Developing Content Your B2C Users Actually Want

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Central Europe Accelerator

To the Next Beginning: StartupYard in Numbers

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This month, we say a heartfelt goodbye to the six startups we’ve gotten to know and love over the past 3+ months. Every year, we have to start all over. New teams, new ideas, new challenges. We have to fall in love all over again. It’s not going to be easy.

This post is going to be partly about the past, and partly about the future.  Where have we been as an accelerator, and a team, and where are we going next? What is our next beginning? As we so often preach to our startups, we’re going to apply some numerical discipline here, and talk in numbers.

5, 6, 36

This has been StartupYard’s 5th batch of startups since our founding in 2011. In addition, we are now a team of 6: comprised of Managing Director Cedric Maloux, Executive in Residence Philip Staehelin, Office Manager Helena Nehasilova, Legal Manager Nikola Rafaj, our intern Ian Abildskou, and myself.

Cedric and I joined StartupYard’s management team in 2013, and have done two cohorts together. Philip and Helena joined us this year, and Nikola has been involved with StartupYard since the beginning. Ian will be leaving us this week. He’s been great, and if you’re looking for a junior graphic designer, I suggest you hire him.

36, 13, 4, 10, 26, 68.6%

All told, we’ve accelerated 35 companies. 14 of those companies have raised either angel or seed round financing (so far), including 4 which have been acquired by other companies, and 11 are no longer with us (though their founders are still alive and well). That leaves 25 still operating, in various stages of animation. That represents a 68.6% “success rate.” We’ll talk more about that number later.

So how are we doing? As VentureBeat has noted, that can be difficult to assess. We could (and we sometimes do) take credit for all of the financing that our startups have gained since they’ve left the accelerator. In addition, we could take credit for the acquisitions of StartupYard companies that together represent over $20 Million in market value. We could also take some credit for the at least 150 jobs that our startups have created.

Smaller, Smarter?

Those numbers might seem small if we were to compare ourselves to some other accelerators, such as SeedCamp, Techstars, or Y-Combinator, the latter of which has 37 startups alone valued at over $40 Million each. But that wouldn’t be the whole picture either. Y-combinator has accelerated over 840 companies in the past decade- a rate of 10 times more per year than StartupYard (and more than most other accelerators). And they’ve been around 6 years longer, in a much richer market. Of those companies, while the successful ones represent some $30 Billion in value, 75% of that value is represented by their two biggest successes: Airbnb and Dropbox.

What exactly defines “success” when it comes to an accelerator’s portfolio company is murky. This list, for example, shows that out of 840 Y-C companies, just under 100 are “dead,” however, the vast majority are “operating;” many on the original investment they received from Y-C. Since internet companies can “operate” by keeping up a website for years, while the core team may move on to other projects, it’s not easy to nail down a number for the companies that are effectually shuttered.

So exact figures and failure rates for Y-C, given its size and the softness of the numbers, is difficult. A recent episode of the Startup Podcast placed Y-C’s projected failure rate at over 90%, but that also accounts for the likelihood of current companies eventually failing. That would mean that less than 1 out of 10 of Y-C’s companies would either exit, or turn a reliable profit in the future. But that’s not being very generous- we shouldn’t count failures before they happen. I would estimate that Y-C’s “failure rate” is probably similar to our own.

To measure success by the only fair indicator in StartupLand, which is to say: success is the absence of failure, then we are also doing well, with a 68.6% success rate.

36, 840, 40, 6%

But here I’ve been comparing us with Y-Combinator, when it isn’t a fair comparison, either for Y-Combinator, or for us. I asked Cedric this week, what he thought he would do if StartupYard could have access to the level of funding that Y-C enjoys.

“Well, I would love to invest in 80 startups a year… but there have to be 80 startups I would invest in.” Just as Y-C has ridden the waves of growth in the startup ecosystem in California for over 10 years, and just as Y-C in many ways helped create that wave, we are on a different wave, and we have to help create it for ourselves.

Part of the frustration, but also a positive challenge, of working in the shadow of places like London, Berlin, or the Bay Area, is convincing the brilliant, innovative, and energetic minds in the Czech Republic and across central Europe, that we too can play this game. We too can grow, year on year, and offer more.

