Abhishek Balaria is CEO and Founder of the enterprise mobile solutions company Zentity, a leading developer of mobile gateways for telecoms and banks in Europe. He is also a mentor at StartupYard, and a regular at many of StartupYard’s events.

Abhishek has been working in technology for nearly 20 years, with an interest in banking, telecommunications, and mobile. He founded Zentity in 2008 to produce mobile games, and has since expanded to provide mobile gateways for some of the Czech Republic’s and Europe’s largest banks and telecom providers, along with other services like major e-retailer Alza.cz, and Novinky.cz, the Czech Republic’s most popular news portal.

Hi Abhishek, why don’t you start by telling us a little about yourself and your background.

I like to think of myself as a technologist who happens to understand a bit of business or specifically software related businesses. I was extremely lucky to have started my professional career at a startup in the early days of the Internet boom and had a dream to someday have a startup of my own.

Before starting my own business I had worked on three continents (North America, Europe and Asia), in startups and the world’s largest corporations, across various industries and with people from all over the world. I feel this background gave me a solid footing for creating my own business. I have been building mobile applications since 2000, when I first built a game for Palm Pilot.

I am married with two children and try to live a simple life.

My current focus is on mobility and cloud related technologies.

You are Founder and CEO of Zentity, which is responsible for a multitude of apps millions of people use on a daily basis. Can you tell us how Zentity started?

I have been interested in mobility since cell-phones became popular in the late 90s. I still remember when GPRS and WAP were first announced. I was also lucky to have worked at an early mobile based product startup called 12snap in Prague where I programmed some WAP based systems.

Later I went on to work for Oskar/Vodafone on SMS content based systems and Česká spořitelna where I worked with online systems. Since the beginning of the millennium we heard every year that it will be the year of mobile.

It started to seem like a real possibility in 2008-9 timeframe after Apple’s App Store was opened to 3rd party developers. So, over the years, I always had startups and mobility in my mind and when I held the first iPhone in my hand, it was crystal clear to me that this was the time for action.

So, I started playing with mobile apps for new smartphones and hired a few people to program mobile games. At that time there was no market for Enterprise mobile solutions, but the mobile games allowed us to learn the technology and were successful in their own right. In summer of 2010 it became clear to me that banking will eventually be performed on mobile devices, we called it a “bank in your pocket”.

My years of experience in banking and telecommunications allowed me to design, market and successfully rollout mobile banking products when the market finally came about. By 2011 we were on our way to become an important player in Enterprise Mobility.

Today we are a leader in mobile banking and related solutions in the CEE region, and probably in wider Europe. 

You’ve designed mobile gateways for huge enterprises, like Vodafone, CSOB, ING, and Alza. Why do these big companies come to Zentity to build their mobile solutions?

It’s got to be a combination of our product maturity, security focus, technical expertise, agility, scale and references.

The enterprise market is very difficult to get into. In the early days, we won because we were ahead of the game. Nobody was thinking in terms of mobile gateways back in 2010-11. Also, we were very clear about our focus and committed to things that mattered to our customers: security, time-to-market and user experience. We have stayed true to that vision through the years.

After successfully rolling out first projects we started winning on the strength of our references. Over time we have reached a scale which is hard to replicate for others in our space. I would love to say that this was the game plan, but we didn’t know how far we can push it.

So, I suppose the formula here is, first you win by correctly timing your product market fit, then you win by scaling through reference selling and then you win because of the scale (as it becomes harder for your competitors to be faster, better and cheaper than you). All the while you have to run a tight and efficient operation.

What are some of the unique challenges in working with such large corporations, with such complex needs?

I have had a long career on Enterprise IT side of things, so to me it came naturally. You have to be aware of long sales cycles. It took us 2-3-4 years to close some accounts, so you have to be patient.

You have to work with a big sales pipeline. On the delivery side, the projects have to be managed very tightly with constant evaluation of the risks. Communication is very important. As in everything I do, I believe that it all starts with putting together the right team for the project. Half of your job is done if you have put together the right team.

Working with large corporations is not much different than working with startups in that you are always delivering a piece of software to a group of people who need it to run their business.

What have been some of your “favorite” or most important failures in the process of building Zentity into what it is today?

