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What did you do in 2011? Here’s what we did, and what we learned building, pitching and growing our own tech start-ups. We hope it inspires you and others like you to follow your dreams and fulfil your goals in 2012, whatever they are.
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Start-up Now A guide from the Seedcamp 2011 participants
Here’s what we did, and what we learned
building, pitching and growing our own tech
start-ups.
We hope it inspires you and others like you to
follow your dreams and fulfil your goals in
2012, whatever they are.
What did you do in 2011?
Bootstrap Your PR The biggest challenge you will face as a start-up is not
technology, not building your app or hiring.
It’s getting people to give a damn.
Here’s what we learned about generating buzz from an
event at zero cost.
1.Help the organizer promote the event
Use social media to let everyone know you’re attending.
Retweet official announcements and post status updates
to LinkedIn. Remember to include the hashtag in all your
Tweets. By doing this we’ve been offered massive
discounts on show pricing, free upgrades and the chance
to speak at future events.
2.Build relationships
Look at the speaker and attendee list. Tweet about the
speakers you’re looking forward to hearing and the
people you’re meeting up with. Make sure to use their
Twitter usernames so that the conversation can grow.
Cast yourself in the role of the jovial party host. Do not
sell!
3.Arrange a side event
If you can’t afford the entrance fee, arrange your own side
event. When we were told we couldn’t attend a show we
arranged a Tweetup to coincide with the conference that
grew to the point that the conference organizers asked us
asked how they could get involved in our event!
4.Live Tweet conference sessions
Remember to always use the conference hashtag.
Journalists often follow the hashtags during conferences
on the lookout for interesting stories. In our case, our very
first piece of media coverage came from a journalist
quoting Tweets we sent from a conference.
CubeSocial is social CRM for professionals. Since its launch in mid-
2011, CubeSocial has garnered accolades from customers and press
alike. CubeSocial was named a “Top 20 Idea” in The Guardian,
selected as a “Company to Watch” in the TV250 awards and named a
Top 20 Startup of 2011 by Startups. http://cubesocial.com
Follow-up Follow-up with everyone you meet.
Add people you meet to Linkedin
– You never know when you need intro
Add them to your CRM or address book
– Write down all that you remembered about them. I have met 800 people this year. If I hadn’t done this I would be in a bad situation
– Use tags. E.g VC, London (for next time I need money and I’m in London!)
Send a follow-up e-mail…
– Say a big thank you – State your biggest take-away – Say what you will work on in next month – Ask – is it ok to keep them in the loop and ask
for feedback in future
Every month, send a short update
– Progress – what you have achieved. E.g “we have launched GrabCAD Challenges and have signed 5 customers”
– What are you working on. E.g. “Improving the retention, currently 10% survive and it sucks”
– State where you could use some help. E.g “Do you know anyone in Ferrari?”
You will find that
– Some people like you and continue working with you weekly => engage them
– Some people don’t give you any feedback, but keep them on the loop anyway, you never know if you need them, but don’t spam!
Next action
– GO write those e-mails, they won’t remember you next week
GrabCAD is a community founded by mechanical engineers. It is also a place for engineers to share their talent, expand knowledge, find a dream project and work with tools and features that make life better. http://grabcad.com
Managing the Start-up Rollercoaster
One of the reasons people start companies is to get the
feeling of doing something meaningful with their lives.
They want to experience the excitement of building
products that people find useful to the point of paying for
them. The “I’m invincible” feeling that comes when you
land your first big customer or when your product gets
featured on a big blog.
Well, if you want to enjoy the adrenalinic pleasure of
hard-earned success, you’d better be prepared to go
through the dark deeps of depression when things don’t
work out as expected. That’s the startup rollercoaster:
You’ll have just as many highs as lows during the
adventure of building your business.
With Ondango, some days we’d be celebrating the
acquisition of a big customer and the next day we’d be
managing a PR-crisis due to server crashes or seeing a key
employee leave. I can’t remember how many sleepless
nights we’ve had, both from euphoria and depression.
We have been riding the rollercoaster for a while now and
have learned how to deal with it. The key point is to
understand and embrace the fact that startup life is just
like that. Enjoy the highs, but be aware that they won’t
last, so you keep working hard. Go through the lows
thinking that they are part of the game and try to learn
from them. And most importantly: Know that you’re not
alone. Seek support from your co-founders, get mentors
to lend you an ear. If you’re a true entrepreneur, you’ll
find yourself enjoying the ride as much as the destination.
José Matías del Pino is CEO and co-founder of Ondango, a shopping system that helps brands to sell their products directly on their Facebook Pages.
Better Than Good
When building an idea, prototyping it and releasing it to
the lions out there, you tend not to stop, breathe and
rethink. Adrenaline is high, you and your startup mates
are in the zone, productivity is beyond imaginable. No
time to pause. But that is exactly what Seedcamp taught
us to do. Not that you need to stop and smell the roses,
but you need to stop and rethink what you are doing.
Every idea, every startup has an evolution process and
distance between A and B is always the same. But the way
and speed of getting there is such an insane variable that
periodically one needs to stop and deeply rethink what
and how he wants to get to the B.
Seedcamp has given us exactly that: A reality check. And
what is even more, these reality checks came in various
shapes and fragrances, expending our horizon and field of
activity. We came back confused, of course, but with a
knowledge platform that allowed us to find opportunities
far beyond the expected product fit.
Seedcamp taught us that loosing focus and being
confused every now and then is not a bad thing, it is
actually a vital ingredient of a startup life.
It does hurt finding that you were wrong, though. But that
is needed if you want you or your startup to become
better than good. This is no army and failure is an option.
Andraž Logar is CEO of Toshl, www.toshl.com
Failed architect, but graduated 3d computer graphics artist; founder
of one of the first social networks in Slovenia; partner of RnD
web/mobile lab www.3fs.si, servicing multinationals like Ericsson,
Nokia, Publicis; a good guy.
How to Hack Seedcamp First and most importantly have an answer for the question “Why do
you need the money”. Having no answer or not a sufficient answer
(“We may do some marketing”) may be a deal breaker. Think about
how exactly the money helps your business and why you need the
money from Seedcamp for it. Also be honest. If you don’t need the
money you won’t fool anyone there. If you need the network, but not
the money say so.