Our team consists of native Czechs, and of expats who have been living here for a long time (a combined 40 years), and we understand the region, and the culture, very well. For two decades, Central Europe and the Czech Republic have battled an inferiority complex and a brain drain that fixates local media, local politics, and local investors on what is happening in other places. The Czech economy is dependent upon its skilled workers (few countries boast more qualified IT workers and engineers per capita), but also on the larger economies that surround us.

But that ignores the totally unique accomplishments of the Czechs in their own backyard. We are home to the only search engine outside of Asia that beats Google in its own country- Seznam.cz. We are also home to two of the world’s leading software security companies, AVG and Avast, and we are a major hub for DHL, the world’s leading logistics operation.

Due to sensible fiscal policies, a business friendly tax structure, and a conservative debt culture, the Czech economy was one of a very few to expand during the most recent economic crisis- growing around 6% from 2008 to 2011.

Prague, the Capital, also leads the world in various indicators of quality of life. We are in the top 10 ranked countries with the fastest growing internet speed, and Prague has one of the densest and most used urban transit systems in the world, and a quality of life index score higher than South Korea, Poland or Italy, and just below France.

Europe comes to the Czech Republic for its top-shelf engineering talent, its low prices, and its productive and no-nonsense work culture. Just as the communist world relied on “golden Czech hands,” to innovate in transportation, heavy machinery, medicine, and material sciences, so too does the west now look to us for an even broader range of talents- a dependence that keeps Czech unemployment persistently low, rivaling the US and the UK, and beating Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Poland, France, and Canada, among many others.

In short, we do some things pretty well, and we get a lot done. And it’s absurd to assume that we can’t be among the best in the world when it comes to mobile, e-commerce, security, and B2C online businesses.

We recently published this slideshare about the Czech tech scene, and we encourage you to take a look.

60, 240, 500

When Cedric and I joined the accelerator, it was on the eve of an open call for the 4th batch of startups. We received 60 applications- most (though not all) from the Czech Republic. This year, thanks in part to the accelerator consortium CEED Tech, which we run in cooperation with established partners in other CEE countries, we upped that number to 240. We were also able to secure grants from the EC that allowed us to invest €30,000 in each of our startups, up from €10,000 in previous years.

We received more applications this year from Slovakia alone, than we had from all countries combined in 2013.

And our mentors and investors have noticed the difference. Excitement surrounding our current batch of startups, while still early, is stronger than any we’ve seen before.

This year, we have an ambitious goal. We are looking to collect 500 applications to the accelerator, from which we will again pick only 7 to 10 of the absolute best applicants.

While other accelerators like Y-C, or Techstars, who have had the opportunity to take advantage of a groundswell of new interest in startups and startup investments, and expand both geographically and in sheer size of their programs, we are in an earlier phase of evolution at Startupyard.

There haven’t been the number of massive successes in the Czech tech ecosystem that would be needed to drive a huge movement toward startup culture. So we continue to focus on the quality of the startups we accelerate, and on seeking the drivers of the wave that will raise all ships in Central Europe.

1,000, 50 Million, 1 Billion

There are 6 startups leaving our program this month. I believe that every one of them represents a smart investment, and a potentially very profitable and rapidly growing company. But I’ll be uncharacteristically conservative and biased. I believe that the 6 startups finishing our program this week can employ 1,000 people within 5 years. They can serve 50 Million loyal users or customers, and together, they can be worth $1 Billion or more.

The defining moment for most accelerators, particularly in the eyes of this industry, is when they generate their first “unicorn.” Their first $1 Billion company. Airbnb, for example, now a household name, put Y-Combinator on the map, and they have added 2 more 10 figure companies since then.

Techstars, which has focused more on geographical expansion of its program, based on B2B successes like SendGrid, and Softlayer (both Startupyard partners), has a track record not dissimilar to our own, with a 76% “success rate.” SendGrid continues to raise money, and Softlayer sold to IBM in 2013 in a $2 Billion deal.

Time will tell whether we’ve already met our unicorn. But I don’t think that’s the right metric at all. Given $100,000 to invest in each of 800+ startups, in an industry and region where investors are dying to throw money at tech companies, I think a decently intelligent person could pick at least a winner or two. And Y-Combinator and TechStars are run by more than decently intelligent people.