We probably have made every mistake in the book as we were getting started 🙂 I always tell my team that the most important projects (tenders or RFPs) for us are the ones that we lose. Every loss makes us regroup, work harder and smarter.

Also, the projects we didn’t win often come back to us because competitors don’t do a satisfactory job or for some other reason. We work hard everyday to make sure that from an operational point of view we are absolutely world-class.

As a mentor at StartupYard, what is are some of the key mistakes that you see startups making most often? What piece of advice to you find yourself giving all the time?  

Timing and product market fit. Also, doing it for the right reasons. I generally lose interest when someone speaks of getting acquired or just raising a funding round. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who think raising money is the main objective.

I never discuss the idea itself, I only want the team to explain the product market fit to me. I want the team to have a deep understanding of their market, technical talent is not enough. I understand that pivots are an important part of a startup’s life and no plan survives contact with the enemy, or as Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.” But you have to let the team figure this out and not push them to your world view.

In the early days of Zentity, I was advised to open source our product, because we will never sell it. I was advised to hire a VP of sales or build bikini apps. But all I wanted to do was to build a “bank in your pocket”. It’s very important to stick with the core idea, but it will only work if you have deep expertise in the subject matter. I knew banking, so I knew what I was building.

Not pushing a startup to adopt your world view is incredibly hard. It’s something our team struggles with, and I know our mentors do as well. What would you say is the ideal role of a mentor for seed-stage startups?

Yes, it’s natural to try to comment the idea based on our experiences and beliefs. But it’s counterproductive on many fronts. First, young founders look up to you and will underestimate their own convictions, second, they get defensive about this and then you don’t discuss anything other than the idea.

You want the founders to convince you of the product market fit and that they have a deep understanding of their market. Peter Thiel calls it “the secret that you believe in.” Sean Parker didn’t change a thing in the core Facebook idea, he simply advised Zuck on how to stay in control of his own business (a whole different topic :-)) and scale it.

What has worked for me is to start with the assumption that I would never know the market and its product needs as well as the founders. Then you can start on a clean slate and may even learn a thing or two.

As a non-Czech who has adopted the Czech Republic, what are some of the advantages, and disadvantages, that you see in this market? What attracted you to it in the first place, and what keeps you here?

I will answer the second question first. What attracted and keeps me here is the love of my life, my wife and later our children.

Even though I always kind of knew that I wanted to run my own startup or company I could not have known where it would be. I believe that the fundamentals of business in the long run are the same everywhere. You have to build something or work in an area which others want enough to pay you, do it well, be straightforward in your dealings and keep things simple. I do not like complex business models or deals.

But I can share some observations of the Czech Republic compared to other places like US or India where I have lived or done business. The Czech Republic is a remarkably small market and everybody tends to know everybody, which can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on your reputation

 It’s also a very young market, which means sometimes there are no clear category leaders. An older or more mature company here simply means someone who got started in the early nineties. You can find world-class technology talent. I consider all those things advantages.

On the disadvantages side, I can only think of two things. First, it’s hard to scale and secondly, sometimes it can be hard to build meaningful and mutually beneficial partnerships.

The scaling problem is understandable, given the size of the Czech market, and its incomplete integration into the European market as a whole. But why would you say building partnerships is particularly difficult here?

Regarding partnerships, it probably has to do with the fact that if you are trying to create a software product in an industry vertical you will run out of accounts very soon. E.g. banking only has about 15 real accounts and Telco only 3-4 major accounts. The partners would not have enough incentive to invest in the pre-sales of your products.

Another observation I have had is that people and companies generally don’t get the idea of specialization. They want to do everything for everyone. Again, probably due to small market size or historically this is how it worked here. In US, for example, you normally hire someone to mow the lawn, here people just like to do it themselves.

We try to overcome this by explaining to companies about the whole value chain in a vertical market and that they don’t have to do the whole stack to add value.

We have been successful with partnerships like Microsoft, locally and globally, because of the mature partner ecosystem Microsoft has built. Let’s hope more companies will get this over time.

What do you think Czech corporations and startups should do in the near future to compete on a higher level with larger markets, such as Germany, the UK, and the US?

We have been reasonably successful abroad. To compete globally you have to run a very tight world-class operation. English has to be your corporate language from day one. You have to have diverse and international talent early on.

