Stream.Plus: Netflix for Brands

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Stream.Plus is the last video platform brands will ever need, according to Founder Marek Novy. Late of Seznam.cz and also a longtime StartupYard mentor, now turned StartupYard member, Marek has spent his career in digital media, and says that the current video advertising market is fundamentally broken.

Stream.Plus is designed to offer brands, as well as viewers and video curators, a better model for monetization of high quality branded video, and the growth of MCNs (Multi Channel Networks). Stream.Plus is based on a viewer-centric approach to online video, and bills itself as “Netflix For Brands.” I caught up with Marek this week to talk more about his startup: Stream.Plus


Hi Marek, Tell us a little bit about yourself and Stream.Plus.

My passion is learning and building new things, it is my name anyway- [Novy means “new” in Czech]. I quit my job at Seznam.cz, because I feel I have to do much more learning and building than I was able there. But it get me thinking about future of media and I also met my cofounders there. Stream.Plus is the materialization of our vision of where media, and specifically video, is going.

 

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Marek Novy, Founder and CEO at Stream.Plus

 

What makes Stream.Plus different from other streaming video platforms? What can you do that can’t be found on YouTube or Facebook?

The most important difference for me is the purpose, even though it might be not so obvious. Our purpose is to help organizations, brands or individuals to build and operate their own media properties so they can have a direct relationship with their customers. The real business purpose behind YouTube or Facebook is to be a middleman between users and brands so they can sell user’s attention to advertisers.

That’s a basic conflict between brands and companies like Alphabet and Facebook. The interest of the brand is more and more in building an audience for their product- not just selling products one by one, but developing customer loyalty around the brand and the ideas and culture it is a part of. But YouTube, as a particular example, has more of an interest in moving customers between channels- from one video to the next, in order to display their direct advertising.

For YouTube, it is of more value to have a user not remain in one particular stream of content- but instead to jump around to allow different ad-impressions to be sold at higher prices. Basically, the user is the product, and advertisers are the customer. That model is becoming quite unsustainable- especially when you consider that typically, YouTube users now skip video ads within seconds- which drives YouTube to make their ads more aggressive, and more pervasive.

On a product level Stream.Plus is primarily about human-created playlists. They are important, because they drive a type of user experience which is really missing in online video. Human-created playlists are trending in streaming music and they have even stronger value in video. We improve playlists to combine short and long form content so that users can choose how much time they spend on a topic.

The big difference here is that we preference real users’ interests, and not that of advertisers. The media companies and brands on our platform will compete for eyeballs with their high quality content, not for the cheapest ad space available.

We also think that a video is a great tool for direct in-video shopping and lead generation. We provide conversion buttons in videos and eventually we want the whole buying process to happen inside a video. This keeps the customer’s interests as the main priority- people don’t want to be taken away from content they enjoy, and people want to have a relationship with the brands they buy from. We can accomplish both with Stream.Plus.

More and more, brands are becoming direct content providers, through Social Media, Youtube, and elsewhere. How can brands use Stream.Plus to help them build their audience?

Social media and YouTube are great places to be present in order to attract users. But sound brand strategy has to go beyond that. Otherwise a brand is being used by social media instead of using it.

Stream.Plus provides tools covering a complete user journey starting on branded social media channels or the social media channels of an influetial person, going through branded online tv properties, then mobile apps, and finally reaching a point when a user is ready to buy or provide a lead. This journey is about gradually building trust and earning permission to give a user a business proposal.      

Brands have to accomplish that by creating content people want to see- not by forcing them to see content that they haven’t asked for.

How have MCNs (Multi-Channel-Networks), evolved in the past decade, and in what direction do you see the industry growing now?

MCNs are my favorite subject. They are essentially the most recent evolution of the media industry.

I think both traditional media and marketers can learn a lot from them. They’ve kind of organically grown out of the YouTube ecosystem. They started as pure aggregators of channels to get better deals from advertisers. Later they built various analytical tools and technology to help creators to be more successful. The most successful ones are actually those who thought beyond YouTube. They are building full-scale media companies potentially totally independent from YouTube, using the platform to their advantage instead of being used.

Multi-Channel Networks are not a small industry anymore. Many of the networks that were originally built on YouTube are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars as media companies, with their own loyal followings, products, and diverse revenue streams. We want to create a way for brands to jump into this next cycle of evolution in media, and grow where their audiences now live.

Let’s talk a bit about the service. What are some of the features that users can experience? What kind of content and experience are you going to provide?

I can best illustrate it with some examples. Let’s say you saw a post on FaceBook with a video that your friend shared about a musical. You click on the video to see what it’s about. You will end up on our platform watching a large, almost full screen teaser video about the musical, which is typically 20 seconds long. If you don’t respond to it, we will show you another teaser video, for instance, a Lion King. It is a great one, you actually want to really see it after watching that video. You can now directly book a ticket from the video or choose to learn more about show by watching more videos about it.

People want to be in control of their buying experiences more and more. They want the joy of discovery, not an advertising hammer, pounding on them to buy, buy, buy. We have to help brands evolve into the free-media space, so that they’re speaking the same “language,” as their customers.

Entertainment is a great vertical for us because trailer videos are often a joy to watch anyway. Interviews with actors, backstage videos, etc are all very interesting content to watch. This can be linked directly to ticket booking. Cars are another interesting vertical with videos like car reviews, tuning and car improvement tips, auto sport videos, drifting shows, etc. Fashion is another area we will explore by working with fashion retailers to essentially build a small MCN for them with selected creators to run many shopping channels in parallel for different audiences.

How do you plan to monetize Stream.Plus?

We have a free plan if you don’t need video hosting from us. Your channel will be a part of stream.plus web and mobile apps. This is a great option if you want to create a channel that is your own personal selection from other people’s videos on our platform or from YouTube. You can build an audience there and upgrade later without losing them.

Then we provide a subscription plan based on how many monthly active users you have. It includes video hosting and your own branded web and mobile apps. You can choose to integrate it into your main website or run it on a separate domain like “brand.tv.”

Next  you can decide whether you want to work with our network of creators and social media influencers. They will either promote your product in their videos or recommend your content to their audiences. You provide them with your marketing brief and a reward for them which is typically a CPC or CPA model. We take a share of this revenue.

Can you talk more about the E-commerce potential in Stream.Plus? How can consumers use the platform for a better shopping experience

There are some categories of products which can be sold much better from video than webpages. In-video shopping is the next big thing in e-commerce. Honestly, there have been many attempts to do it, it is a kind of obvious, and they have all failed.

As usual, I think, there is no single key to break it, it will come from a right combination of several factors. YouTube is an obvious place, they have actually tried several times, but it is simply not compatible with their goals as a platform. There are so many distractions in YouTube’s UI, that a new buy button is yet another distraction. Our approach is no distraction besides call-to-action buttons during video viewing, to make it much more powerful. Affiliate programs for creators and influencers is another ingredient to make it work.   

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The StreamPlus Team

What’s been the biggest challenge for the Stream.Plus team since joining StartupYard? Why?

 

We are shaping our product offering into something our customers can easily understand and relate to. I have to thank StartupYard and all mentors that they have been a great help. Due to my online media background I tend to unconsciously expect that people have insight into media mechanics and that some trends are rather obvious. StartupYard and the mentors have opened my eyes to how important it is to be able to clearly communicate our vision and story.

People are currently obsessing about media ownership, but media was kind of “owned” by advertisers from the beginning.    

Are there any particular mentors who had a disproportionate impact on your company’s development? How so?

There have been a bunch of mentors who provided valuable contacts and insights to us. I am currently waiting for a meeting in a big agency network, this type of partnership can have disproportionate impact on our development, but we don’t know yet.
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Where do you hope Stream.Plus, and branded video content in general, will be in the next 5 years?