But it’s a strange metric for success that would make me feel embarrassed to only to aspire to having these 6 companies, together, be worth $1 Billion. That isn’t dreaming small, when you think about it. We’ve been trained in StartupLand to view success in a strange way. We talk about “making the world a better place,” enough to make that an ironic punchline. But the story of late has persistently been about large purchase prices, and big valuations.

Instead, I think we should measure success by a metric more commonly employed back here on Planet Earth. Are we doing better than we did last year? Is our region responding to that success by taking more creative risks, working harder, and making our investment decisions ever more difficult and interesting? Does our work add value to our industry, to our region, and to the economy we participate in on a daily basis? I think the answer in our numbers so far is clear: they show that we are on the right path.

Taking these as our KPIs, we should be more than able to make a lot of money. But even better, we should be able to make money doing the right thing. We should be able to make more money, and have a bigger impact, every single year.

Defining Success For An Accelerator

Having met members of dozens of accelerators from across Europe, I’ve come to what I think is a more complete picture of our place in the industry in the past few years. Often when we discuss startups and the tech industry, we talk in terms that are only actually relevant to a relatively small number of stakeholders. We talk about valuations- the hypothetical selling prices of private companies that are too big, too expensive, and too deeply rooted, to be actually bought or sold to anyone but a few behemoth parent companies- which means they will not realize that value until they go public.

Increasingly as well, super-unicorns, worth $10 Billion or more, are privately funded, and show no signs of interest in IPOs. That means that we also talk increasingly in the terms of return on investment for a small pool of investors. We know that investors in Uber think that they can make some percentage of $40 Billion on their investments in the company, but what does that mean to the public? Do we only benefit from these successes as customers, experiencing a new layer of convenience in our daily lives? Or do we profit more deeply?

While we don’t focus on it, surely most of those very successful companies in Y-C’s club of “minor hits,” with “only” $40 Million+ valuations have also benefited the smaller investors who have bought into them. Somewhere down the line, an investment fund linked to someone very ordinary, non-super-rich person’s retirement has been doing well thanks to these successes.

Hopefully they have made people more economically free, more financially secure, and ultimately more happy and productive people. Moreover, at least a few of those who have profited immensely will now turn around and reinvest those earnings into “making the world a better place.”

Today > Yesterday

That StartupYard’s successes in this area are more modest than an Uber or an Airbnb isn’t troubling to me. We have DameJidlo, Brand Embassy, Gjirafa, and most recently, TrendLucid, Shoptsie, TeskaLabs, BudgetBakers, Myia, and Testomato. Already, thousands of people around the world benefit from the work that these companies do, in real and measurable ways. Perhaps we should be focusing on those kinds of metrics as well.

Part of what brought me to StartupYard was the credo that our investors and team shared: something Cedric pitched me on when he first invited me to work with StartupYard as a part time blogger, and later as a member of the team. If our country and region do well, then so do we.

We can define success in many ways beyond money- and if we do that, then we can be proud of the money we do make. So we have focused much of our attention on more than short term gains in the companies we’ve taken on. We have tried to take the long view.

In his landmark book The Tipping Point, pop economist Malcolm Gladwell famously compared corporate America to professional sports: the unicorns are the Michael Jordans, and the investors are increasingly the agents, managers, publicists, investment counselors, and other hangers-on of the world that benefit from a massive empire of wealth, based on relatively fleeting value- the idea that someone can perform at an incredibly high level, for a while, and generate enough interest to make money for everyone involved.

But accelerators are fundamentally different. That’s something I’ve come to see in the past few years. Startup, the Gimlet Media podcast, in its 2nd season profile of a company attending Y-Combinator, called accelerators “a school for startups.”

At first hearing, I mentally rejected this notion. We aren’t a school. We don’t give marks, and we don’t “teach” a curriculum that equips all of our startups to do the same things. I spent some time as a teacher, and one of the chief frustrations I experienced was that I changed all the time, but the needs and problems of my students rarely did.

Education is and can be essentially standardized, whereas we are and have to be custom fit for each of our companies, who live in a world that changes too fast for the lessons of yesterday to be written down in a textbook.