What has worked for us is to try to scale globally once we build a solid business locally. Every global market is unique and sometimes you may have to tweak your product and communications strategy. It’s also a timing issue, you can’t be too early but you can’t do it too late either.

A lot depends on your funding situation. If you have tens of millions of dollars in funding you can try to build full global operations, but if you are growing organically you are better off finding one deal and then grow around that deal.

“I know a guy for that.”

“We’re going to do content marketing. I know somebody who is gonna do that for us.” It surprises me how often I hear this line from founders in our program. “You’re just gonna get someone to do that?” I say. “Yeah, you know, somebody will do some content. Some blog posts, a newsletter, part time.” “Okay… and what will they be about?” “Oh, you know, about the product and you know, stuff in that area.”

As we often say, it’s much easier to teach an engineer something about marketing, than it is to teach a marketer something about engineering. We’re exposed to marketing, particularly content marketing, pretty much every day. You get email updates from services you’ve signed up for, or you click on links that friends have shared on Facebook. So we naturally assume that we understand the behavioral economics of content marketing pretty well.

And it’s become such second nature to also assume it must be easy- something you can just assign to somebody on a part-time basis. Set it and forget it.

But we also tend to assume that we are immune to its effects, while it’s really aimed at that mass of people out there who we deem “typical,” or “average.” Certainly I don’t shape my habits and thoughts around cues that are generated externally. I can’t be manipulated- that’s something that happens to other people.

On the one hand, our founders deeply understand their own products, and the importance of those products as experiences for their users, but they will also tend to discount the marketing around those products as a factor in that experience. As I’ve said often, marketing is not something to be “handled-” it is half of the product/market fit equation.

I would say that I hear some version of: “we will get someone to handle that marketing stuff.” From about half the startups we work with, at the beginning. I’ve come up with a the best answer I can to this refrain: “Yeah… it will be you.” And by the end of the program, most founders are devoting more energy to the marketing challenges they face, than to the development challenges they thought were more important when they started.

What Marketing Accomplishes

Founders commonly understand that marketing is about communicating the existence and benefits of their products. But that’s sort of like saying that the purpose of a car is to keep four tires in contact with the ground. It is something a car has to do- it is one way of defining a car, but it’s not the real purpose.

Instead, marketing is really about helping people to do things that they will want to do. Now, a person may not *know* that they want your product -because they may not know your product even exists yet- so your marketing has to start there. But it can’t end there. Instead, announcing that your product exists, or as in the worst cases of pointless email marketing, still exists, is just the beginning.

As with a car, whose purpose is to get people where they want to go, the purpose of marketing is to get people to do what they already want to do, or need to do- it is to eliminate reasons and barriers against using your products.

Content Marketing: The Why

As we know, there are a lot of ways that marketing can be used to diminish, eliminate, and circumvent barriers. Not sure if you want to pay? Take a trial. Not sure it’s worth the money? Have a discount. Does it do everything you need? Check the features page and the FAQ. These are the basics, and they help us to erode the gap between the decision to use and commit to a product, and the decision to pay for it. By the time people pay for our product- we want them to want to be paying for it.

And we want them to continue to want to pay for it. It costs 10 times as much to obtain a new customer, as it does to retain an old one. And that’s why, particularly in a B2C SaaS business where customer churn is naturally high, the most important metric you can focus on once you have any real number of paying customers, is how many stay with your products and continue paying for them for any length of time. Keep improving that number, and you’re unlikely to fail.

Many startups start off viewing their marketing as a funnel that leads to, and ends with, a purchase. That’s sometimes a fatal error, particularly if your growth model depends on repeat business. Many startups spend much more time, money, and energy on customer acquisition than they do on retention, even when retention accounts for much more of their revenue. Startups want to grow out, not up. They want to get bigger, but they often resist getting better.

The Who: Different Users Have Different Needs

Consider some numbers for a moment. And I’ll base this on a fictionalized version of a real company i worked with a while back. It was a mobile app and web platform.

The company had about 1M app downloads, and about 80,000 monthly active users. For active users, the product was incredibly sticky, with the average user accessing the app at least 3 times a week. Of the 80,000 monthly actives, about 5,000 were paying for a premium product. Again, the product was incredibly sticky, and had been around for a while, so it had a core user group that was really hooked. so churn for paying users was really low.  