The next 5 years will be quite dramatic for the TV industry, which is the last media sector to be really disrupted by online world realities, especially in the US, where the TV industry has been able to prolong the business status quo most successfully.

Stream.Plus wants to be a leader in permission based video content marketing. We want to define a new balance point between users as content consumers and marketers who are paying for the content. I think this relationship has to build from permission marketing principles (defined by Seth Godin in 1999) and transparency. Branded content channels are actually more transparent than “native” advertising on 3rd party media.  

Are you currently looking for partners or pilot customers? How can people get in contact with Stream.Plus?

We are looking for forward thinking brands who are essentially willing to transform into media companies. We are also looking for agency partnerships, because in our vision of the future, creative agencies will create content and grow audiences for many brands at once.  

Don’t forget to sign up for StartupYard’s 2016 Demo Day, April 6th, at the Royal Theater in Prague. Tickets available and going fast!

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Neuron SoundWare: Making Sense of Sound

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Neuron Soundware is what we often call a “deep tech” startup. Like several of StartupYard’s alumni companies, they are unique in that they are operating at the edge of current technology, and developing processes and software that have never been tried before.

Neuron Soundware’s mission is bring machine learning and neural networks to sound and voice analysis- creating interfaces between machines and people, and between machines and mechanical devices, that are highly intelligent and adaptable to many applications. I caught up with CoFounder and CEO Pavel Konecny this week to talk about the company and its mission to understand and process sound:

Hi Pavel, tell us a bit about Neuron Soundware, what you do, and how the company came to be.

We build and train software that understands audio. Our technology is practically an auditory cortex in a computer- a digital brain. It’s all based on deep learning – the fastest-growing field in machine learning. That’s the kind of technology, that has just recently beaten the best human player in Go. It is all enabled by the increasing power of computing – especially thanks to GPU advances.

We started working on some prototypes in October last year. I worked for a global IT firm for the past 12 years, and I just returned to Prague after spending over 3 years in the Sydney office. It was a great time, but I felt that I needed to follow my passion for AI. So I convinced my friend and high school classmate. We initially worked on some of my ideas around data compression using neural networks. In November, we applied for StartupYard. It was a good decision, and it helped us to find the right business field for our technology.

Your team is probably working on the most complex problems of any startup in our program right now. How is your team uniquely qualified to solve problems using machine learning and neural networks?

All of the co-founders have a strong technical background. I studied cybernetics and biomedical science. And I’ve worked on many projects with different technologies. I did the first Hadoop Big Data project in Australia, and implemented high-performance calculations for smart meters. We were about to digitalize a video archive, so I also built a pilot implementation for the facial recognition of cricket players last year. That was a very exciting experience.

The Neuron Software Team

The Neuron Soundware Team: Pavel and Filip

Filip Sedlak has a Master’s degree in chemistry informatics. He worked many years for pharmaceutical companies. He was in charge of taking an algorithm and building applications for researchers in genetics. He is really brilliant at that. I am very glad that he joined our team.

 

neuron soundware, pavel klinger

Co-Founder and Musician Pavel Klinger

Pavel Klinger is my very good friend. He studied biophysics at Charles University in Prague. He is an excellent coder as he has been programming since his childhood. He is also a musician. So that is one of the reasons we focus on audio. Neural networks are his old hobby. He built his first one when he was at high school. He wanted something to write his school homework instead of him. It did not work that well, but he could type a bit faster as the neural net was predicting the word he was going to type based on the first few letters. So it was an easy task to convince him to start a company using neural networks.

Can you tell us a bit more about how neural networks and machine learning software can help manufacturers and other industries?

Our technology analyzes sounds that machinery makes. We train it to recognize any anomalies or known issues. Sound and vibration are the most efficient way to detect mechanical malfunctions. However, the moving parts acoustics were typically too complex to make it practical. Till now. Our technology can manage these complexities, so we can inspect enclosed parts like gearbox using the sound it makes.

Our software is sort of like a very streamlined, simplified mechanic- but one that never gets distracted or bored. It can learn how an engine normal sounds, and it can learn which sounds signal a mechanical problem.

Neuron Soundware’s technology works just like a human brain- but because of the complexity of a real brain, ours is only about as powerful as the brain of a small bee. But that’s enough, really, to understand quite a bit about complex sounds, and recognize problems by listening to them in a huge range of applications.

Neuron Soundware technology can also learn from “training data,” to reconstruct sounds and even voices, based on what it has already listened to. This has enormous applications in the future, when it comes to anything from call centers, to natural language AIs.

Our technology can eventually be used to generate the voice of a completely artificial mind, with emotion, ability to listen, and detect and understand complex emotions in whomever it’s talking to. It’s difficult to overstate how many applications this technology will have in the next decade. It’s simply enormous. 

For now, we are already able to reconstruct a real voice that the software has listened to, and to reproduce speech without using any sound files. Soon, we will be able to generate original, unique speech as well. I plan to demo this technology on April 6th at the StartupYard 2016 Demo Day.

Don’t forget to sign up for StartupYard’s 2016 Demo Day, April 6th, at the Royal Theater in Prague. Tickets available and going fast!

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What are some of the other possible applications for your machine learning technology?

In addition to the industry sounds, we are developing some advanced services for call centers. It sounds like magic, but we are getting close to the production stage. For now. we are working on emotion detection and comprehensive voice modulation. 

The way you say something is often more important than what you say. So we can start by modifying a customer service agent’s voice perfectly to the emotional state of the customer. For example, the direct sales team would sound nicer and more trustable. We can change accents, and make many other changes. In time, our technology could completely replace call center agents, with machines that never make mistakes, and never get tired or frustrated.
We also have plans in the area of IoT devices, where we could provide diagnostics and sound recognition in conjunction with other services. We’re currently working on a potential partnership in this area with a major Czech printing and IoT company, who have been incredibly supportive so far.

Q: You’re focusing initially on partnerships with device companies, such as 3D printer manufacturers. What do you hope to accomplish business-wise in the next year?

Industry sounds are quite simple compared to emotional detection in voices. We have achieved extremely high accuracy. Hence, we are planning to first address manufacturers with high-value products and large high quantities, such as car makers.

Neuron Soundware technology could provide a sound “guardian” to any moving part. We could hear that something is broken or even predict that it is going to break. We would license our algorithms and charge fees for every unit equipped with our system.

How about the longer-term strategy? Where do you hope to be as a company in 3-5 years? What kind of things will Neuron Soundware technology be doing further in the future?

Our plan is to master the process of learning. We believe that the next generation of applications will not be coded but “trained.” 

For example, we would replace most of the people working in call centers with programs that learn on the job. We would take a few months of historical data from the call center (voice and screen recording) and process it. Our algorithms would develop a complex customer interaction model that would not only consist of the conversation with the customer but also management the customer data in the backend systems. Call center agents are a kind of interface between calling customer and company systems. With our service in place, the call center traffic will be managed with a fraction of the current staff.

You’re a bit of a futurist, I’ve noticed. How do you think the overall role of AI and machine learning will grow within the foreseeable future?

A lot of our jobs will be done by machines and automated services. For example, it is much harder to make a living as a translator these days, when you are competing with Google translate. You might think that people are still better, but they won’t be forever. The same would happen in a lot of other areas.

Do you want to sort the best photos, videos and create an appealing movie from your vacation? Done. Exploration of what is the best market for my product would be just one click? An automated tool will create a set of ads and test them via Facebook in a day.

It would be a huge impact on the society. New jobs would need to be invented. We might even see taxation of computation time. If Moore’s law stays valid a few more decades, we would all have a choice. Either die or move our minds into machines and then live forever. But that’s all still in the far future. 

For now, AI still needs a way to interact with people and objects.