But as I thought more deeply about it, I struck on a slightly different realization. We are like a school, but a school that owns a real stake in the success of our “students.” We are financially motivated not only to see our members succeed and do well, but for them to grow the diversity and strength of our country’s, and our region’s, economy; providing us with more future “students” to choose from, themselves with more diverse choices about what they want to work on, and how they want to achieve their successes.

Our Next Beginning

So what is our plan for growth? We think quality has to stay our priority. Only when it is time to grow- when the demand for more space and more accelerator programs makes itself impossible to ignore; when we simply can’t turn away enough startups, or enough investors from this region, that will be the day we truly know we’ve already succeeded.

#PragueHacks Attracts 80 Hackers, Winner Announced

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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 Weekend

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.

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!

#PragueHacks, the Pre-event, in Tweets and Pics

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What is #Praguehacks?

Earlier this year, we announced #Praguehacks, “Sharing the City,” a weekend hackathon that is taking place this coming weekend at Node5, StartupYard’s own shared workspace. The hackathon will be based on open-city data, provided by the city of Prague, and using technologies provided by our partners, including IBM, and Microsoft.

There are a raft of partners for this event, including the French Embassy in Prague, Credo Ventures, the US Embassy in Prague, the British Embassy in Prague, The Vodafone Foundation, GisMentors, and TakePlace.

The hackathon will run from this Friday evening, up to Sunday night, and will aim to generate applications, visualizations, and useful tools based on data provided by partners, including the City of Prague and the Prague Institute of Planning and Development, (IPR Praha), to make life in the city easier, safer, more ecological, and more interesting. Teams will receive access to hundreds of thousands of Czech crowns worth of services from IBM and Microsoft as part of the hackathon.

Winning teams will be eligible for fast-track selection to the StartupYard program, or to a non-profit acceleration program run by Vodafone Foundation.

129 Applications

While we had initially hoped for at least 30 teams to apply, we were soon swamped with nearly 130 applications. Clearly, this is an idea whose time has come in Prague. In the end, space limitations meant that we could accept “only” 85 teams, nearly 3 times the number originally planned.

Lead Organizer Michaela Rybickova of Fond Otakara Motejla, on the excitement leading up to the hackathon:

There have been plenty of volunteers:

The Pre-Event

Our managing director Cedric Maloux hosted a “pre-event,” Monday at Node5, to welcome the selected teams and introduce the sponsors, data, and technology to be used during the hackathon.

Speakers included: Jiří Čtyroký, director of the Spatial Information Section for IPR,  Ondřej Profant, representative of the City of Prague and Municipal District of Prague 7, Josef Gattermayer, entrepreneur and  IT consultant at Municipal District of Prague 8, Jan Cibulka, data journalist at Samizdat, and Josef Šlerka, chief of New Media Studies at Charles University, and the head of R&D at Socialbakers.

Here is some of that event in tweets and pics:

The event was highly anticipated:

 

Michal Tošovský, open data advocacy officer for Fond Otakara Motejla, talked about problems cities can solve with open data. He shared tips for city apps based on conversations with municipal representatives. 

FixMyStreet, a service presented by Lepsi Mesto (Better City), an app that allows citizens to flag and report issues in urban infrastructure and maintenance, served as inspiration for many of the attendees on what is possible with enough data.

Some friendly competition between Microsoft and IBM was encouraged by the participants:

SocialBakers’ Josef Slerka revealed a huge source of data that will be welcome at the hackathon:

One of the centerpieces of the hackathon, city data, was presented by the Prague Institute of Planning and Development.

Not all the attendees’ data dreams were fulfilled however:

Derek Eder, lead organizer of Chicago’s “Civic Hacknights” and a co-author of ClearStreets presented his work remotely. ClearStreets tracks Chicago’s snow plows in real time- giving city residents a real sense of city services at work. 

Not everybody could be there:

But a live stream of the whole weekend will be available at the #Praguehacks website:

StartupYard Demo Day 2015, in Tweets and Pics

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The Big Day

For the StartupYard team, this day has been 8 long months in the making. For StartupYard’s teams, in most cases, it’s been years of hard work.

Last night, before an audience of nearly 200 local investors, professionals, startupers, and members of the media, StartupYard’s 6 startups premiered to rave reviews.

Of course, our mentors were never without their opinions.


