with a global potential are the key elements of Slovak STARTUP 2.0.
As already mentioned, the idea of the Slovak STARTUP initiative popped up in the heads of three people. From the beginning, Dusan has been in charge of the business and fundraising part of the project; Peter has been a marketing advisor and online expert, and Michal has been covering the portal activities and editing role. You can imagine that we wouldn’t be able to grow without the support of many other advisors, angels and partners. Soon you’ll be able to find them on our Partners and Supporters web page.
Over the course of the 6 months, the team covering the daily operations grew from three to five people. Martin is now the social media manager dealing with our presence on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and Veronika is our very much appreciated English “grammar nazi” responsible for the content proofreading.
Do you share our vision? Does everything mentioned above excite you? Would you like to help us shift Slovak STARTUP to a new level? If so, we would be pleased to work with you!
We are looking for young and driven individuals for two of our positions – Web Developer (WordPress) and Market Research Analyst – to join your team. You can check both of the openings with the descriptions below. In case of interest, please send us an email on hello@slovakstartup.com.
If neither of the positions suit you personally, we would be thankful if you share this article in your network. Thank you!
Web Developer (WordPress)
We are looking for a developer with knowledge of WordPress including editing and customizing WordPress plugins and themes and ability to extend and customize WordPress functionality. If you have such experience and would like to help sharpen and maintain our website, we want you in our team! This a paid part time position.
Market Research Analyst
If you enjoy collecting and analysing data and you want to truly make an impact, we have exciting job for you. Your task will be to create a database of specific entities and organisations from all across the world. You will be working with traditional and advanced research tools and you will be asked to establish the communication with targeted people and organisations along the way. If you are up for a challenge, want to gain valuable experience and mainly help us to put Slovakia on the global map of startups and innovation, you are the right one! This is an unpaid 3-month internship.
What do we offer?