Neuron Soundware is paving the way for machines to be able to interact with the world based on sound- which is an incredibly important sense for a machine to have. Much of our conception of AI today is about natural language processing- programs listening to and understanding us and their environment. But that requires many innovations that are still in the future. We want to lead that effort.

Of any team at StartupYard, Neuron Soundware has had to work hardest on finding a go-to-market strategy. Why do you think that’s so difficult to do with AI and machine learning?

That is the counter-intuitiveness of machine learning. You do not need a lot of coding, but you need good training data sets. We can not build our services without our clients. We initially wanted to focus only on the call centers.  However, the device diagnostics using sound is the low hanging fruit.

As we say, a machine doesn’t have a lawyer! It’s ethically complicated to work with live customers, and that is a part of the legal and business world that has to keep evolving in the next few years. As you can see from many other areas of advancement in AI, such as self-driving cars, new laws and regulations are necessary, and they are coming. We believe the benefits to people far outweigh the short-term drawbacks.

You’ve been working on several potential partnerships. Can you tell us more about those?

We do have a partnership memorandum with some Czech universities. That would help our company in different dimensions. Firstly, we would have access to the latest research and people in our key areas. That would help us to grow our team and knowledge. Secondly, we can fund our product development via cooperation with the university laboratories as it is close to the leading edge of scientific research. So we could leverage their server infrastructure as it will be probably our highest cost. We are also looking for a strong business partner.

How has the StartupYard program affected the development of Neuron Software? Where do you think you would be if you hadn’t joined the accelerator?

It was a really great experience. We gained a lot of contacts, ideas and quick feedback. The mentors from StartupYard are valuable providing support to the Neuron Soundware team. We changed our focus from music to voice and industry sounds, largely due to the input of mentors we met in the program. A long series of workshops gave us an overview of what to expect and master in so many different areas. 

I would personally welcome prolonging the program by 3-4 weeks. So we would have a bit more time to digest all that information, meet more customers and iterate even more on our product.

Has any particular mentor at StartupYard had a particularly strong impact on your company’s development? How so?

Well I think it might be the StartupYard team, You and Cedric Maloux. All of the mentors gave us a lot of valuable input, but the StartupYard team also tells us what *not* to do. And that’s often even more important. So when I’m in doubt, I ask myself: “would Lloyd or Cedric do this?” And that helps me to find the right path.

Salutara, StartupYard

Salutara: Your Health Matters

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Salutara is a full-service online platform for medical travel.

Every year, 11 Million people seek medical procedures that are not accessible or affordable in their home countries. With Salutara as a trusted advisor and intermediary, patients can search and compare clinics, arrange procedures, plan, book, and pay for a whole trip in one place.

I sat down recently with the founders, Martin Cvetler and Petr Vankat, to talk about Salutara’s current status, and future plans. Here’s what they had to say:

Q: Hi Petr and Martin! Tell us a bit about Salutara. Where did the idea for a medical travel platform come from?

Petr: I was spending my 2014 New Years in Switzerland with my girlfriend at that time who is a dental hygienist. As we were walking through the center of Thun, I saw a walk-in store saying “Zahn reisen – Dental travel” on the sign above the door. It caught my attention so I came closer and found out they were sending citizens of Thun to Hungary for dental procedures.

They organised trips specifically designed for patients with any kind of dental problem. This whole concept was taking place offline and was aiming at a very limited clientele. I thought why not do this online and globally? There is clearly a demand, with 20 million people traveling every year for treatment. That is when the idea was born.

But I put it in a drawer after my return to Prague and we started seriously discussing it in the summer of 2015 and in August we signed up for the Startupyard FastLane. And you know the story from there. We went through all the steps in the selection process and eventually made it to the accelerator.

Martin: Our first idea was to concentrate on dentistry and our first work name was “Bite´n´Chew” [laugh] Then we started to research, expanded the idea to other treatments and we just could not find a website that would be easy to use for booking a medical treatment abroad. Salutara is for people seeking quality medical care who cannot find affordable and accessible treatment at home. It’s a complicated and time consuming decision-making process, and we want people to have a way to do it all within one platform. We want to become the world’s most innovative medical travel booking platform.

 

Salutara

The Salutara Team: Martin Cvetler and Petr Vankat

 


Q: What are some of the main advantages of traveling abroad for medical treatments? What kinds of treatments are most popular for medical travel?

Petr: One of the most obvious advantages is the price difference between countries and continents.

Just to give you an idea, it is very common that patients for example from the USA are saving up to 80% of their medical costs when traveling for a hip replacement, dental restoration or cancer treatment abroad. Those can add up to huge sums- into the tens of thousands of dollars per treatment. A hip replacement in the US can cost upwards of $80,000, while the same treatment by an equally skilled surgeon in India might cost $10,000. That easily justifies the cost of going abroad.

You know, the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States, believe it or not, is medical bills. That really makes no sense to me in the modern world. But where there is such a clear need, there must to be clear, easy to access alternatives.

But the US isn’t the only place with problems. Waiting times in various countries such as the UK or Poland are also a big issue, as they can go as high as months and in some specific cases including orthopedy or eye surgeries up to years.

On top of that, some countries are facing certain legislative barriers that can be seen in relation to procedures such as In Vitro Fertilisation. At Salutara, we strongly believe that every human being should have a right to access that type of treatment, and we are working hard to provide options and accessibility for all the cases mentioned above.

“Every patient has a right to access the best treatments.”

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Martin: We want to inform and educate customers about all possibilities that the medical travel industry offers. One example is the EU Directive 2011/24 that enables all EU citizens have their insurance cover procedures anywhere within EU. Not many people know this, and not many people use it. On the other hand we want to give our clients the opportunity to choose and decide if they want to go abroad or not. They can compare both options, decide and book abroad or at home. We just want to give them the freedom to choose and a tool to make it safe and easy.

Q: What are some of your key challenges in approaching consumers? How will you convince people that medical travel is for them?

Petr: We understand from our own experience that it can be tough to even decide where to go on holiday! Is the food going to be good there? Will it be safe to walk on the streets after dark? Will I be able to charge my iPhone there and get wi-fi? Generally speaking people are not always very open to changes and exploration. Especially when it comes to something so important and precious as human health.

Certain things are easy to sell. Medical travel can be vastly cheaper, and certain treatments will only be available abroad, depending on where a patient is coming from. But it’s about more than that. A person thinking about medical travel is concerned about trust and safety, and building trust is one of our biggest challenges going ahead. People deserve their dignity in medical care, and sadly that’s not something they can always have. So we want to change the way medical care works for those who can’t now get what they deserve.

That is why we are focusing on providing top notch care for our first customers – the early adopters or ambassadors. Sharing and promoting their experience on the website as well as on our social media profiles is going to be crucial- getting the word out through people like that will open up new possibilities for people who haven’t even considered medical travel. Good word of mouth plays an important role in the process of convincing others that it is safe and supremely beneficial to make the decision to pack up a small bag and take off for a treatment abroad.

Q: Let’s talk a bit about Salutara. What features and capabilities will you launch with? Where do you see the product in a year or two?

Martin: Customers will be able to connect directly with clinics and their doctors for unlimited online consultations and price quotes. They will be able to book a treatment and pay the deposit.

Later on we want to provide the whole travel package, including flight and hotel booking. Everything in one place. A lot of patients use medical travel for sightseeing before the treatment or they stay longer after the surgery to recover and come back home all fit.

Most competitors in this market right now are focusing on connecting clinics and patients. That’s great, but we want to provide a whole experience- start to finish. That is what we’re working towards: a platform that you can use exclusively to get reputable, safe, and fairly priced treatment anywhere in the world.