After 3 months of gruelling work with mentors, advisors and workshop runners, and 2 weeks of sheer panic and excitement as they formulated and rehearsed their pitches, our 6 startups exceeded our expectations for this Demo Day in every way.

The Startups

Here are a few shots of the teams warming up before the event:

The Community

Last night, we were reminded once again of what makes Demo Day so important.  Over 40 of our active mentors were present, and many commented on the incredible progress the startups had made in just 3 months. Mergim Cahani, of Gjirafa (a 2014 member of Startupyard), was in attendance with some exciting news of his own. We hope to share that with you soon on this blog.

The Event

Not only is Demo Day a chance for a great startup with a worthwhile idea to get noticed, and funded, both locally and internationally, but it is also the moment when our startups become “real.” The moment when they transform from something that few people have heard of our thought about, to something on the market and in the air, interesting, dangerous, even possibly inevitable.

Following opening remarks from our Director Cedric Maloux, Michael Jackson, of Mangrove Capital Partners, the VC fund, delivered an amazing keynote address, which aligned perfectly with our own mission:

 

Then it was time for our 6 startups to take the stage. They blew us away.

The Pitches

It’s a thrill to share that experience with our Startups, and to take a moment to see how far they’ve all come from those first meetings way back in January, when they pitched us the barest seeds of amazing ideas.

The conversation and discussion reached well into the night, with many of the guests staying to talk with startups until the small hours.

What’s Next

StartupYard can take a nap today. But it won’t last long. In addition to hosting Prague’s biggest ever open-data hackathon in just 2 weeks, we’ll be opening applications for StartupYard 2016, kicking off in January of next year, within the next week.

 

Meet the StartupYard 2015 Startups: Testomato, a watch dog for your website.

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When Testomato joined our program, it was with the understanding that they would be hiring a CEO to lead their team. Over the past 3 months, as we’ve gotten to know the Testomato team, and their new CEO Marcel Valo, we’ve become even more excited about the potential of this idea, and confident in their ability to bring it to a larger audience.

Testomato actively monitors and tests websites for errors and other issues that may interfere with normal operation, letting the site owner know almost instantly when an issue occurs. Simple tests can be set up and run continuously, ensuring that mission critical sites and services never go down unexpectedly. Testomato aims to be the leading watchdog for websites- a must-have tool for any revenue generating site.

Hi guys, tell us a bit about Testomato. What does the service do? Who is it for?

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Marcel Valo, Ceo of Testomato

Marcel: In short, it’s a monitoring service for websites. It tells you when your website has a problem that may interrupt service or access for your visitors. It does a lot more than just monitor websites of course, but this is the core functionality: making sure your website is up and running properly at all times.

Testomato is for people like myself. In my corporate career, I have been responsible for marketing communications and for company websites, and I always had lots of problems to solve with those websites. Google analytics codes missing, time-outs, meta-tags just disappearing— there’s always something potentially wrong. And it took a lot of time to even notice a problem, much less correct it. Now with Testomato, I would be able to set up a simple automatic test, and know about any problem that arises within five minutes. That’s incredibly valuable when you have a mission critical website to maintain.

Where did the idea for Testomato first come from? How did the company get started?

Jan "Honza" Prachar, Co-Founder of Testomato

Jan “Honza” Prachar, Co-Founder of Testomato

Honza: It was originally an idea from one of the founders- Michal Illich [StartupYard investor and founder of Wikidi]. We were struggling with setting up Selenium to test a few projects. We wanted something that would quickly and easily verify that a site, and all its components, were online and working.

It took a lot of time to configure and maintain, and many false alerts were reported. The time invested was really not worth the problems we experienced. But we still needed this kind of monitoring, so we came up with a simple solution for monitoring and supervising our other projects.

Marcel: My business partner Michal Illich wanted a very easy to use, but also complex and in-depth tool for monitoring his company projects. Testomato was the result of that. While it ran as a sort of side project for Illich and Wikidi for about a year, it became moderately popular among a group of web developers. While a lot of people had signed up and were using the service, Testomato still struggled to find a paying audience or a way to monetize properly. I was brought on board quite recently- only after Testomato joined StartupYard, and together we’ve been working on shifting our business model towards e-commerce, helping online retailers to make sure they aren’t losing business due to site outages and other problems.

