Startup Lessons from Finland

Lesson One: The Sauna Principle

Finns invented the sauna. A room where you sit naked in extreme heat until you feel better. No apps. No subscription model. No “premium features.” Just heat, wood, and the occasional bucket of water.

This is product design at its most essential. Take one thing. Make it work perfectly. Use it for a thousand years without changing it because, frankly, perfection doesn’t need updates.

Silicon Valley could learn from this. Instead of adding seventeen new features every quarter, what if we just made sure the original feature actually worked as promised? Revolutionary thinking, apparently.

Lesson Two: The Nokia Philosophy

Nokia phones were famously indestructible. You could drop one down a flight of stairs, use it as a hammer, accidentally drive over it with a truck, and it would still have full battery life and perfect reception.

Then smartphones happened. Suddenly everyone wanted fragile glass rectangles that shatter if you look at them wrong. Progress, apparently, means making things more breakable and calling it “premium.”

The Finnish approach: build things that last longer than your attention span. Radical concept in our disposable economy, but there you have it.

Lesson Three: Brutal Honesty is a Feature

Finns don’t do small talk. They don’t pretend your mediocre idea is brilliant. They don’t say “that’s interesting” when they mean “that’s terrible.” They just tell you the truth, which is both refreshing and occasionally devastating.

This translates beautifully to product development. Instead of convincing ourselves that our third-rate solution is actually genius, we ask the Finnish question: “Does this actually work, or are we just telling ourselves it does?”

The Sassy Safety Sleeve exists because we applied Finnish honesty to baby products and realized that most solutions were solving the wrong problem. Instead of making toys easier to sanitize, why not just make them not get dirty in the first place?

“This is either brilliant or completely obvious. Possibly both.”
— Finnish focus group participant (probably)

The Anti-Startup Startup

We don’t have a ping-pong table. We don’t offer unlimited kombucha. We don’t use words like “synergy” or “disruption” unless we’re making fun of them.

What we do have is a pathological obsession with making things that work. Not things that look like they should work. Not things that work in theory. Things that actually, demonstrably, reliably work in the real world where people spill things and children have the destructive power of tiny hurricanes.

This approach, apparently, makes us either refreshingly honest or completely unmarketable. We’re betting on the former, but we’ll let you know how that works out.

The Future of Good Stuff

Here’s our prediction: people will eventually get tired of products that break, apps that spy on them, and solutions that create more problems than they solve. When that happens, we’ll be here with our collection of boringly reliable products that do exactly what they claim to do.

Until then, we’ll keep applying Finnish principles to American problems. Direct solutions. Honest marketing. Products that last longer than the warranty period.

It’s not the most exciting business model, but it’s the most Finnish one we could think of.