Here’s where the math comes in. At €2 a month for premium, the company would be bringing in about €10,000 a month in revenue for the premium product. However, the churn for the premium product was 20% (which is still really great). This meant that the product needed to attract at least 1000 new paying users a month to keep its revenue at the same level.

But when we looked at the churn for users who were new to the premium product, turnover was much higher- up to 60% for the first three months after the user purchased premium, before it fell off and the product stuck.

So the company was only keeping about 40% of its incoming premium users for more than 3 months, at which point the >3 month churn rate was about the same for all users.

But the company was treating their marketing as if it existed in two tranches: paying and non-paying users. They were assuming that they would have to recruit at least 1000 new paying users a month in order to stand completely still. Which is a lot when you only have 80,000 active users to work with.

And if you consider that only 8% of app downloads led to active use, and only 1 in 16 of those active users were willing to pay for the product so far, then you would have to gain 200,000 new app downloads a month in order to add 1000 paying users. To break even, you’d need to pay just 0.02 Euro per new app download. Maybe that’s possible, but it’s definitely not easy.

The key then, would be to focus on retention of paying customers, and on selling the premium product to more of its active users, earlier in the process.

When I talked to the company about their content marketing efforts, they said they were emailing all their active users with the same messaging- a newsletter with a few blog posts about their subject area. They were also developing a trial lifecycle email campaign for new trial users, but once someone bought the product, they were in the “already purchased” camp. There was no specific effort to engage new paying users when their churn was at the highest levels.

Worse yet, there was no specific communication targeting any paying users. Everything was focused on active users.

This is a mistake that a lot of startups make, and it’s not even always a mistake. We’re trained to view our monthly active users as our measure of success, and according to that metric, this company was doing really well with retention. They had clearly achieved some degree of fit with the free product, because a lot of people were using it a lot of the time. But the premium product wasn’t taking off in the same way.

They hadn’t achieved market fit with the paid product. So their answer to that problem was to develop the premium product with more features (another issue we can talk about in another post) But just because you’re having trouble selling a premium product, doesn’t necessarily mean the product is not worth paying for.

Sometimes, users who are paying for it just don’t know what they’re getting. And users who aren’t paying for it may not know what they’re missing. That’s an experience many of us have had. Who hasn’t paid for a premium product for a month or two, and been unable to name the benefits? Maybe they existed, maybe not, but we certainly don’t want to pay for something we can’t see as better than something free.

Working backward from Your Goals

This can all get very granular and very hard to deal with as a small startup. Once we start treating our marketing efforts as these very multifaceted and complex operations, it can be difficult to understand why we’re expending all the effort. And if we don’t keep an eye on the results, then it can be quite demoralizing to write great content and send it off into the ether, not knowing whether it does you any good or not.

So we encourage startups to work backwards from their marketing goals. By looking at their data and identifying a specific retention or engagement failure, they can devise ways of directly targeting that issue, and potentially fixing it. In the case above, I would encourage the startup to focus on developing engaging content for the users who have bought the product within the last 3 months. At the same time, they should put all their new users into a trial of the premium product, supported by the same content- spelling out the benefits of the premium product.

Motivational infographics, blog posts, and data about how the app is helping those users to achieve something are a good start. Specific walkthroughs and highlights of premium features can also work.

They might also launch a post-purchase retention lifecycle, including personal notes from the customer care or community team, asking for feedback and gathering survey data on the product. This helps users to feel they’re being cared for and listened to, and it can improve retention, even if you don’t act on the data you gather from them.

Whatever they do, the important point is to work backwards from a specific goal. Not “improve retention,” but “increase 3 month retention by 50%.” If you can target and execute on a goal like that, while continuing to do everything you’ve already done to gain new users, then you could potentially increase your overall retention by a huge amount, while actually growing your user base.

The How: Developing Positive Associations and Behaviors

This is all very easy to say. How is it done?

I’ve talked quite a bit in the past about how Startups should think about their marketing team. A community manager who is empowered to affect the development of the product is key. But that person also has to become an expert on the users. They have to have access to data on what the users do with the product, and with that data, they need to find ways to engage with those users to give them small, positive experiences, and reinforce the behaviors that lead them to use the app.

