Sampo Karjalainen is Chief Creative Officer of Habbo Hotel and has founded the company 8 ½ years ago together with Aapo Kyrölä. Habbo.com is both a social networking website and a virtual „hangout for teens“.
As Sampo says „it started as a hobby thing, created by a small team for ourselves and our friends“. Over the years, teens took over and changed the tone of the voice of Habbo’s community. Nowadays, Habbo is one of the biggest virtual worlds in the world and can be used from over 30 countries with local languages.
Sampo and Aapo started Habbo together with a local advertising agency whose Chairman of the board helped them with the first financing round. With another three financing rounds, Habbo received altogether €27 mio, so „it was quite a long road to become profitable“ as Sampo points out. In order to get the financing in place, they hired a professional CEO, Timo Soininen, also from Finland: „That was the right decision, that’s how the business started to grow“ says Sampo. The company had a revenue of €43 mio. in 2007 and is profitable now. As Habbo changed from an experiment into a real business, Sampo points out: „Over the years we had to accept the fact that there are much more people with their own interests involved. You have to have clear shared goals with others.“
Even after all these years, Sampo is still „enthusiastic about creating a really good end-user experience. It’s the new experiments and concepts I find the most interesting, like expanding virtual worlds to mobile phones. We might find out completely new types of services in this area.“
Sampo finds it important that „there is more than the desire to make money“ when one decides to starts a company. He says „it can be something very personal, like the curiosity to try out new things or your whole idea might be to create a better world. But do not think too much about it – just do it, if it is something that can be tried out quickly.“
26.05.2010 at 15:05
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