There are plenty of resources now available for medical travel and for patients seeking treatments. There are great services like RealSelf, which provides a community for people to discuss issues around cosmetic surgeries. We want to provide the same value to people- a place where they can find trusted opinions and advice, and also connect with the right doctors and clinics to provide the right treatments.

Q: What will be your focus within the next year? How will you approach the market, and which segments will you focus on in order to grow?

Martin: We will launch small and lean. Just with a couple of procedures, clinics in the Czech Republic and UK market on the patient side. After we optimize our workflow and processes, we will scale up with more treatments and clinics in the same markets and then expand within the EU in the second half of 2016 and globally in 2017. We’re starting with less invasive procedures like cosmetic dentistry, hair transplantation, sleep disorder, cosmetic surgeries, LASIK (laser eye surgeries). Then IVF and life threatening diseases and their treatment like oncology.

Our dream, as Petr said, is to be a trusted platform for patients and clinics the world over- so that people will always know what treatments and doctors may be available to them anywhere in the world. Right now, medical travel is very opaque- it’s run through backchannels, and patients rarely have any sense of who they are dealing with. That’s just not good enough. Fair, open, and trustworthy markets need transparency, and that’s what we will provide.

Q: Obviously partnerships are going to be a key factor in Salutara’s growth and success. Which partners do you view as strategically important, and how do you plan to build these partnerships?

Petr:There are lots of ways to think about partnerships in our case. We believe that the first partners should be charities of all sorts. It is important to give back. And those who are in need or unfortunately suffer from a specific condition deserve our primary attention.

We would like to donate a part of each transaction to a charity of choice for each patient who uses our services. Next in line of common sense, are travel agents both in countries where our patients travel from and in the countries of our clinics. Sport clubs and associations have a natural connection to what we are doing too, especially those where injuries happen often such as rugby or ice hockey.

We encourage anyone reading this to reach out to us with partnership suggestions from their network. We want to hear from you!

Q:  You started at StartupYard with essentially nothing but an idea and a vision, and now you’re almost ready to launch. Have you been surprised by your own speed and execution?

Petr: I am personally naturally very impatient and yesterday was already too late. So until we fulfill our goal of becoming the world’s biggest platform connecting patients with clinics all over the world, and handling medical travel on every continent, I will not be satisfied with the pace of our progress. Nevertheless just being around such amazing influencers as Cedric Maloux or yourself, Lloyd, and having the priceless opportunity to consult with our great mentors helped us speed up the process a great deal. We can never thank them enough.

Martin: I will be very open here. I was a little naive a few months ago. The deeper we are in this industry the more I realize how much more is ahead of us and also what we could have done differently, faster and better. We have decided to make some compromises on the product and market entry in order to launch fast and we have a long list of updates already. The truth is we chose a very complicated product and market. And you just cannot do everything at one moment. You have to prioritize every day, stay focused but be able to pivot at the same time. All of this is very challenging but I enjoy it quite a bit.

Q: How has working with StartupYard affected the development of Salutara? Have any particular mentors had a big impact on your development?

Petr: As I mentioned above StartupYard is like a nitro boost in the Fast and Furious franchise. Being friends with one of the 2015 SY startups (TeskaLabs), we knew what we were going into and busted our bottoms to make it to the 2016 cohort, because we were aware of the impact SY had on TeskaLabs. To be specific at StartupYard you learn a great deal of skills from pitching, creating awesome landing pages to creating meaty content and to confidently ask investors for money. I am sure we will start to fully appreciate the help of StartupYard only after a couple of years from now looking back at the days spent here.

As far as mentors, the initial avalanche of heterogenous opinions and suggestions naturally creates a bit of perplexity when you want to take the advice and put it into practise right when the consultation is over. The mentoring month helped Salutara shape it’s business strategy and recognize some of the threats and weaknesses as well as strengths and opportunities.

Now as the dust is slowly settling, we are revising our notes and realizing the value of suggestions and tips we in some cases did not see immediately. To mention a few names in particular – Liva Judic helped us in the process of renaming our company, to Salutara. I cannot leave out Ladana Edwards whose persistence in support has been endless. Marketa Kabatova and her great input on Google advertising, Jeanne Trojan and her factual to the point tips on self presenting, Veronika Prikrylova, Klara Gajduskova, Karin Pomaizlova…Those are just a few, and all the mentors had something to contribute to our launch and growth, and we are super grateful for the chance to get to know them and learn from them. Thank you all, guys, you have been phenomenal! Hope we will show our appreciation by becoming the global leader in healthcare provision without having doctors on payroll.

Martin: Honestly I cannot imagine how we could move forward so fast without the support of the whole SY team, shareholders and mentors. It would be very long and painful without this.

Q: You’re currently expanding your team. Who are the kinds of people you are looking for?

Martin: Yes, we are now hiring a native English journalist/blog writer, social networks specialist, SEO specialist. Then two more coders, designer, key account for clinics and customer service specialists. We want a team of people that have drive and are results oriented. I want to also thank here Jiří, Jakub and Michal for their work, we are happy to work together.

Q: Where can potential partners, clinics, or job seekers get in touch with Salutara?

Petr: Salutara can be reached on our Twitter plus Facebook profiles and of course e-mails (petr@salutara.com or martin@salutara.com).

 

StartupYard World

A Day in the StartupYard World

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Because we work around startups every day, it’s sometimes helpful to step back and take a look at the bigger picture. We asked ourselves recently: “what kind of impact do we really have on the world as a whole?”

While it’s true that StartupYard companies touch the lives of millions of people every day, part of the magic of technology is that the vast majority of those people have no idea that when they pick up their smartphone or buy something online, or search for something in an e-shop, or a host of other activities, they are touching a product or service that started in our “yard.”

So we thought we’d try something fun, and give you this- a creative imagining of a single day, from an ordinary person, who just happens to be constantly in contact with products and services we helped bring into the world. While probably no single day would actually look like this, it is a composite of a real day shared by many people, all around the world, who interact with StartupYard companies.

Tweet A Day in the StartupYard World!

 

A Day in the StartupYard World

You wake up at 9am, and start off by browsing your favorite content online. These sites are monetized using NeuronAd, delivering you a fast, ad-lite experience. You notice an ad for a new movie coming out, and you check your budget with BudgetBakers, to be sure you can afford to go see it tonight, and pay for the babysitter you booked on Hlidacky.cz. You’ve been saving up to get a laser eye surgery, and you’re planning on using Salutara to book a trip to the Czech Republic, but the good news is that it will only cost a fraction of what it would cost at home.

To your delight, BudgetBakers informs you that ClaimAir has sent you 400 Euros as compensation for a delayed flight you had last month, which you booked at the last minute for only 50 Euros with Speedifly. You decide to really spoil the kids tonight, and order them their favorite pizza from DameJidlo.

You use Gjirafa’s search engine to look for an eshop that sells the best tablets, and you soon see recommendations for the best deals, with ads hosted on Gjirafa’s ad network, advertising products that have been identified and priced using TrendLucid’s ecommerce intelligence platform. The eshop you pick runs smoothly because it is being constantly checked for bugs by Testomato. You buy a new tablet, using Gjirafa’s own ecommerce solution, and register the warrantee with Warrantly, so that you’ll never be stuck having lost the receipt. You remember the tablet from an interactive display ad you saw at the local shopping center, courtesy of TotemInteractive.

After your purchase, which is secured by TeskaLabs’ secure mobile gateway, you see a one-question survey generated by SatisMeter, asking you to give feedback on your experience, which you gladly do. The purchase is automatically entered in your BudgetBakers budget.