Read through the list of mentors and get an overview who everyone
is. Think about the questions you have for all the mentor groups
(Marketing, Sales, Investors, Tech, …) so you got something to ask
anybody.
Go through the list of Startups and try to see which ones you would
like to talk to the most.
Think about and get Feedback on all the weak points in your Idea. e.g.
Why use your service, what if “big company xyc” does this. The
Investors will ask you those questions and if you don’t have a
sufficient answer they will ask the question again and again and
again.
When answering a question take your time. Think about the question
and the underlying meaning of the question. For example we were
asked if a huge company could do the same thing we do with their
current infrastructure. I answered as a techie and said no and listed
some techie reasons. Let’s say they were not impressed. The real
question was what if they step into this market and the answer
should have been then the market is already pretty big since they are
multi million dollar companies. Thus I only care about the other
startups in that space and how I can be the one big enough to either
partner with the big company or get bought. So stop thinking as a
techie. At least a bit.
See which other Startups from your area go there and book your
accommodation together. Drive there together and drive home
together.
Don’t forget to put some numbers about your market into the pitch.
No one is interested how your technology works. Everyone wants to
know how you make money.
Don’t hesitate to tell someone “Then you will maybe never be my
customer”. We talked to one guy who would probably never use our
service out of very legitimate reasons. Don’t get dragged into an
open discussion with someone who will not use your service. There is
nothing to gain out of having that discussion publicly in front of
everyone.
Have Fun and go to the parties. Talk to everyone at the parties and
dance, dance, dance.
Railsonfire provides Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment for Ruby code hosted on GitHub. Follow a modern day development method with regular testing & deployment in the cloud. http://railsonfire.com
Stress Test Your Product Name for $5
So you have your idea? You even know how to call it?
Great! Now let’s find out if people will remember the
name and spell it correctly. We combined a web
survey (eg. surveymonkey.com) with a cheap way to
get English speaking participants (Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk).
Step 1 – Setup the survey. Start with a description of
your product and mention the name. Continue with a
couple of decoy questions (can be product related,
but don’t mention the name again). Ask a free text
question “What is the name of our product? If you
don’t remember what would you google?”. Make
sure you deactivate the option to return to previous
pages, so people can’t cheat.
Step 2 – Setup Mechnical Turk and pay 100 people
$0.05 to take the survey. (More than a hundred
answers is premium on surveymonkey).
Step 3 – Profit. Analyze how many people
remembered the name and spelled it correctly.
To improve the results you can repeat the process
with different names. Don’t expect miracles these
people are rushed and non-native speakers. But the
same applies to your “prospective” users when
somebody tells them about your product.
For us this helped a lot to drop a name that was hard
to remember and spell.
Jan Mechtel @janmechtel, office productivity junky, excel wizard, founded http://veodin.com to build KeyRocket, a smart trainer for keyboard shortcuts.
Jump Faster. Jump Higher. “If you aren’t standing on the edge you’re definitely
taking up too much space”. This was our main belief
when we decided to start a life-long project of
building an awesome startup and we live by it every
single day.
InfluAds started with a simple but powerful vision:
There are a lot of crappy ads on the web today and
we’ll clean it up. We are an ad network where only
gorgeous, carefully designed ads are served through
carefully selected, quality sites. Ads suck and we
wanted to be the ad network for the Quality Web so
we’re focusing on promoting that quality with only
one quality, premium ad per page.
We were nuts enough to start a lot of stuff and the
need to be lean introduced another idea. What if we
ask our publishers (site owners) to help us inviting
others to join? They know about quality more than
we do, anyway. The first crowd-sourced ad network
was born and now thousands of publishers work with
us on turning our vision into reality. A lot of people
came to us saying something like “Your model is
awesome; too bad you don’t focus on Tattoos”.
Tattoos? Why not. We’re now building one with our
publishers and many other trendy topics as well. Lots
of them!
Is there something we wished we had known when
we started? It wouldn’t have been half of the fun if
we knew more stuff.
Jumping faster into your own passion and jumping
high is all that really matters, really! It’s not about
the team of ninjas... or the funds... or…
InfluAds is the Ad network for the Quality Web. We match gorgeous ads promoting quality products with quality ads and highly influential, trendy audiences.
Even My Mom Can Do It! Creating a video was not an easy job and not fun at all….until now.
I and our CTO Matjaz consider ourselves enthusiastic travellers and
amateur photographers. Naturally, we take lots of pictures on almost
any occasion. And for the last 10 years we’ve been creating videos
from them. Why? To me, it is simply so addictive and rewarding to
see people smiling when watching my video. And it’s so much more
powerful than just pictures.
But there is a trick. To create a video for people to smile and feel
good, it takes some effort and a LOT of time. Too many times I’ve
found myself spending whole weekends polishing one single video.
Yes, it sure looked great afterwards but I’ve discovered I simply didn’t
have the time for this anymore. After couple of months, I’ve found
out that I’m having a great amount of great memories stuck on my
hard drive. What a waste!
So, last year around this time we asked us:
Does it need to be so depressingly difficult and time consuming to
create and share a great video?
After couple of beers and some napkin sketches… we had an idea.
Why not create an on-demand video creation as a web service? But
not just any service. It has to be incredibly easy to use. We’ve set
ourselves a criteria. It has to be so easy, so our moms can use it. No
skills or any prior experience required.
So, after couple of months of research, we’ve started. We are now in
public beta just before going commercial. And I’m happy to tell you
this. Just the other day, my mom who turned 62 recently, has created
her own video using Slidemotion. 100% on her own, no looking over
shoulders!
Challenges? Many of them. Besides engaging the best enthusiastic
guys possible, challenges are appearing every day. The biggest one is
…speed. We are a small team and it’s a real challenge to o prioritize
what you do first. It’s a constant struggle between what we want to
develop and how much time do we have.
We are now live for couple of weeks and we are welcoming users to
try us out. But next big step will be mobile! Create a cool video way
on the fly in just minutes, from a sailboat in Croatia, from a mountain
cottage, the beach and basically wherever you are, payable instantly
via mobile and Facebook credits. That's where we are going. And
we’ll stick to what we said in the first place. It has to be easy so
everyone’s mom will be able to use Slidemotion.