What does this look like? Suppose that this company had a community manager. That person should look carefully at user data, and find specific insights about specific types of users. Do certain users always use the app in the morning? Or at night? If a large group of users opens the app in the morning, then why do they do that? Is it because the app prepares them for their day?

FitBit uses location awareness to tell when you’re on a trip, and offers you content that is useful in that situation.

Try a blog post including a few tips on how else these users can make their mornings more productive. Perhaps motivational morning messages inside the app would get a good reaction. If they do, and you see the users reacting to them, then follow that pattern, and make it a positive experience that the users can expect from the product on a consistent basis. If, over a few months, that technique has been working, you can consider how else you might apply it across your whole user base.

And you don’t always have to follow user behavior in order to produce a small win with users. Perhaps there is a feature that users are not engaging with much. Try a newsletter that highlights a few of those features and their benefits, and see if the users start using them more.

In addition, use your knowledge of your users to generate data that may be interesting to them. If your app saves people time for example, employ that data in a post about how much time you’ve been saving your premium users, and exactly how that has been working. Whatever your app does that is a benefit to its users, highlight that in real terms.

Form is Function

We tend to get locked into one type of content marketing over time. For me, it’s always blog posts, because that’s what I like to do. I enjoy writing, and I enjoy the structure. But even StartupYard does other forms of content marketing, despite the fact that we don’t have an app to promote or a service that applies to more than a handful of people.

Content marketing can take many, many forms. Aside from the “traditional” types of content like blogs, email, videos, infographics, and other static content, you can also generate user specific content that can serve to reinforce positive behaviors and feelings with each user. We often call this “gamification,” even when it really isn’t that. It’s just content that reinforces positive behaviors.

For example, I used FitBit for over a year, until my FitBit recently stopped working. FitBit, if you don’t know, is a fitness tracker that sits on your wrist, and lets you know how many steps you’ve taken throughout the day. Mine stopped working, but I plan to replace it, and keep using the service.

Here’s why: every day, usually in the evening, I would take a look at my stats, and find that more often than not, I had not completed my “step goal” for the day, which was around 15,000 steps. So almost every night, after we put our son to bed, I would go out for a walk to “make up” my steps.

Over the course of a week, I would look at my stats to see whether I was meeting my weekly goals. At the basic level, this is a form of content marketing. It is employing user data in order to reinforce certain behaviors. It doesn’t scream: “USE ME!” Instead, it gently reminds the user of the best way to use the product.

Internal, and External Content Marketing

As the above shows, content marketing is not defined by click-bait articles on mashable that get users to download something new and cool. You can use content marketing to recruit new users, but you should also be using it to engage with the users you already have.

Again, StartupYard practices both kinds of content marketing- with the dual goals of engaging with new people like potential mentors, investors, or applicants to our accelerator program, but also engaging with and improving our relationship with our existing companies, mentors, and investors.

Recently, for example, we emailed all of our mentors, asking them to fill out a short survey. It took about 5 minutes. The response rate was nearly 50%. While many of the mentors were probably not consciously aware of it, the survey served two simultaneous goals. It allowed us to get insights into what our mentors think about us, what they want from us, and what they want to get out of mentoring. But it also subtly reinforced certain behaviors that we want our mentors to have.

For example, we asked mentors whether they had “personally connected” a startup to at least one of their contacts. 100% of the responding group had done so. But when we asked the mentors whether they had “personally connected” one of our startups to an investor, only 50% of them had done so.

The question is aimed at gathering valuable information for us, but the survey was also anonymous. We can’t judge specific mentors, or their worth, based on what connections they have provided for our startups. However, that this question was asked in exactly the same way as the previous question, reinforced to our mentors that providing connections to investors is something StartupYard hopes our mentors will be able to do.

A mentor who answered “no,” may then think about whether they have been trying as hard as they can when it comes to mentoring. Perhaps they mentioned an investor, but did not make a personal connection for the startup. Perhaps they talked to the investor, but didn’t then follow up with the startup to see whether the connection had really been made. In sum, the mentor may act differently the next time, and may try a little harder.