Later that day, as you’re creating handmade crafts to sell on Shoptsie, you experience an internet outage. Logging onto a public wifi hotspot using Myia, you tweet at the telecom provider that you’re fed up with their lousy service. Thanks to BrandEmbassy’s social CRM platform, the telecom gets back to you in moments to resolve the issue, and a workman is dispatched shortly after. The call with the telecom sounds like it’s from a real person, but the friendly and pleasant voice is being generated by Neuron Soundware technology, which is able to understand everything you say, and gauge your emotional state by listening to your voice.

All this activity has made you tired, so you turn on StreamPlus, and watch a few branded videos from your favorite lifestyle companies to relax. Later, you check in on Works.io, and spot a few paintings from a new artist you’d like to keep an eye on. You decide to book a romantic private cruise on the water tonight with your partner using Boatify.

Don’t forget to sign up for StartupYard’s 2016 Demo Day, April 6th, at the Royal Theater in Prague. Tickets available and going fast!

Click to Book!

StartupYard DemoDay 2016, April 6th at the Royal Theater

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It’s with great pleasure and anticipation that we announce that StartupYard DemoDay 2016 will take place on April 6th, at the Royal Theater. The event will feature pitches from our 9 startups, and keynote remarks from Mergim Cahani, StartupYard Alum and Founder/CEO of Gjirafa, the “Albanian Seznam.”

The event will take place on April 6th, at 18:00, at the Royal Theater, in Prague.

 

Book Your Tickets Now!

 

 About the Keynote:

NWJ3017-Edit-1Mergim Cahani is the Founder & CEO of Gjirafa, Inc (gjirafa.com), the Albanian Search Engine. Gjirafa has recently raised $2.5M in angel and venture funding, with investors including Ester Dyson, Ondrej Bartos, Phillip Staehelin, and Rockaway Capital. An alum of StartupYard 2014, Gjirafa is working to bring state of the art e-commerce solutions to emerging markets in Kosovo, Albania, and the surrounding regions.

Previously he founded iziSurvey, a mobile survey solution, and MatchBox, now a defunct dating application. Currently Mergim serves as the President of the Board of Governors at American Chamber of Commerce in Kosovo, and has over 15 years of industry experience with startups, technology, management, and investment experience. Previously, in New York, Mergim worked for Broadridge Financial Solutions, an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the department of Computer Science at St. John’s University, and an executive management consulting program at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. His education includes a Summa Cum Laude BSc degree in Computer Science, an MSc degree in Computer Science from New York University, and an MBA degree with honors majoring in Executive Management from The Tobin College of Business at St. John’s University, all in New York.

About the Venue:

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The grand and historical Royal has stood in Prague for nearly 100 years. It recalls the glory days of the city when it was the capital of the First Czechoslovak Republic, from 1918 to 1938. After the 2nd world war, the theater was confiscated by the state, and it was not returned to its owners, the Maceška Family, until after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. It remains in the family to this day.

In 2014, the family agreed to rent the Royal to Jean-Christophe Gramont, who restored its look and feel to that of a First Republic public venue. Many of the original finishings remain intact, dating back to 1929.

StartupYard DemoDay 2016

Our decision to host StartupYard’s 2016 Demo Day at the Royal is a nod not only to our roots in Central Europe, but also to the Royal’s signature theme: of honoring the past while remaining unafraid to innovate into the future. As the story of those days in Prague just a century ago shows us: progress and innovation must be constantly defended and constantly re-energized by new generations, be they artists, engineers, or entrepreneurs.

Book Your Tickets Now!

The StartupYard 2016 Startups

 

Satismeter: Know Your Customers

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Czech Republic

SatisMeter is perfect for online businesses that lack qualitative feedback from their users.
It’s an in-app feedback platform, that collects NPS data based on specific usage patterns. Unlike a traditional email survey or various in-house solutions, SatisMeter is an easy to integrate, multi-platform solution, perfect for small startups with only a few customers, all the way up to enterprise scale clients.

Satismeter’s current customers include BuzzSumo,  Udacity, Mention, Adroll, Dashlane, and MailJet

Read the Interview with Satismeter!

 

ClaimAir: Know Your Rights. Get Paid.

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Czech Republic

ClaimAir helps travelers fight the airlines for compensation, because fliers don’t have the time and resources to do it themselves.
It’s is an automated platform that handles the end-to-end process of claiming owed compensation for delays, baggage mishandling, etc. Did you know that the average compensation owed was over 300 Euros?
Unlike travel agencies, ClaimAir is specialized in handling legal compensation claims in large volumes.

Read The ClaimAir Interview!

 

Neuron Software: Making Sense of Sound

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Czech Republic

Neuron Software is a deep tech startup, exploring the use of self-teaching, constantly learning neural networks in a wide range of audio analysis and audio manipulation applications.
Imagine having a car mechanic in your pocket, able to diagnose a problem just by listening to it. Or being able to accurately document the emotions of your customers, every time anyone from your company talks to them.
Neuron Software’s technology will enable a broad range of new capabilities that are just starting to be explored.

Stream.Plus: The Last Video Platform You’ll Ever Need

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Czech Republic

Stream.Plus is the future of branded video distribution. Brands who have quality video content often lack control over the distribution and monetization of that content. Stream.Plus creates mobile and web apps for branded, interactive online TV channels that create a direct connection between consumers and brands.

NeuronAd: Ads for Everyone

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Czech Republic

Online publishers rely heavily on advertising for revenue. But 20% or more of internet users now have adblockers installed. NeuronAd helps online publishers show relevant, unobtrusive ads to adblocked visitors, while maintaining the speed, security, and experience that led those visitors to employ adblockers.

Read the Interview with NeuronAd!

 

Speedifly: When in Doubt, Travel

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Bulgaria

SpeediFly is for spontaneous travelers who want to get away last minute, but don’t know where they can go on a budget.
It’s a mobile travel discovery platform that locates the customer and finds the 15 cheapest flights departing from and returning to the nearest airport in the next 10 days. Unlike clunky old-fashioned search engines, SpeediFly combines social dimensions like group travel planning, with the ability to discover destinations based on activities and interests.

Read The Speedifly Interview!

 

TotemInteractive: Make Ads People Love

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Poland

TotemInteractive enables Digital Out of Home Advertising to become more than just a one-way brand-to-customer ad channel.
It’s a cloud based advertising platform that supports interactive content, like games and contests, by allowing people to control ads directly from their smartphones.
Drive real audience engagement with your live ads, by making ads people love, and love to play with.

Salutara: Your Health Matters

Salutara, Startupyard

Czech Republic

Salutara is a full-service online platform for medical travel. Every year, 11 Million people seek medical procedures that are not accessible or affordable in their home countries. With Salutara as a trusted advisor and intermediary, patients can search and compare clinics, arrange procedures, plan, book, and pay for a whole trip in one place. Travel for your health, with Salutara.

boatify: hop onboard (a boat!)

boatify

Switzerland

Boatify is for people who want to go on a boat ride, but don’t have easy and affordable access to a boat. It’s a web and mobile platform, where boat owners can earn money renting their boats directly.
Unlike typical boat rental services, boatify relies on a network of partner “officers,” who take responsibility for the end-to-end customer experience of each boat rental, making it a snap to safely rent and take a trip in a boat near you, anytime.

We look forward to seeing you at the Royal!

Book Your Tickets Now!
NeuronAd

NeuronAd: Ads for Everyone

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Do you use AdBlock, or another ad-blocking solution? More and more, the answer to that question is yes. With the advent of adblocking for mobile, over 20% of online users now employ some form of ad blocker, and that proportion is growing rapidly.

Ads can be annoying, they often use too much data, and they can be loaded with unwanted code and invasive tracking. NeuronAd is working to reconcile the needs of online publishers, with the wishes of ordinary web users who are sick of invasive advertising on desktop and mobile. NeuronAd is a member of StartupYard 2016, and will present at our Demo Day, on April 6th.