Slidemotion makes it incredibly easy to create awesome videos from images, video clips and music in just few clicks.
Make Your Customers Feel at Home
Khojan is a community of boutiques across London,
when we had the idea we were very stubborn with
our approach. We felt that by providing a platform
for customers to find and shop from these stores we
wouldn’t have to focus too much on the design as it’s
not the main attraction.
Big Mistake.
Fashion is a totally different environment to usual
tech start-ups and looks are as we know now are a
crucial player when it comes to success. We made
the mistakes of not researching our customers
enough and not making sure what makes them feel
‘at home’.
By this we mean making sure they feel comfortable
with the site and design, that it’s something they’re
used to, or impressed with.
Because Khojan didn’t say ‘Fashion’, it totally gave
the wrong message to those who landed on the site.
Instead of being very professional and high end it
was very web 2.0, very rounded corners which is
something these boutiques and their customers are
certainly not.
My best advice would be to research your ideal
customer and profile them in depth. Look at what
websites they use, where they spend time online,
what are their interests, and then begin to build a
picture of how to design around that.
We are currently re-branding and the re-design is
due within the next 6 months.
Anish Hallan is cofounder of Khojan.com, passionate about technology, nature and health. Powerofchange.tumblr.com - @anishkho – [email protected]
Lean Seedcamping Here's some advice for a successful Seedcamp session.
1. Read 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries.
2. Figure out what change-the-world
(http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2011/10/what-i-
learned-from-steve-jobs.html) business assumptions
and hypothesis you truly have. It's just a few distinct
sentences, but take your time here; it's an iterative
brain-sharpening process, and it's supposed to take a
while.
3. Build a short presentation
(http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/re
ally_bad_powe.html) around your hypothesis. What
are your assumptions? And how do you propose to
build a business around them? The Seedcamp
experience is about learning (big ears) not about
convincing (big mouth). It's easy to become confused,
but this is not a VC pitch; your Reality Distortion Field
super powers should be checked at the door.
4. Use the Seedcamp mentoring sessions to get feedback
on your assumptions. Do the mentors think they are
valid? How can you refine them? And, most
importantly: ask the mentors to help you figure out
how you can test your assumptions quickly and with
minimal effort.
5. Listen.
6. Take notes.
7. But remember: everything you hear in a session is not
the truth. Success is out there, but only you can figure
out the path to get there.
I wish we had done the above before our sessions. :)
Best of luck!
Martin Walfisz Serial entrepreneur, game developer and gamer. Founder & CEO of Planeto http://planeto.com
Everything takes time… And that's okay.
You live in the same universe as everybody else. And that
universe has laws. Some of them are harder to break than
others. A lot harder. Murphy’s Law is one of them.
You're young. Excellent health, fine endurance, you don't mind
working from a sofa, living on dubious junk food diets and
putting in (very) long hours. No friction.
You're a small team. Lean, mean and fricking awesome at what
you do. You know your limits and how long it takes to get
things done. No cumbersome hierarchy to deal with, no red
tape, no complex process. No friction.
You're a startup. You're building in the cloud, advertising on
virtual platforms, selling online… Again, no friction.
So this should take exactly the minimum time required to do it,
right?
Wrong.
Even the best engines use lubricant. Even the best-built bridges
have expansion joints. Even zero-stock is close-to-zero-stock.
And for a startup, that lubricant, that joint, that "extra shot" is
time. Mostly because there's really nothing else to bank on.
Things take time, and slightly more of it than you'd expect. This
isn't because you're not doing it right. Don't be too hard on
yourself: you are young, and your team is awesome. But in
every plan, in every schedule, for every deadline, you should
have a line for the unknown s*** that will hit the fan, and you
should put a number in front of it. Not necessarily a big
number. But never, ever zero, because you do live in the same
universe as everybody else, and you don't mess with Dr
Murphy.
Gabriel and Stan, engineers and Stanford grads, cofounded teleportd in June 2011 to allow people to... teleport. More at http://teleportd.com
If you like this ebook please
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Scratch your own itch? Apparently it’s the secret to building a great web app.
Scratching an itch feels great but if you stop scratching
there’s only a brief moment of respite before it itches
some more.
How do you follow that second great mantra ‘Release
Early and Release Often’ when the itching just doesn’t
seem to stop?
We are a booking/ticketing agency for adrenalin activities.
We process bookings for over 150,000 adrenalin
enthusiasts every year and place them at partner venues.
Our business has been evolving for the last 13 years from
an event management company, venue operator, national
paintball network and finally ticketing and gift vouchers.
We built groupM8.com, to solve our own problems and
help our business become more efficient and profitable.
In so doing we built a great web app. We intimately
understood the problems and by using the app on a daily
basis to process our bookings we can evolve, develop and
improve the app continually.
The intention was always to open up groupM8 to
subscribers (activity venues and other booking agencies)
as potential subscription revenues are significant. We
have marketing campaigns and recruitment websites
ready to go and despite no real recruitment push we still
attract a trickle of trial subscribers.
So have we built a great App? Damn straight we have!
Do we Release Early and Release Often? Not so much, still
trying hard to ignore that itch
Does groupM8.com mean our core business makes more
money? Every single day.
groupM8.com is a complete solution for activity venues to publish and manage availability, enquiries and bookings whilst helping customers organize their groups of friends.
Your Life Should Be a Game Oust.me idea was born exactly year ago when couple of friends
meet on a beer and realized that check-in for owning places is
not enough fun. Connecting existing check-in services in one
spot and making fun of check-ins (creating territories) was our
first goal. We build a team of seven, that started to produce
game.
History
• 04.11.2010 - the idea was born
• December 2010 - planning, researching, studying
• 30.3.2011 - Oust.me private beta start
• July 2011 - registering company Teritorij d.o.o.