Is this a competitive space already? What are some alternatives to using Testomato for website monitoring and testing?

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Marcel: There are a number of alternatives on the market. But they’re all either too simple, making them useless for monitoring a high value site, or too complicated to use. Some of the existing solutons allow you to monitor and control whatever you want, but they’re so time consuming, that nobody buy an IT specialist or a developer would bother with them. We are developing a tool that many different stakeholders can use effectively, from marketing, to IT, to QA departments, to ensure that they aren’t missing major site failures.

You’ve made some significant changes to your business model since joining StartupYard, can you tell us more about your current direction?

The Testomato Team

Roman Ozana, Co-Founder of Testomato

 

Roman:  One of the realizations we’ve made is that business owners like to use Testomato as a quick and simple tool keep track of the work of their developers. There are so many things to potentially keep track of on a site, that it can be impossible to do it manually.

Marcel: Well, we’ve made a lot of changes, as I’ve mentioned. A lot of changes still lie ahead.

Our target group has shifted from developers, to people with online businesses, and e-commerce sites. Testomato could be used by a marketing head to track campaigns, for example, or by an IT department to alert them to failures in a high-value site, like an e-shop with hundreds of transactions an hour. When your business depends on your website being reliable, 24/7, and processing hundreds of transactions, a simple error can cost you thousands of euros.

A site like that can’t afford a lot of unscheduled downtime- nor can any high-traffic site or page that generates revenue. We had to shift our pricing accordingly, because this new target group has different needs and expectations. We find that this group needs more comprehensive testing on just a few sites, which means much more work on our end, coupled with a very straightforward and intuitive user interface.

What are some of the functionalities and services you plan to offer in the near future?

Marcel: Right now we are talking about locations. Because Testomato monitors, checks and tests your website from the outside, we can also play the role of a test user. How does a site work from a particular location? Is it fast enough? Is it properly localized or not? Do all the plugins work in all locations?

testomato-test

We currently have two regions – Europe and the USA, and as a customer you cannot pick-up one, we still do it automatically.  But this is something we plan to change. Many more sites and services now have to be location aware, and they have to function differently according to how users access them. Many site owners aren’t aware of how their services are functioning in different regions, and if they need to do more localization work. So that’s a key functionality we’d like to expand on.

Honza: Also we want to make design changes to help bigger customers configure their checks and projects more quickly. There is room for a lot of improvement, and we have a lot of feedback to work with. Making Testomato work well with a big website is a new challenge.

Tell us a bit about the Testomato team.

Marcel: We are a pretty happy team. We’re pretty quiet, compared to some of the other teams at StartupYard, but we’re happy too. Not many people right now – 2 developers, Roman and Honza, Monika, our product lead, and our lovely copywriter and social media specialist Elle. We have Irena, the link-builder, and me, the new CEO.

I should be leading the whole team, but because I’ve been with Testomato for just a few weeks, sometimes they are leading me. Thank you guys!

Honza: Marcel joined us a month ago and he is doing really great. He has already made several big decisions, so we could start implementing them and move fast. Many impasses were eliminated thanks to his experience.

I would say, and feedback from StartupYard and the mentors also confirmed this, that our team was not really ready to make the big decisions on our own. As developers, we just weren’t used to that kind of thinking, and we needed some help with direction. Since Marcel joined us, he has pushed us to move forward, and that’s really helped.

How do you plan to grow in the next year? What markets will you focus on in the near-term? 

Marcel: We want to be  a world-wide service, with strong added value for online businesses. For example, e-shops, banks or insurance companies could deploy Testomato on an ongoing basis, and save money consistently by spotting site failures as they occur.

But we’re also interested in web services and media agencies, because we can help them with many issues. If a web agency or media company knows about an issue before the client, that’s a good thing! Growth in total users might be slow for the near term, as we’re changing our focus, but we expect to grow our paying user-base substantially within the next year, and focusing on adding value for that group will help us get there.

Long term, what do you see as Testomato’s vision for the next 5 years?

Honza: We want to be even more active in searching for critical issues on a website. This means that Testomato won’t just test and monitor according to user requests, but also notify the user about possible security issues, problems with site ranking, even things like design and speed of loading for different locations and devices. There are a lot of points of failure for big websites, and they’re too many for any one person to monitor consistently. We want Testomato to be a much smarter and more engaging tool as well. Site testing can be boring, so it’s important that users see the value they’re being given.