I caught up with Karel Javurek, founder and CEO of NeuronAd, to talk to him about the state of online advertising, and his role in improving it. Here’s what he had to say:

Hi Karel, Tell us a little about yourself and NeurodAD. How did you come up with the idea?

My experience has lot to do with NeuronAD, because I’m a journalist and writer, owner of a small content website, and an entrepreneur. But i’m also a reader and i saw Adblock becoming stronger and stronger every year.

Some publishers do get a bit extreme with the number of ads on their sites, but Adblock is the opposite extreme – completely no ads. So I started thinking about that, and I realized that basically the current model of online advertising is broken.

People want content, and advertisers want impressions. But publishers have to balance these two needs, and they have a very hard time doing so. The economics of advertising are constantly pushing them to new extremes.

At some point, online ads stopped helping online publishers, and started to hurt them, and that starts to happen when the pain the ads are creating is real enough that people do something about it- like using AdBlock. And that happens essentially because the reader does not feel that their interests are aligned with the publisher. Instead, they see publishers as working for advertisers, even though they are relying on the publisher for content that they want to view.

There has to be some middle ground– a solution that can balance both sides.

Readers are ultimately the most important part of online advertising. That’s what advertisers are there for, and it’s why publishers exist. At the same time, advertising is ultimately meant to be beneficial to people. In a fundamental sense, advertising does help us to make choices about how we spend our money – and it can have a positive role in our lives.

You want to know if a product is right for you, or if something new is available, and advertising helps us learn things like that. But neither advertising nor publishing is going to work if the publisher can’t survive because half of the readers are blocking ads, and the other half are being attacked with them.

What we see today is the whole system sort of breaking down, and that’s bad for everyone. NeuronAd is set up for what I think the future of online ads is going to be– something much more sensitive to the needs and wishes of consumers.

Click to Tweet about NeuronAd!

 

Tell us a bit about your team as well. Who is working with you now? Are you looking for more people?

Right now we are about 8 people. As CEO I still do everything except programming, that is managed by the David Dutkovsky, our CTO. We are still mostly programmers and DevOps, but also one experienced sales pro from the US, who has worked more than 10 years in online advertising business, and led big teams of salespeople.

The NeuronAd Team

The NeuronAd Team, Karel in the middle.

 

Our business is strictly B2B, so we will need lot of sales help in order to expand. We are always looking for talented programmers as well. We are solving hard and unsolved problems, so it’s very interesting even from the architectural point of view.

NeuronAD defeats ad blockers. What’s the problem with ad blockers, considering that they are so popular?

The main problem with ad blockers is that they are too extreme – they block every ad on every page a user visit and usually, once a user installs them, they never uninstall them. Possibly over 20% of internet users now use some form of ad blocker, whether or not such technology is really needed to enjoy online content. In most cases, they simply aren’t necessary.

Making quality content isn’t free, and i think everyone who use adblock, knows this. Ads are  a great solution for a free internet, and they work not only for publishing, but also for Google, Facebook and a lot of other online companies and startups.

Some publishers are greedy, honestly, and they deploy too many ads, pop-ups and so on. But that in itself is an extreme situation, for which all publishers are being punished. We are trying to help conscientious publishers who display useful, relevant ads that are not obtrusive- as it should be.

Ads that are tasteful and well placed can add value to a reader’s experience. That is the kind of thing we want to support with our technology.

Can you talk a bit about how NeuronAD’s technology works? How does it get around Ad blockers?

Our solution gets around any type of blocking software in a browser- desktop or mobile – and can also get past adblocking on the network level, where it’s normally hard to do. So we can offer publishers a future-proof solution for the next generations of adblocker, not just the ones on the market today.

We do that by detecting when an adblocker is being used, and rebuilding that page with code the adblocker doesn’t recognize, delivering an “ad-lite” experience that an ad-sensitive user should find acceptable.

It’s a better alternative than, for example, barring ad-blocked users from visiting the site at all, as more and more publishers, such as Forbes, now do.

We’re building NeuronAd from the ground up, to tackle ad blocking technology where it will be two, three, or even five years from now.

We can also easily update our solution, so if there is any problem with any type of new adblocker, we will be able to patch our technology quickly, and publishers don’t need to take any action.

Will NeuronAd have any effect on website visitors who are not using ad blockers?

No. NeuronAd only affects users who are employing ad blocking technology. For typical visitors, NeuronAd has no effect on their experience, and nothing is changed at all.

Part of our mission is to change the business of online advertising by rewarding fair actors. Part of this is our firm commitment not to spy on or collect private data about site visitors. Much of what has driven people to adopt ad blockers has been privacy concerns, and with good reason. We want to encourage publishers to respect the privacy of their readers as well.

What is NeuronAd’s relationship with advertisers or ad networks?

Our backend can be connected to different ad networks and clients, so we can provide extra inventory for an advertiser, even on big websites and reaching people who don’t usually view ads.

The number of people with ad blockers grows at about 40 % every year. There are more than 200 million people with some kind of adblock installed, and that will double in the next few years. On some websites, the number of users with ad blocking software is now higher than 50%, and this puts a powerful strain on publishing as a viable business online.

How do you plan to grow in the coming 6 months to a year?

We are a global startup, and our reach is not limited by geography or language. We hope to be in the US within the next year – that’s an obvious market to tackle, and it is where much online advertising is focused.

We’re piloting the solution with a few Czech websites right now, and we hope to be serving ads very soon.

Long term, what do you hope NeuronAD’s role will be in the online advertising market?

Our goal is to make the internet a better place for all involved – for publishers, readers, and advertisers.  Publishers and advertisers can forget that readers are the real customer, so we focus on them quite a bit, providing an ad-light experience (less advertisement), more privacy (less tracking), more security (ads link check), and better performance (faster loading times, less data to download).

 

How has your experience at StartupYard shaped the company going forward? Are there any particular mentors who had an outsized impact on your development?

The experience with StartupYard has been fantastic. It’s accelerating every part of our project and we’ve had great feedback and contacts from a huge number of mentors. Every mentor is useful in some way, even if they’re from different market or segment. Sometimes even a small idea or feedback from a different point of view can shape your service or product to be much better.

 If I’m forced to name names, then Jan Urban, Andrej Kiška, Aleš Teska, and Viktor Fisher are examples of really important mentors for us. But in truth, there are many more who have played vital roles in shaping our development, and we are grateful to all of them. 

Are you currently looking for launch partners and early customers? How can people find out more?

We are looking for good partners from publishers and ad networks, that want be relevant in the future. More information is on our website Neuronad.com and you can also send email to info@neuronad.com. On our twitter page we are trying to cover new thing in the world of adblocking.

Speedifly

Speedifly: When in Doubt, Travel!

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SpeediFly is for spontaneous travelers who want to get away last minute, but don’t know where they can go on a budget.
Unlike clunky old-fashioned search engines, SpeediFly combines social dimensions like group travel planning, with the ability to discover destinations based on activities and interests. It will allow friends and relatives to book flights together at one price, while splitting the bill, and to book truly last minute trips, even on the way to airport. 

I caught up with Co-Founders Alexander Karadjian and Stoyan Dobrev, the Bulgarian team behind Speedifly, to talk more about the young company that wants to take the next generation to the skies. Here’s what they had to say: 


Q: Hi Alex and Stoyan, tell us a bit about yourselves and the SpeediFly Team.

Alex: Hi Lloyd. Thanks for asking. Well, I spent the last eight years of my life studying architecture at Harvard, and a month after graduation decided to found a spontaneous travel startup!

I think that speaks to my spontaneous nature.  The truth is I have always been passionate for travel, which is why I took a semester off three times during these eight years and lived in Spain, the Netherlands, the Seychelles and Australia.