• 14th of July - Participation on Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana
where we were one of two winners
• 5th to 9th September 2011 - Participation in London
Seedcamp Week 2011
• 1st of October - Oust.me going live (very silent)
• 6th of October - Oust.me scoring
Future goals
• 31. November 2011 - first game OusteRisk
• December 2011 - first campaigning using Oust.me as
platform
• 2012 - continue adding games, challenges and improving
Oust.me for you to have even more fun
Advice
• Start-up life is the way of living.
• Begin your start-up if you truly believe in it and you are
prepared to sacrifice a lot of your free time. Keep in mind
that having a full day job and running a start-up is very
exhausting.
• Running start-up costs money. Getting a seed capital is
far from easy, so be prepared to open your wallet big
time.
• Stay in contact with your potential investors and inform
them often about your progress. You never know, who
will you need sometime.
• Listen to your users. Theirs feedback is worth of gold.
• Stop waiting and go for it. You only live once. Share your
idea and try to succeed with it.
Legendary Insights I don't have a magic formula for success or solving
problems. I do have a tip: learn from others that have
been there, done that. To be honest that's the only way.
So when you listen to people that have various opinions,
ask yourself: what experience do they have? Have they
started companies? Remember, age is just a number in
business, just like everywhere else.
When you're a lean start-up not many things are certain
and that's also an important part of the journey you have
to take. Avoid creating a corporate environment to soon,
with fixed policies and no room to move. You need to be
able to adjust quickly (changes in development, testing
new audiences). Flexibility is one of the biggest strength
as start-ups.
Working with a small budget, the difference is like night
and day compared to having a big investor behind you. As
a company with limited resources, your time is your
currency and simultaneously the most important asset for
success. Don't waste it.
An entrepreneur’s journey is a wonderful journey, but
there will be hard times. But when the tough times are
coming the tough get creative. Remember one thing:
there are no bad ideas - and with a great team you can
sculpt your venture until it’s perfect. With this advice in
mind, don't be afraid of rebranding your solution or for
that matter changing your customer group.
See you in the trenches!
SurveyLegend is the world’s first engaging picture-, video-, text- and audio-based survey app that can be integrated with a company/individual’s website, blog or social media presence.
How to Pitch in the Wardrobe With all the work around selling our hosting business and
finishing our last web development projects it seemed to
us that all the info regarding Seedcamp came in the last
minute. We really didn’t have that much time to prepare
for the perfect pitch. But that’s the whole point, you
never have enough time for anything. In Seedcamp
Prague we had 3 minutes. Seriously, 3 minutes? But
technically that’s all the time you have to grab the VC’s
attention, and trust me, that’s all the time you need if you
are any good.
The point of the 3 minute pitch is to be direct, stay on
point, learn how to prioritize and say whats downright
important!
Everybody is a potential investor, client, partner, you
name it. Seriously, be alert all the time! When you go to
the “cloak room”, when you eat, when you go to the
toilet, all the time! I am dead serious! When we arrived at
the Cervo institut where main event was held, one of the
hostess told us where the cloak room was.
Shortly after me, another person entered the wardrobe,
and I started a conversation how I couldn’t remember
what a cloak room was, until I remembered playing Diablo
10 years ago, where you wore cloaks. And the guy
laughed, and commented how games can be educational.
I responded that was true, and the first time I realized
that was in high school when I was the only student to
know what “congested” meant. (English isn’t my mother
tongue). And when the teacher asked me to explain the
word and how I knew about what it meant, I explained
and said I knew this from playing Sim City 3000. So
naturally the guy laughed again. Than he asked about my
startup, and he (Thomas Preuss from VC fond Neuhaus
partners) ended up giving me his business card, and asked
to send him the info and to update him. So you see, stay
sharp!
Goran Duškić is an online marketing strategist and online business consultant. He co-founded a game development team Generation Stars 10 years ago, a web development - hosting company GEM Studio 5 years ago. He is currently co-founder of IT startup WhoAPI.
Talk to customers! “Seedcamp is just a factory on start-ups!” or “You
can´t get anything from just one day startup event!”
Well… we did not listen much to these and many
others opinions on Seedcamp, the early-stage seed
investment fund, and applied to Mini Seedcamp
Prague 2011, one of the start-up competition taking
place at various cities in Europe. And it was worthy –
we got support from high-profile people,
international exposure and things you might not
expect…
Some advice to the start-ups applying to Seedcamp:
People, the co-founders, are taken even more
seriously than what your start-up do. So spend a
time to make really impressive personal profiles (skill
set, mind set, career history, experience, etc…) and
easy to understand explanation why your team is the
right one for your project to become successful.
We realized that the pitch is mainly about the
SHOW. There are 20 startups one after the other…
You have to make difference to awake the crowd. So
show some story, make them laugh, make them grab
a pen and make some note for later. You need it,
because otherwise they will not want to talk to you
during the mentors sessions afterwards.
Seedcamp helped us to get international feedback,
support from marketing-oriented high profile
managers and investors and little exposure thanks to
the TechCrunch Europe blog post. Not bad for one-
day no-fee start-up event, right?
Brand Embassy helps companies to talk to customers on internet. It provides a full solution of online customer engagement to large companies. www.brandembassy.com
Discover New Books Our journey started at Seedcamp NY 2011 when
we’ve launched BookLikes for the very first time. It
gave us tremendous heads up.
Thanks to events like Seedcamp we’ve got a lot of
useful feedback from mentors, VCs and
entrepreneurs that practically helped us save a lot of
time and money. Here are few tips:
• focus on the user not only the product - listen
to your users because they now what they really
need;
• fight for your product every day instead of
planning releases for next 6 months - don’t get
lost in visions and focus on what should be
done today;
• monitor traction every single day - you’ll see if
you are doing it right;
• don’t stop learning - read books and not only
blogs;
• product should solve your own problem - be the
user and not just the creator;
And so after few months of hard work we did it!
TechCrunch, The Europas, Startup Week … BookLikes
was chosen as one of Europe's 50 most innovative
startups and one of The Best Social Platform or
Networking Startup.
And we’re still on the road - BookLikes is constantly
growing and successfully monetizing.
In next 12 months we are expanding to other
countries and languages.