The survey was full of these types of questions- it reminded mentors of events that StartupYard holds for mentors, and checked to see if they had attended our demo day. It asked our mentors to rate the progress of our startups, but it combined those sorts of questions with subtle cues about how active the mentors themselves have been. A mentor that rates our startups’ progress as middling, but who indicates that they haven’t been to any of our events or the demo day, may turn the question on themselves: “have I done enough here? Do I have a right to this opinion?”

This is not manipulation. As I’ve said often, and as I always stress with our startups: you cannot make people do things they wouldn’t normally do. But you can help people to see how valuable they are, how included they are, and how they can make a difference for themselves or for others. You can show people what positive results look like, and content marketing, whatever its form, has to follow that function above all others: it has to make people aware that life is better with you, than without you.

This weekend’s #Praguehacks event, which involved about 80 local and visiting hackers, and focused on open city data provided by the Prague Institute for Planning and Development (IPR), has announced a winner!

The Winner

“Naše školy,” which you can read more about at PragueHacks.cz, will make previously fragmented data concerning public schools in Prague and the surrounding region, allowing users to compare schools across many different criteria. Their project involved developing an API and a showcase app that could be applied to any set of school data.

Their platform could be seen as a kind of “trip advisor” for schools, and could be applied to any city, provided that the data is available.

The team, led by Marek Lisý, and including Šimon Rozsíval, Martin Egrt, Honza Kašpárek, Lenka Moutelíková, Tomáš Fejfar, and Michal Zwinger, demonstrated how open data applications can be used to push public institutions to release data that is in the public interest.

At the same time, in only two days, the team built a persuasive prototype, showing the advantages of having the data available, and giving a clear idea of how it can be used.

The winning team of #PragueHacks announced! Prague school data are to be reloaded soon. pic.twitter.com/Jbg6hGYEPG

— Michal Tošovský (@MTosovsky) June 14, 2015

The Weekend

#praguehacks starts!!! pic.twitter.com/u71sLszAvh

— Petr Biskup (@BiskupPetr) June 12, 2015

Hackers arrived starting Friday evening, and were greated by StartupYard Managing Director Cedric Maloux. Anyone with an idea for the hackathon was invited to pitch that idea, which about 20 teams did. Later, hackers in attendance matched themselves with the ideas they found interesting, breaking up into groups of between 2 and 7 people each.

Then the hacking began, and continued straight through to Sunday evening, with a number of hackers even choosing to sleep the night in Node5, StartupYard’s home workspace, and the host of the hackathon. 3 meals a day, plus snacks, were provided, along with free Redbull and other energy drinks to keep everyone going.

Commercial and Non-Profit

While many of the ideas from early in the hackathon mutated and changed through the course of the weekend, often based on what was feasible in a short period of time, and what data was available, there was a steady mix of for-profit, and non-profit ideas represented.

Ideas often centered around visualizations of public information. For example, Parking in Prague, City Activity, and Signalizator, all try to give an overview of actual conditions in the city, helping visitors and residents to more easily navigate and get things done.

Teams like Storyteller Prague went even further, offering guided tours of the city, using offline content. Other groups like Walkz, LuckyMe, OpenFlats and wHeReToLiv.prg, attempted to give an overview of general conditions in the city, allowing people to see a mix of private and public information related to housing, crime, transportation, and other aspects of city life.

http://t.co/E0OeQjKx3Y #praguehacks a live overview of the Prague tram network! pic.twitter.com/EPAy36DL8W

— StartupYard (@startupyard) June 14, 2015

Sbirej.to, also known as “pick it up,” is an application that allows anyone in the city to flag and report areas in which dog owners have not cleaned up after their pets, and allow pet owners to report a lack of dog bags and bins. While such platforms do already exist, the team built Sbirej.to as a proof of concept for a more frictionless and fun UI, which would encourage typically disengaged city residents to become more active in reporting issues of basic city maintainence.

Was #PragueHacks a Success?

The object of this hackathon was twofold. First, we wanted to engage local citizen hackers and developers with the problems of modern city living, and inspire them to come up with new solutions to issues that any city’s residents might face on a daily basis.

On that score, we can count this event as a sound success: the teams came up with innovative and promising ideas about engaging citizen interest, making data more available to people, and improving the daily lives of city residents and visitors both.