Roman: Our ultimate goal is let you know about harmful issues on your website before customers even notice. We want to be a website watchdog, something like a security guard or a babysitter for your website.

Marcel: Testomato should start to be a synonym for monitoring and testing websites. It should be a “must-have,” like health insurance for the web. Something everybody knows about, and anybody who cares about their website will naturally use. That is my vision for the next 5 years.

 

Give Testomato a Try Today: Test Your Site in Seconds

Follow Testomato on Twitter at @Testomatocom

Meet the 2015 Startups: BudgetBakers, Stress Free Mobile Finance

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BudgetBakers came to StartupYard with a unique problem. With a popular and highly rated app on the GooglePlay store, in many ways, they’d already won the “Game of Startups.” But like many startups, the growth hadn’t translated to profitability yet, and the popularity of their app, then called Wallet, hadn’t translated to the number of paying users they’d need to keep growing as a business.

Honza and Martin at StartupYard

BudgetBakers Co-Founders Honza and Martin at StartupYard

Beautifully designed and expertly constructed, the software immediately caught our attention. The team too, co-founders Jan Muller Martin Jiricka, were eager to take the next steps. Here’s Jan “Honza” Muller talking a bit about the BudgetBakers journey, before and during StartupYard:


Q: Hi Honza, tell us about BudgetBakers. Why did you choose to tackle the problem of personal finance and budgeting?

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A: Well, it all started 5 years ago. I just wanted to learn how to develop for Android- at that time it was a really new platform.

Also, I wanted to make an application for my personal use, to track my finances. I called that original application Wallet. Through the years, the application has become more and more popular, and more complex. It’s coming soon to iOS and a web app, and is already on android (the Android app is still called Wallet for now).

As BudgetBakers has grown, I’ve changed as well. Since I founded BudgetBakers,  I’ve started a family myself and become a dad. I’ve come to really understand the need for smart daily money management. When I quit my job late last year to work on BudgetBakers full time, that only reinforced my need for solid money management. That’s quite a motivator to get BudgetBakers right!

BudgetBakers-Fam

Honza with his partner and daughter.

As an entrepreneur working for myself, knowing how much I have to spend, and how much I should spend on everything my family needs is really important- for me and for my partner. We need a smart way to make smart decisions as a family.

People are afraid to think about their budgets and the money they spend every day. But we find that once they get going, that sense of control and security is really addictive. It certainly is for me!

When we’re growing our families and our careers, we can come to let money concerns dominate our thinking. But we don’t think rationally or effectively about our money- we just worry about it uselessly and inefficiently. I’ve come to see what we do as a way of saving people from that trap.

So that’s how BudgetBakers grew into what it is today- more than an expense tracker, it’s your personal finance assistant. It thinks about every little penny, so you don’t have to.

Q: What makes BudgetBakers different from competitors like YouNeedABudget or Spendee? Why should people use BudgetBakers?

A: First of all, BudgetBakers is not just a mobile application.

We are constructing a fully integrated platform where people can learn how to get control of their personal finances, and gain peace of mind for today, and the future.

More than that, we want to go further than just helping people to track their individual expenses and manage their budgets.

Screenshot 2015-05-15 11.46.37

Managing money is an important family priority as well, and one that people have a hard time with, especially when they’re just starting their careers, and thinking about saving for a house, maybe a car, or that vacation over the summer.

You get your paycheck one day, and the next day it seems like everything disappeared. Where did it go? That can cause a lot of stress.

A lot of families aren’t on the same page when it comes to their finances- they don’t know how much they can reasonable expect to spend every month, much less how much to save for the long term.

So we’re not only perfecting personal finance via a fully integrated web-based, and mobile platform, but we’re also building in tools to encourage couples and families to begin cooperating to manage their money more effectively.

I don’t think you need to have a lot of money to be happy, but I do know that you need to have enough. That’s where BudgetBakers comes in- our platform helps people to understand what enough looks like. Are you sure you can afford that trip to the movies on Saturday? With BudgetBakers, you will be sure.

Q: A big hurdle for BudgetBakers so far has been gaining traction with users. What are the unique challenges you face in getting people to commit to your approach and platform?