The other co-founders, Stoyan and Zahari, have been good friends of mine for many years. Actually, Stoyan dated my sister back in the day, and she always claims that she deserves a share in the company [smile].

Stoyan is also crazy about travel. He spent the last 4 years studying management in the UK and Hong Kong. Zahari is a friend from high school, whom I’ve known for more than 13 years. He is our tech genius living in his own world. In addition to his programming skills, he has quite a lot of experience with computer graphics and visual effects, which turned out to be invaluable for the team. 

 

Speedifly Team

Alex and Stoyan, CoFounders of Speedifly

 

Q: How did you come up with the concept for SpeediFly?

Alex: The idea for SpeediFly came up during a lunch conversation I had with a good friend at Harvard.

At that time I was working on my graduate thesis project, a proposal for London`s seventh airport, and all that occupied my mind was optimization of air travel, airport capacities and cost of airfare. We were discussing how every fifth seat on a plane that left Heathrow airport was empty.

I though that the business case for last-minute travel had not been pushed to its limits – as long as people can be convinced to act spontaneously and hop on the next plane, the opportunity is huge.

Now, it’s no shock that this isn’t a new idea by any means, but I thought previous attempts had been missing something. There was a lot of talk about “Uber for air-travel,” because Uber is also about managing the extra capacity of someone’s car.

But airlines and air-travel just don’t work that way. It takes a different kind of approach: something in between traditional travel agencies, and these on-demand service platforms.

So we built the platform to essentially tap into the benefits of on-demand functionality, in what is otherwise a more traditional, less on-demand business.

Tweet About Speedifly!

Q: What do you see as the last-minute travel industry’s biggest problem? How can it be solved?

Alex: Travel platforms featuring last-minute travel “sell” the price. It’s always the price of the ticket, the price of the hotel, the price of the car you rent.

But if you think about the nature of a last-minute trip, it’s all about the experience – it’s about seizing the moment and allowing people to discover fabulous destinations and share their adventures with friends. The price should be there only to show people that travel is not as expensive as they think – that they can afford it; but low price is not the key factor that motivates people to travel.

With all the information in social media, it’s so easy to analyze your customer’s interests and passions, and to customize the last-minute deals to their taste. Still, nobody does it yet.

This is one way to go about it. Also, just think about how difficult it is to make a group last-minute booking – by the time you call your friends, the deal is gone. We want to provide our customers with a platform where they can share flight information with friends in-app, invite these friends to join them on a flight and make the decisions live.

That’s much easier for people, and it’s about the experience.

Q: What makes SpeediFly different from typical metasearch platforms like Kayak, or booking platforms like SkyPicker?

Stoyan: Metasearch platforms like Kayak or Skyscanner simply aggregate large amounts of flight data and refer customers to the websites of airlines or online travel agencies where tickets can be booked.

It`s not uncommon for the price and the seat availability to change during this referral process, which, of course, disrupts the quick and easy nature of the booking and negatively effects the whole user experience. That`s why we don`t want to follow the metasearch model.

By contrast, Skypicker processes bookings and does not redirect customers to third-party websites. In this context, we will be a booking platform just like Skypicker. In fact, Skypicker is our flight data provider.

What`s unique about Speedifly is that it allows for interest-based searches like flights to skiing, surfing, concert or festival destinations. Birdwatching is also an option, although I don`t have high hopes for that one [laughs]. So, in a way SpeediFly is a travel discovery platform – the customer doesn’t have to know where he or she wants go, just what he wants to do.

What`s more, SpeediFly is a social booking platform where users can invite their Facebook friends, build their own travel communities within our app, share flights they are interested in, or flights they have booked, and invite others to join them on these flights.

Once we start understanding what the customer’s and his friends` preferences are, we will be able to recommend group getaways based on interests and budget. SpeediFly is all about making travel a social experience.

Q: Let’s talk a bit about your target market. Who do you see as your ideal customer, and what does that person value most? What will be special to them about SpeediFly?

Stoyan: Our go-to-market strategy is to target Millennials. Statistics show that on average Millennials travel way more than any other age group. Soon, millennials will account for a substantial part of the working population in Europe, enjoying more purchasing power than ever before.

We divide our target market into two segments – students (aged 18 to 24) and young professionals (aged 25 to 35). These are two groups that differ in their price-sensitivity and flexibility.

Let`s start with the students. They are very price-sensitive but have flexible schedules, which means that it is easier for them to take a long weekend or to skip the Friday class and jump on the next available flight. With SpeediFly, students will not only find it easier to discover relevant and cheap flights, but we expect them to use extensively the social dimension of the platform – it will allow them to share their travel intentions, invite friends and classmates to particular trips and organize group getaways.

Young professionals are less price-sensitive and less flexible, which has two important implications. First, the cheapest option is not necessarily the best one. Second, the timing of the trip and its duration really matter. That`s why I see the value for this group coming from the recommended deals we can make. SpeediFly can save busy young professionals a lot of time planning a quick trip – with us they can discover destinations related to personal preferences for hobbies, concerts, sport events, etc.

Q: Can you talk more about your go-to-market strategy? When and where will people be able to use SpeediFly for the first time?

Stoyan: On the 27th of March we are soft launching in London. We will make the private beta of our app available to 200 students from two different London universities. We want to see how people interact with the app, how they make use of its social functionality and where they see the added value.

A month later, we will officially launch the app in London and market it exclusively to university students. For 4 months SpeediFly will be available only in London and in September we will release it in Paris, Rome, Madrid and Amsterdam.

Q: What are your near term goals for the service? Where do you hope to be in a year?

Stoyan: Up to 3 months after the official launch we plan to integrate accommodation and event ticket (concerts, exhibitions, etc.) APIs, which will complete the cycle of organizing a spontaneous trip – book a flight, find a place to stay, and discover something cool to do once you are there.

Our next priority will be to enable collective bookings. You know how when you are organizing a trip for many people, someone usually pays for all the flight tickets? This is because if you buy them separately, most probably each one will have a different price, if there are seats still available.

Then the person who has made the payment has to collect his money back – it`s an annoying process. We want to allow one person to start a booking and then split the payment among all travelers. Just like Uber does it. Why isn’t that functionality already available to air travelers? It should be.

In one year? Well, as with every B2C startup we want to be viral among our target customers and have more than 100,000 active users. We will need to work hard to get traction in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, and Madrid. We’re looking forward to the challenge and the new experiences.

Q: Long term, travel is very competitive. How will SpeediFly compete and stay relevant in such a crowded market? What will SpeediFly be in 5 years?

Alex: Relevance is actually the key factor here. The industry is indeed competitive but one of its major problems is that it lacks relevance in terms of the deals offered to customers.

It’s not a working solution to send email updates about cheap flights from Paris to Tokyo to a customer who lives in London; recommending a skiing destination to somebody who is not into skiing also doesn’t work.

Still, people are constantly bombarded with such irrelevant offers, and at SpeediFly we want to fight against exactly this problem. Constant analysis of our customers is a priority for our team – this is how we can make relevant recommendations and stay competitive in this market.

In 5 years we want to have a global product or at least to have expanded beyond European borders. After Europe, our next target geography is Southeast Asia.

speedifly launch

Q: In what ways has the concept of SpeediFly changed since you’ve joined StartupYard?

Stoyan: The first thing that pops in my mind is that we changed our name. (laughs) It was quite a contentious process at times. Now we are SpeediFly, and quite happy with that.

It is hard for me to express in a few words how much feedback and insight we were given for the last two months at StartupYard. Naturally, our concept changed substantially.

When we came to StartupYard, we did not even have a website. We had our core functionality – the 15 cheapest flights from the nearest airport within the following 10 days – and we thought we would be making money from selling cheap flights. In a sense, SpeediFly had a lot in common with any other online travel agency that sells cheap flights.