Booklikes is a social platform for real readers who want to discover new books, organize them on their personal bookshelves, share their reading passion with their friends and find great books in best prices. http://booklikes.com
Tell me a story As a startup, you tell your story a lot, with every
conversation offering the opportunity to refine and
improve. And as tiring as it sometimes feels, the
repetition and picking apart of the story makes us
continually think about customers, competitors,
coding and complement. And our message is getting
better. All businesses need cash to operate. Bilbus
gives businesses visibility to work out when they will
need cash and simplifies how they will meet funding
gaps.
We realized quickly how our particular audience’s
reference point (and occupation) defined whether
eyes glazed over or lit up. To get the proverbial ‘light
bulbs’ to ping silently, we needed to find a way to
make working capital and business finance sexy.
Amidst a sea of mobile, geo-location, social media-
derived apps and tools, this was easier said than
done. Through Seedcamp, we were able to pick the
minds of some amazing people. Validation lifts the
spirit above the mountain of challenges yet to come
and makes it easier to fix the bugs.
Pitching to a large audience in 5 minutes was a
different story. Experience in the boardroom or a
mastery of product and market does not necessarily
translate to an audience-grabbing delivery. Both of us
had years of industry and business experience -
banking, treasury and financial technology.
After a few botched attempts to get it right, we got
some very good advice: simplify what you say, as if
you were explaining it to a kid. Surprisingly (to us), it
worked. No matter how good the idea or
proposition, how clear and important the problem,
getting a large number of people to understand and
realise that is hard.
Sanjeev Chhugani
www.bilbus.com
Machine, learn! For the last few decades we told our computers
exactly what to do and they mindlessly followed our
orders. But this relationship is about to change.
Finally our devices start to behave in ways interaction
designers have always dreamt of.
The concept of a device that just “knows” when to
do what and accomplishes tasks independently has
always been floating around the interaction design
community -- along with the realisation it wouldn’t
quite work in reality yet. But recently our devices
started to have access to interesting data (location,
calendar, your communication with others, etc) and
have become powerful enough to make sense of this
data mess.
Imagine for example a smart-phone’s music player:
Without knowing it the user actually inputs data:
Skipping songs, turning the volume up, being at a
specific location. All this tells the application a lot
about our preferences. Which songs are skipped at
which time of day in which order? For which songs
does the user adjust the volume? Is there a pattern
in geo-location, time, day and played songs?
Think of these questions as a starting point: Take a
minute and imagine where in your own product the
machine could make sense from the human’s
behaviour and how this insight could enhance the
user’s experience.
Ben Freundorfer is passionate about user experiences and co-founded http://replydone.com - a software that learns and makes smart suggestions for email replies.
Pivot or Die One of the most painful experiences for the
entrepreneur is the pivot: a fundamental change of
direction in the development of a product or service
based on the discovery of a new, enhanced truth. It
can be the discovery that his product is unwanted on
a market or that the opportunity window he has
been pitching for the last six months just ceased to
exist. The point is that this new truth partly or
completely distorts the current world view of the
entrepreneur which can cause intense pain and a
deep sense of regret.
In that moment, it is important for the entrepreneur
to stay true to the pivot. The accumulated knowledge
of the customer and the market up to that point is
what matters, and if the marketplace is telling him
that something is wrong then so be it. For most
entrepreneurs it is natural to value one's own
opinion above any other and to admit that one was
wrong can be highly challenging. Pivots are however
a natural part of building products and services, and
the survival and growth of them depends on the
ability of the entrepreneur to pull those pivots off.
The successful entrepreneur learns to embrace
change and program pivots as a part of his DNA. He
is humble to the voice of the marketplace and
understands that its words must stand above his own
ego at all times.
Forget servers, system administration and expensive IT bills - deploy
your websites and apps to Omnicloud and relax while our platform
makes them scalable, swift and secure.
http://omnicloudapp.com
Lessons for Hackers As a team of two talented hackers with intimate
knowledge of our target market Jack and I were
perfectly aware that we had all the skills one could
possibly require to launch a successful start-up. We
knew what we were going to build, why we were
going to build it, and most importantly how to build
it (in a beautifully elegant manner). So we did.
Once we were (eventually) at beta we thought it
prudent to whip up a social media frenzy; one tweet
and two facebook status updates later we sat back to
catch our breath and watch the users (and $$$) roll
in. Inexplicably this didn’t happen. Something must
have gone wrong, but what could it have been? All of
our bases were covered.
Although I’m being somewhat facetious we did learn
an awful lot in our first few months, so here follows
Globe’s Lessons for Hackers:
If you are worthy of the term hacker you do not have
the requisite skills to build a successful start-up.
Find someone that likes talking to strangers, and
another that knows how to run a business.
We know you like perfection (to the points of OCD at
times). This is your enemy.
The ‘M’ in MVP stands for “The least or smallest
amount or quantity possible, attainable, or required”.
Try not to forget.
You + social media != a marketeer.
Working 30 days in a row is not cool, and doesn’t
help. (Turns out Kent Beck was right).
Tim Sherratt is one of the co-founders of Globe, which is dragging travel blogging (kicking and screaming) into the 21st century: http://www.globev1.com
The Place to Be?!? A success story is Heineken, the Dutch brewer that started in 1864 in
Amsterdam and is ranked as the third largest brewery in the world,
with an annual beer production of 139.2 million hectolitres. The
success of Heineken beer can be granted to Alfred “Freddy”
Heineken, a brewer and salesman. Just after the World War II he
went to live in New York for two years. There he was taught the
ropes of American advertising and marketing. In its green bottle, with
“export” on the label, and priced to match its suggestion of
exclusivity, it caught on in the United States and elsewhere as a beer
for special occasions.
If you want to be the best fashion designer, you go to Paris or Milano!
If you want to be the best banker, you go to London or New York! If
you want to become an actress or actor, you go to Hollywood! If you
want to start a successful and thriving start-up company, you go
where there are people just like you. Why? Because you will find the
following:
A culture of collaboration: You have to build networks! People that
understand how difficult it is to start a start-up will listen and share
their experience, they will also help where they can as they enjoy
seeing others succeed, it is magic that rubs off, which gives new
energy and momentum.
Critical mass of talent: You need to network with engineers,
marketers, investors, venture capitalists, lawyers and stakeholders
that you can share and discuss your start-up with. It is like dating you
have to find someone with the same chemistry, which you will only
find where there are people just like you.
