What have you been experimenting with and learning from it, CEO at Un/known and Lähtijat, Liisa Holma?
I have done a lot of experiments in my work. Un/known specialises in helping leaders guide their business and make decisions in environments and situations with poor visibility and predictability. Experiments are one of our main tools, together with multidisciplinary research and facilitation. There is no situation where experiments would not work or provide a way to gain more information and learn.
In this text, I wanted to share a bit different examples of experiments. Lahtijat podcast and research have given us two interesting business ideas the viability, feasibility and desire which we decided to validate by with experimenting them.
The Lähtijat podcast will start the 7th production season, and we have been making the podcast for over 3 years already. During this time, two different business ideas have arisen for us creators from the podcast, both of which are based on the challenges we have come across in our own work. These two ideas it was impossible to estimate the potential in advance, so we decided to approach them as experiments.
Business experiments
In the fall of 2023, we outlined two different business ideas and a year ago we put the wheels in motion to rotate. Hear Hear Media – not just a podcast – the idea is to offer companies multimedia, often podcast-oriented content marketing services, and Ultima Lead, on the other hand, does teamwork training. With these business experiments, we wanted above all to test whether there is room in the market for such services and whether we can build a profitable business.
📌 Idea 1: Podcasts and B2B marketing
We noticed that the market lacks an actor that combines the production of podcasts and marketing of B2B companies. Podcasts are often purchased by corporate communications and marketing teams, and they are implemented by traditional podcast studios. But a good podcast is much more than that audio file – it can act as a strategic marketing tool that produces multi-channel content for company use. We had the necessary know-how for this, so we decided to take it to the occasion.
📌 Idea 2: Teamwork skills – a blind spot in working life
The more than 500 employee interviews and 100+ expert discussions of the Lähtijät podcast brought out one of the biggest challenges in working life: teamwork skills. Experts need more and more skills to manage their own work, but the development of these skills is often overlooked. We wanted to develop a solution for this – and so another experiment was born.
How were the business trials conducted?
The idea was simple: let’s test before making a big investment. First, we market and sell services to see if there is a demand for them. Next, we delivered the services to customers, to test whether we could produce them the way we wanted and profitably. The ideology has been to build the most attractive offer possible, i.e. customers listening and modifying what is offered as needed. Of course, we also think about the price point and whether the service can be done profitably, but the first thing for us has been validation of demand, i.e. genuine customer need.
What have we learned?
Both companies have been running for a little over a year now, and we’ve learned a lot. The offering has been polished, the first Customer Cases taught us the most, and now we are starting to be ready to scale services. The following goals have been set – the journey continues. What the year has taught us is that it is important for a small company to put things more in a queue as in a row – i.e. consecutively, not side by side. When resources are scarce, you really have to be precise about where the development focus is placed right now. When both are service businesses, sales and customers have been good indicators of what is the right focus at any given time.
What should be taken into account in business experiments?
✅ Set a clear goal – what do you want to test?
✅ Start small enough – focus on the essentials.
✅ Define milestones based on which you evaluate success.
✅ Treat the experiment as a learning process – there is no perfection in the initial stages, and you will have time to improve later too. A business experiment is a way to learn, innovate and grow without massive risk.
Thank you, Liisa for your wonderful insights!
Small experiments and inspiration 