Now, after two months of mentoring and workshops, our ambition is to go way beyond the cost-saving concept. In fact, we realized that the full potential of the idea has little to do with cost-saving. It has a lot to do with social travel or collective travel.

If we go back to the basics of travel for a second, it is about experience, about the unknown and about the adventure. Unfortunately, if you go to the websites of our competitors, travel is all about price. We want to change that perception and at StartupYard many mentors helped us focus exactly on this. We want to escape from the cost-saving notion, create the largest community of spontaneous travelers and change the way people think about leisure travel.

Q: Are there any particular mentors from StartupYard who have had an especially big impact on the company’s development? How so?

Alex: You Lloyd, along with Cedric, have had an invaluable impact on our team. Sometimes, we take it for granted as we are together every day, all day long, but whether it’s for the landing page, for A/B testing or for fundraising campaigns, you have always been available to work with us.

Michal Jelinek and Wallace Green have been instrumental in fine-tuning our concept – they pushed us a lot to make the most of all the social interaction that is part and parcel of every travel experience. Wallace is a great believer in what we do and he has spent hours and hours with us working on the functionality and the definition of the added value of our mobile app. His enthusiasm about SpeediFly is contagious and we are really grateful for his input.

ClaimAir

Claimair: Fighting For Air Passengers’ Rights

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ClaimAir helps travelers fight the airlines for compensation, because fliers don’t have the time and resources to do it themselves.
It’s is an automated platform that handles the end-to-end process of claiming owed compensation for delays, baggage mishandling, etc. Did you know that the average compensation owed was over 300 Euros?

I sat down this week with Jakub Ladra, Founder and CEO of ClaimAir, one of our 2016 Startups. Here’s what he had to say about fighting for the rights of passengers all over the world:


Hi Jakub, tell us a bit about ClaimAir, and why you decided to fight for the rights of airline passengers.

Hi Lloyd, thanks for asking. Let me ask you a question: the last time you had a flight delay, or a lost bag, how much money did the airline give you in compensation?

Now, if you’re like most people, the answer is that you didn’t get anything, or maybe the airline gave you enough money for a meal at the airport. But what people don’t know is that the airlines routinely owe much more, often hundreds of euros per person, for a delay or mishandling of bags.

ClaimAir makes sure travelers get flight and baggage compensations when they are lawfully owed by the airlines. Since ClaimAir works as an automated platform which allows us to process claims in high volume, we can provide our service not only directly to the travelers but also to our business partners.

These partners are companies like flight booking platforms, travel agencies, travel itinerary management systems, etc. We believe that our service can help them improve customer relationships, loyalty and last but not least, it gives them a strong competitive advantage. On the other hand, these partnerships help us to overcome our biggest challenge, which is the fact that travelers are not well aware of their rights and airlines usually take advantage of it.

 

Jakub Ladra, Claimair

Jakub Ladra of ClaimAir. Jakub has extensive experience in the airline industry, and wants to fundamentally change the way airlines treat their customers.

Back to your second question, my journey with air passenger’s rights started at the university when it was the topic of my thesis. It was in 2007 and no surprise, the thesis ended up in a box – luckily, not forever. I went through a couple of aviation-related corporate jobs, but I always knew it wasn’t what I wanted. I love the startup environment and the feeling of freedom which, in combination with my knowledge, naturally led to ClaimAir.

Do you see your mission as more than just taking advantage of the laws and regulations?

For us it’s not just about taking advantage of the laws and regulations. We live in an experience economy where customer service should be a priority. Trouble with your flight just happens, and obviously brings a lot of stress and frustration into your life. So our goal is to make the rules around air passenger’s rights as clear as possible and make air travel an even more comfortable way of exploring the world. We also have some plans that don’t relate to the regulated stuff, but I can’t tell you more at the moment.

What are some of the most common mistakes that air travelers make when it comes to getting what is owed them for delays, disruptions, and lost bags?

I wouldn’t call them mistakes. Travelers simply don’t know they are owed compensation and that airlines are in fact legally obliged to pay them out. For instance, when your flight is delayed for more than 3 hours on arrival, you can get €600 paid in cash. Regarding the baggage, the compensation can be up to €1,500. These are pretty good sums that airlines wish to be kept secret. Moreover, when you complain by yourself, the airline usually responds by using complicated legal arguments that you have no chance to understand and work against. The average traveler feels powerless next to the airlines.

What does it take, legally, to get an airline to pay legal compensation? Why is it so hard?

Naturally, it’s a common practice of a majority of airlines to keep their compensation budgets low. Therefore, if you don’t know the rules precisely and if you are unable to submit a strong letter of complaint by using relevant legal arguments, your chances to success are close to zero. The airlines usually respond by using some tricky legal provisions that exempt them from liability, but most of them are taken out of context. Overall, the legislation is damn complex and contains many grey zones, so it’s just difficult for an ordinary traveler to cope with it.

Let’s talk a bit about the numbers. How many travelers a day could benefit from your service? What are some of the other important industry stats?

Although I’ve devoted my professional career to aviation, I’m always amazed about those daily numbers. There are more than 9 million travelers transported by air every day and approximately 800 thousand of them are affected by any kind of flight disruption or baggage mishandling. It’s also worth mentioning that the average compensation we got for our customers in 2015 was €320. There are also projections that air travel industry should double in next 20 years.

Your team is growing quickly. What do you see as your biggest challenge as a company in the near term? What keeps you up at night right now?

A: Extremely quickly! If everything goes well and in line with our plans, we should have more than 100 employees by the end of 2016, which is the thing that actually keeps me up at night these days. Have I mentioned that we are hiring? (laughs)

Looking for a job? Tweet @ClaimAir now!


What kind of people are you looking for?

Anybody who speaks fluent English, has a passion to learn new things from the aviation industry and is willing to use the latest technology is more than welcome to reach out. We are currently based in Prague, but our goals are far beyond the borders of the local market. If any of your readers want to be a part of an international startup environment with a vision and strategy to create something big, I can’t wait to meet them.

Where do you plan for ClaimAir to be, as a company, in 5 years time? What will be your mission then?

We’re still an early stage startup so I primarily hope that we will still exist in 5 years. (laugh) But anyway, I have a clear vision of a perfectly seamless process of customer care that I would love to bring into life.

I would really like to have our service integrated with various travel solutions, so every time your flight goes wrong, we would automatically notify you about important facts and we would get you money without any intervention from your side. In other words, we would like to solve your traveling troubles in real time so you can feel secure, and as a bonus, the compensation will be automatically credited to your bank account.

Have any of the StartupYard mentors had an especially powerful impact on your trajectory as a company? How so?

jakub ladra, Claimair

Jakub talks with other 2016 founders at a StartupYard workshop


Not only mentors but all StartupYard team members, including you Lloyd, are extremely supportive and dedicated. I can’t thank you enough for allowing us to be here and for supporting our goals. I am sure that we wouldn’t make such a progress in just a few weeks otherwise. We’ve met more than 70 extremely experienced mentors yet and sorry, I can’t mention anyone in particular because I value all of them the same. They are busy professionals and they give us their precious free time to move our businesses forward. We got numerous valuable insights into our business as well as several important introductions to our potential business partners. I’d definitely recommend other early stage startups to do their best to make it into the next StartupYard’s batch.

This space has some active players already. Why is there room for ClaimAir in this market?

Of course, but I always find competitors as an important part of every industry. Their presence confirms that our business is viable and they also help us educate and evangelize the market. Why is there room for us? Remember the figures? 9 million travelers are transported by air every day. Moreover, we are the only ones who deal with baggage-related issues and I hope that our focus on a technology will quickly make us one of leading players.

Are you looking to raise investment right now?

Yes. In order to carry out our business plan, we are looking for an initial €300k investment.