Respect of intellectual property: You will be more at ease to share
your knowledge since you know that people are focusing on a
different scope and do not have time to copy you, but instead think
of a win-win situation.
A capacity to celebrate failure: It takes less time to find out if your
start-up is a failure since others surpass you in success. Lesson learnt-
start a new one with all the knowledge you gained from your last
start-up.
Worldwide attention: Who reads local tech blogs from a country?
Not many. The best tech blogs will be where there is action. You have
a better chance hyping your start up in a famous tech blog since the
local ones will refer to them and it will be translated into 15 different
languages!
Alexander Börve, Founder & CEO, iDoc24- Ask a dermatologist anonymously in any device 24/7. iDoc24 started in the STING (Stockholm innovation and growth) incubator in 2009 and took home first place in the Mobile Healthcare University Challenge at last year’s mHealth Summit in London. www.iDoc24.com
Ziv’s rules for start-up survival MyWebees is now one year in the making; we’re beating
our own forecasts with over 10,000 sites joining our
platform since Jul 13th but with every milestone reached
the next ones are looming even higher. So when
embarking the hazardous startup road with the odds
stacked high against you I’ve tried following few simple
rules that make survival just a bit easier.
Raise money fast – some VCs will tell how much they love
bootstraps; building a product on your spare time may be
a necessity but it also means you’re wasting precious time
and time is the one resource that runs out faster than
money.
Forget about valuation – an important factor if you want
to raise money fast; pre-money valuation is a fictitious
number that represents what YOU think your company is
worth; most investments will cost you 25% - 40% so
don’t waste time optimizing; if you can, raise what you
need to reach the next meaningful milestone, if you can’t,
raise what you can.
Apply selective hearing – You will mostly hear why your
idea will not work / attract customers / make money; do
talk with domain experts but remember that an expert is
a person that optimized existing process which mostly
makes him less capable of understanding and embracing
disruptions. Listen to the few who offer actionable
advises on how to overcome your challenges and simply
ignore the rest.
With point 3 in mind don’t drink your own cool-aid if
things don’t work out as planned and you think you know
how to fix them don’t hesitate making changes if you do
not know it’s probably time to move on.
Wear sunscreen.
Ziv Koren is Prime Webee @ www.MyWebees.com Start-ups veteran turned corporate VC turned entrepreneur
Don’t Give Up Margn took part of the Mini Seedcamp event held in
Prague October 2011. The event was amazing and
experience was memorable. It gave a lot of ideas for
developing and marketing our product.
2011 has been breaking year for us as we finally
could introduce Margn to public and do some
marketing besides coding. The whole process has
been real challenge for the team, as it took more
than one and half a year to go live. But now it seems,
although we made our first revenue one month ago,
that it has been worth of all the effort! We already
feel that we have done something that makes the
World better place, including the part that nobody
currently likes: accounting.
If you think you have a good idea then start working
with it. Do some market research and put a lot of
effort on finding the perfect people around you for
your journey. Always try and if you fail, don’t give up.
Instead remember what T. A. Edisson said: “Genius is
one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent
perspiration.” We have perspired a lot, but the
journey has been really fun. It is worth living in the
World of start-ups!
Margn is super simple online accounting software for small
organisations.
Wait no more! “Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t
yet dramatically transformed, it will”
- Chris Dixon
What are you waiting for? For the idea? For the charitable
investor? For the time when you have “time to focus”? Waiting
to get some magical insight on information that would give you
a competitive advantage?
The harsh truth is that by reading this you are most likely
wasting your time. You should be out there getting this
information yourself - everything cannot be put into words. Do
or Die.
But on the positive note – by reading this you are already more
likely to succeed! The simple fact, the simple step that you took
by obtaining this e-book and reading it, gets you a step closer
to #winning
On average, I read 600 articles, blog posts, e-book pages, etc.
per day, but what got me to the writing side of the spectrum,
was the step to actually do something. It was stepping out of
my comfort zone and taking action!
I did it without any special or highly relevant technological
expertise or connections or education, but rather by disrupting
my comfort zone and going all in with the acceptance of
learning from my #fail’s and having the determination to go on
regardless.
I am 22. I dropped out of college, I have never written a CV, I
am currently at a startup garage, sleeping on the floor and
reading an article about my startup – Qminderapp.com – in
The Wall Street Journal, shared on Facebook by the President
of Estonia. A startup eliminating waiting.
The thing I wish I had known before I started is the knowledge
that I could have started sooner. I already had what it takes -
and by reading this e-book it is more than likely that so do you!
Don’t get me wrong - doing a startup is hard work, but not
because of the reasons most of you expect it to be!
Wait no more and find out for yourself!
Upwardly mobile? Ok, let’s start with the thing we wished we known at the
start. Actually, we did know it. Everybody knows it. We
just didn’t know it:
Less is more. Be specific. Build a niche. Narrow your
focus.
Call it what you want. We didn’t do it, not at the start
anyway.
Why was it important? Well, trying to develop an
application that everybody could use meant:
• we were slower than we should have been • the app we were developing was less simple than it
should have been • we were spending way too much energy on stuff we
shouldn’t
And it wasn’t working for us.
But the plus side, I guess, was that it took all that
slowness, over-complication and wasted energy for the
message to really hit home. And when it did, we could
begin to strip back everything the app didn’t need. And
then focus fully on the stuff it did need.
So we refocused our app (Sylphone) on its original goal –
to make sales calling fast, easy and efficient. And we set
the app to integrate by default to just one CRM – the
most popular and fastest growing.
This meant we were also able to position our app within
the Salesforce.com sphere, get access to appexchange
(their app marketplace), etc.
Our big challenge over the next year is going to be very
much a customer-focusing one. The shift will be away
from development and onto getting our customer
interactions right. Scary.
Sylpheo makes apps that make business – customer relations better. More calls + better data gathering + less sales admin + more up-to-date CRM = more sales. www.sylpheo.com
Be Passionate and Dream! Universator is a real company with 9 employees right
now but it took us more than year from the first
thought to build it up.