Second, the object of the hackathon was to put pressure on public institutions, in Prague and elsewhere, to make public data more accessible, more comprehensive, and of higher quality.

Time will tell whether this event has been a success on that score, but we think it will be. Groups like NeverRun, which is pictured above, helped to highlight the fact that information people want, such as the actual locations of trams and busses on the transport network at any given time, needs to be made available by the city- as, they pointed out, it is available in other cities like Brno.

The hackathon winners, too, built their school evaluation app and API as a proof of what high quality data can provide to city residents. This should push more cities and municipalities to make more and better data available for these purposes. Once city residents and officials see the potential uses of the data, they should also understand the importance of making it public and highly visible.

Many Thanks

We have many individuals and groups to thank for the success of this weekend’s hackathon. Among them are Fond Otakara Motejla, which did much of the work to organize the event. We also thank the city of Prague and IPR Praha, for making the data available to our citizen hackers.

In addition, the French Embassy and British Embassy, Credo Ventures, the ReSite conference, IBM and Microsoft, along with Vodafone Foundation, lent their invaluable support, for which we are very greatful.

We would especially like to thank the mentors who volunteered a great deal of their time and energy to making this event a success, and last but not least to the hackers, without whom none of our efforts would have mattered. Thanks to all who came and shared a common goal with us this weekend!

Following last week’s hugely successful Demo Day for StartupYard 2015’s 6 startups, we are excited to announce that early-bird applications are now open for our 2016 accelerator round.

Early Birds

While the full application will be available starting in July, startups can demonstrate their interest, and start a dialogue with StartupYard today, by filling in this short form. This will keep you in the loop for when full applications open, and give StartupYard a chance to get familiar with your startup.

Ceed Tech

As was the case in 2015, StartupYard has partnered with Ceed Tech,  a consortium of 5 Startup Accelerators in the Central European region, including Startup Wise Guys in Estonia, Digital Factory in Hungary, Open Coffee Club in Lithuania, and The Spot in Slovakia.

These 5 accelerators will again share a common pool of applications, allowing startups to designate their first and second choice accelerators in the group. This increases a startup’s chances of finding a fit with one of the accelerators, and getting funded.

Funding

Startups accepted to StartupYard will receive €30,000 in seed funding in the form of a grant from the European Commission, in exchange for a 10% equity stake in their company. In addition, StartupYard will be able to provide follow-on financing of up to €250,000 for selected startups who show good future potential during and following the program.

That follow-on financing is in the form of a grant, and is given without an equity swap. If you’re curious about the terms we offer, we encourage you to get in touch with us directly. We have also covered this subject in some length on this blog.

Selection

As in the past, applications will go through several rounds of selection. Initial screening verifies that a startup is within the general scope of business, and geographic area (Europe and other selected countries), that StartupYard recruits from, and that it is a “real startup,” with a potentially global product.

Following this screening, our selection panel rates the applications of the remaining startups, and invites about 20-30 of the highest rated applicants to a series of online and in-person interviews. Reaching this stage is already an accomplishment that startups should be proud of.

During these final rounds, StartupYard evaluates not only the ideas and plans of the startups, but also the potential impact StartupYard might have on a particular startup. Above all, we look for talented, motivated, and ambitious founders with potential leadership skills, who get us excited about their ideas and plans.

What We Look For

As stated, we look primarily for motivated, engaged, and ambitious founder teams who are enthusiastic about taking their startups to the next level. Generally, we look favorably upon startups that have launched products and have users or customers already- even if they plan to significantly alter their original ideas in the near future.

We generally do not consider “lone wolf” or single founder companies, without a strong, committed 2nd in command. While your company founders need not be absolute equals (this is rarely the case), our experience shows that you need at least two strongly engaged, well fitted partners to survive and thrive in the accelerator. We do sometimes consider single founders if they are willing to find a co-founder.

While we look for companies with products already on the market, we have and will continue to also consider companies that have not launched products. In our last accelerator round, for example, fully 1/3 of our startups had not launched a minimum viable product at the start of the program.

If you are a passionate person, a lifelong learner, naturally curious, and committed to making your dreams a reality, we want to hear from you.