To make a decision of leaving all other activities aside
(school, other work) is a real challenge. But once
there is some project you are really passionate
about, you have strong intention to do something
useful and if there is a big need for a change, go for
it! You will enjoy working on something which makes
sense to you.
Our first tip is to not forget to find others who will
follow you, help you and support you in tough times
that will come.
We have just started and we have big plans: to be
the first to help people find their education
anywhere in the world, to bring the biggest added
value to our users. We want to change the whole
process of finding higher education abroad, help
people in a new social environment when studying
abroad. We would also like to help poor people to
get top education thanks to online courses and our
support in the future. We think we can do it, we
need to start and step by step make others believe in
it as we do, so they help us.
Our second tip is: find where your strengths,
passions and opportunities cross each other and you
will find something that you will love working on.
Dream big, go for it, don't let others stop you!
Universator is a global project with a mission to help international
students with their life decision of choosing the right university.
www.universator.com
Enjoy the ride! Nothing is permanent, except change. For us that
meant getting ride of our beloved name egoarchive
and shift to archify.
There are no “markets” anymore - there is really just
only one big market. However in our case the cultural
differences of the various “regions” do matter.
Especially since our home “market” Austria and the
next logical bigger one, Germany, are more
challenging to conquer for our product due several
reasons. Not just by the missing openness of the
culture itself but also by the surroundings and the
certain mindsets. Be aware of time wasters, people
with a blinkered view and those who just talk and not
listen. The solution is to move on, literally. The
quicker the better. We got out of Austria and got a
really great international network to begin with.
Be analytical (rely on stats, the feedback-loops ...) as
well as relentlessly self-critical, identify your
weaknesses and make sure you have great team
member(s) who can compensate those - so you enjoy
wandering through the exciting so-called Valley of
Darkness with a half smile of confidence.
The rules: you need an awesome team & you have to
deliver. Besides that rules - there are no rules.
Remember, the future’s so bright, we gotta wear
shades.
Team egoArchive - aka archify Gerald @geraldbaeck, Max @karli & Walter @vavoida http://egoarchive.com - your memory in the cloud aka http://archify.com - making search personal again
Planning Global? Start Local A beautiful evening on a snow-white 31st December 2008; the CHAKKR team, a group
of expat friends, got together to celebrate New Year. But the mood was not the best as
they were missing their families abroad, and their Christmas gifts had not yet reached
them. Because of the heavy season, many national and international parcel deliveries
were getting delayed.
The start – Global Big-Bang
We found a solution which we thought was unique and useful for millions like us
worldwide → an online travel-courier community where people can help each other to
send and take parcels, especially on international level. That was CHAKKR; first
launched to public during next Christmas night, in 2009.
The first kick – World is BIG and not everyone's the same
We started getting kicks on butt within a few days after the first launch. Not a lot of
traffic (only 300 users in 3 months, for a FREE community platform); no “viral effect”
among expats contrary to what we had expected; CHAKKR user-distribution was
almost like a random spread of 300 dots around the globe; and most of all more
“negative” approach and negative publicity → it was a platform quite open for mis-
use. The exercise turned out to be the first eye-opener → we were not the FIRST one
who tried this model; many had seen this before and view it is a high risk solution.
The change – Localize and Monetize
We were emotionally attached with the “international” aspect of CHAKKR, as it could
really solve the problems we (as expats) had, if it could build the volume and
international networks. But soon after the first kicks we got, we had to find and work-
out ways to make the platform more practical and profitable. The solution was clear;
focus on “safe-zones” → convert CHAKKR from an international “community” to a
regional “courier market-place”, where we connect customers with local/national
couriers. On another cold and snowy Christmas night in 2010, we launched a revised
version of CHAKKR → a commercial courier marketplace; focused on our “safe”
region→ EU.
The second kick – Local is not BIG
We had a nice ride with the online courier-marketplace → in 6 months, we could
facilitate over 1000 deals between customers and couriers in Germany. We thought
we were doing great, and as the bootstrapping cash was almost getting over, we
decided to start a fund-raising round for “smart money”. It was a privilege to get
selected for Mini Seedcamp Prague 2011; but the event really made us think a lot. The
mentors made us really sweat and gifted us with sleepless nights about the flaws in
our business-model and distribution strategy, with optimization suggestions and
potential partnerships.
The second change – Partnerships are keys to the treasures
We got a lot of VC contacts and potential “partner contacts” from Seedcamp. We knew
we were in the radar. We sensed a common tone → “You guys are doing good, but
small. If you want us, show us something BIG; we want to invest a LOT of money → but
show us a BIG vision”. A phone-call with the legendary business angel Morten Lund
really gave us concrete ways to go. We are now making our platform BIG, by opening
up our courier-capacity-matching engine for online shops and marketplaces for use, as
a shipping-solution (SaaS) to their customers. This helps and “saves” us of the
Himalayan task of end-customer oriented marketing, and simply slip-in into the
existing markets which others have created. → easy money, and potentially easy exit.
VC's are knocking on the door now, and we hope to be ready and useful for many
people during Christmas 2011.
CHAKKR is “Shipment 2.0”; it’s a smart way to transport what is bought and sold online, through couriers already on the road, with half-empty trucks.
Customers know it better Here at PressLabs we are a team of three software
developers, dealing with WordPress in the past four
years. Starting late 2009 we entered the hosting
business as our development customers asked for a
reliable hosting service and we couldn't recommend
any at that time.
Since then everything we did for this service was
challenging, really challenging. Going from one
customer to two, then to three and so on, meant a
huge learning curve for us. We realized quite fast
that every customer is unique and we learned a
bunch of stuff with every new customer.
Our key learning for 2011 is that customers tell you
what to do, so GET CUSTOMERS from day one and
then tune your product according to what they need.
There is a huge waste of time planning features that
maybe nobody will ever use. Besides that, you get
frustrated for not getting real results and this can
tear apart the team. Get customers' feedback,
prioritize their needs, focus on one feature at a time
and then your startup will rock.
A second thing we'd recommend is to get out there.
Go outside your city, your country or even your
continent. Go to events and meet other people face-
to-face. Discuss your project with them. Only saying
what you do can lead to new ideas for improving
your product. Get feedback, share thoughts, follow-
up and good stuff will come out of it.
So stop creating the perfect product and get
customers tell you what they want!
PressLabs is a white-glove WordPress hosting provider, targeting professional publishers and large sites that need heavy optimization. We focus on getting the best possible performance out of a WordPress site.
Seedcamp Saved us 6 Months Time is the most valuable commodity when running
a start up. Wasting time on the wrong product
feature, marketing strategy, target sector, can be the
difference between momentum and luck or a slow
death.
Without external mentoring or validation it can be
lonely and even dangerous. Group think? Feature
Creep? Customer Closeness? What problem are we
solving again…? Maybe your team knows but can you
communicate it in one tweet to the rest of the
world? That was the value of Seedcamp to frooly.
Like a baptism of fire, Seedcamp was 6-12 months of
learning in a day and half. Where else can you pitch,
be mentored and given direct feedback from tech
industry A listers? – People who really know how to
get things done.
Frooly is trying to save choice on the high street – a
social commerce marketplace, loyalty facebook app
and self serve, simple online shops to you and me.
Pitching at Seedcamp helped refocus our feature
set/development list, simplify the language we used
to help connect better with our audience
(independent retailers/mostly female shoppers, who
don’t use tech language) and most importantly
decide what not to do.
Since Seedcamp, our marketplace has grown rapidly,
our social loyalty app is coming soon and we’re
excited by the future.
And after much discussion, here is frooly in a tweet:
“Earn money by shopping with Britain’s best luxury
and unique sellers”
What’s yours?
Frooly is an award winning online marketplace for Britain’s best luxury and unique sellers.
1000 Mile Run! If you ask a successful entrepreneur, what made his
startup a success or if you ask an investor, what is he
looking for to invest in, you will always get the same
answer: TEAM.
The more often one hears it, the more shallow and
fake it seems. Nobody would invest into a great team
with a very limited market potential! And nobody
would care about a big business opportunity, if the
team does not have the right passion, commitment
and skills to exploit that opportunity properly.
What one needs to understand is that there are
several types of passion, commitment and skills that
need to prosper in the right team. It is one thing to
have enough passion to start working together on an
idea or enough commitment to quit a job and invest
all available time into that idea. High on “first-weeks-
adrenaline” this is quite easy compared to the
challenges that lay ahead.
It is all about the passion, commitment and skills you
show after a few months or years, when not
everything has turned out as planned and you need
to admit that not every decision taken was the right
one. It is that special thing, that after all the
setbacks, still makes you believe in what you have
started together and in each other. A startup seldom
is a sprint, but very often a 1000 mile run, which you
can only finish together! Therefore TEAM is the only
correct answers to all those questions.
finderly.com is a social shopping service for helping buyers find the right product with custom advice from people they trust.
Ruti Said Yes! When I was two years old, I spent the summer in the
US with my family in Baltimore. Now two-year-olds
the world over are famous for saying “No” at every
opportunity. And I was certainly no different.
Naturally, when my grandmother tried to stop me
from climbing a ladder for the "big kids" at the
playground, I ignored her. My grandmother, horrified,
shouted: "No! Ruti, no!"
I kept climbing all the way up to the top. A 14-year-
old had to help me down.
My grandmother (a child psychologist, by the way)
was convinced that I did not understand English. Why
else would I have ignored her? I did grow up in Israel
after all.
When we got back home, she told my mother about
my dangerous endeavor in the playground. I
immediately exclaimed: "Savta said ‘No!’ but Ruti
said ‘Yes!’". Obviously it was not a language barrier.
This past year I had to go through many changes and
hurdles in my startup. There was a big transition to
MadDate.com. I've encountered many people
shouting “No” throughout the process. But, as when
I was a toddler, I said 'Yes'!
Because no matter what others say, a true
entrepreneur says 'Yes'!
Ruti Polachek, Named Promising Young Entrepreneur (TheMarker Magazine), Chairman & Founder of the Hebrew University entrepreneurship club; Selected in TLV's Seedcamp as Founder and CEO of Flakkes; former Lehman Brothers Banker; Equities Trader; Secretary General of National Youth Group; Brown University Entrepreneurship Program Scholar; Economics Summa Cum Laude BA. maddate.com
Positively Brutal It’s all about the feedback. The easiest thing you can
do as an entrepreneur is to think of an idea and
develop it. The comfort of progressing through the
development of your own idea, even with some
customer traction is deceiving. A far more difficult,
but worthwhile experience is to expose your idea to
a brutal reality check. That was mini-seedcamp 2011
for me.
The mentors, ranging from VC’s, to successful
entrepreneurs, from marketing gurus to business
leaders all contributed. “We won’t invest in a single
person, don’t you have any friends?” stated the VCs.
“We tried live chat in our business but all we got was
time-wasters - how do you know it works?” claimed
the business leaders. “Who is your target audience?”
asked the marketing experts as they fired a barrage
of questions trying to understand the product and its
intended use.
Those questions rang in my head as I left the UCL
building at the end of a long day. Working through
them lead me to rethink the product and the
business proposition, the result of which is UserPulse
aka ‘Live Chat without the Time Wasters’.
We won a Technology Strategy Board grant to
develop the product that reduces the need for an
army of sales support agents by qualifying website
visitors in real-time, enabling agents to focus on
converting the best prospects.
Now I’m working through one type of feedback even
more brutal than Seedcamp; that of our 4000
customers as they respond to our lean startup
validation experiments
With a background in Computer Science, and an M.B.A., Adi spent many years building great software and successfully engaging with customers.
Make something happen. We need your help. Post this, email it, tweet it. Spread it freely. But please don’t sell this content or change any of the entries.
Credits
Photography (CC license):
• Tony Armstrong http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonyarmstrong/5246637459/
• Bindaas Madhavi http://www.flickr.com/photos/mkuram/3610488258/
• Aaron Brown http://www.flickr.com/photos/dietpoison/133957015/
Start-up Now was conceived by Mark Bower and the team at CubeSocial, and authored by the talented start-up teams that took part in Seedcamp during 2011.
Please share this ebook with anyone and everyone, but do not charge for it and do not change any of the content.