A: We have 4.4 star rating on GooglePay, and we get about 1000 new users a day. We use the UserVoice platform to keep in touch with our users, and we’ve also recently hired a new team member to help with community management, blogging, and marketing.

That said, we’ve found from the beginning that our users need a lot of convincing to really start using BudgetBakers to the fullest. It seems like a big commitment, and it seems more complicated than it is. Part of the learning curve for us, especially at StartupYard, was to see how many opportunities we truly had to convince users to stick with the program, and we weren’t converting as many as we could have.

With the help of some awesome mentors and workshops, like Bogo Shopov on GrowthHacking, and Fiodor Tonti on UX/UI, we’ve had our eyes really opened to the opportunities we’ve been missing, and we’ve seen that we have a lot more room to grow and understand our users even more. That’s very exciting.

Right now, we are working on expanding our efforts in content marketing, and community building, to find new ways that BudgetBakers can reach out to its community and offer them tips, advice, and above all encouragement to make the right financial and spending decisions. There are a lot of people out there who need a little encouragement, and we want to be the ones to provide that.

Q: What do you think are the major blockers for most people when it comes to getting their finances under control? How can BudgetBakers fix that?

As I said, I think one of the biggest obstacles we have when it comes to getting people to take control of their finances is fear. People are afraid that once they open up their finances and take a look, they’ll be shocked at what they see. Sometimes they really are!
But we find that as people use BudgetBakers, they get comfortable, and they start to really enjoy the control they have over their spending. The stress in little spending decisions can start to go away, because they have a very good sense of what they should be doing with their money.

Maybe there’s a little extra in the restaurant budget this month. Great! Order a pizza, or take your girlfriend/boyfriend to a nice dinner somewhere. That’s a wonderful feeling, to know you aren’t cheating yourself when you do that. Control of your finances can make you feel virtuous and proud, and it makes you want to do better, and set better goals for yourself in the future, to hang on to that good feeling.

People have to “rewire” a little bit to make this transition, and that isn’t easy. They have to stop being so emotional about their money, and be a little more analytical- stop worrying and start thinking. BudgetBakers helps with that switch, but it can still take a big effort.

Q: Ease of use is also a major concern for any budgeting software. How are you planning to make BudgetBakers more intuitive and less work intensive?

A: We have a lot of plans on how to make our users more comfortable, and make the daily habit of budgeting and expense control simpler and more rewarding.

Screenshot 2015-05-15 11.46.12

Today we have a smart watch application which allows users to enter transactions even without taking their phones from their pockets. Also we have automatic bank statement parsing which works with a few Czech banks so far. We are working towards expanding that ability.

In the future, it’s important that we offer our users ways to integrate directly with their banks, making expense tracking practically automatic.

It’s a balance. With BudgetBakers, the value is in the peace of mind that it gives you about your finances- it reminds you to control your spending, and it keeps you honest about what you can afford, and what the best decisions for you really are. You need to engage with your budget on a daily basis, but you don’t want that to be too much work or too much stress.

There are ways that we would like to make things easier, and entering, sorting, and tracking transaction information automatically will play a big part in that.

Q: What’s your near-term strategy for growing BudgetBakers’ user-base, and how do you plan to keep new users as they join the platform?

A: Budgetbakers has already been downloaded over 800,000 times on the GooglePlay store. When we release our iOS version very soon, along with a substantial rebuild of the BudgetBakers platform, we look forward to adding a whole new group of users.

A lot of users is a great thing to brag about.

But as I said before, one of the things we really want to focus on is making budgeting and financial planning a daily routine for as many of our existing users as we can. We can still do a lot better in that area, and as new users discover the platform, they’ll also benefit from this work. If you do anything for 3 months, it can become a habit, and that 3 month metric is something we’ve been focusing on much more. Can we keep people engaged with their budgeting and financial planning for 3 months? If we can do that, the rewards to our users will extend to potentially their whole lives. We can do a lot of good with some very small, simple changes to the way they engage with BudgetBakers.

For example, a big takeaway from the StartupYard workshops, particularly with Fiodor Tonti and Bogo Shopov [ workshops on UX/UI and growthhacking], was that BudgetBakers needs to utilize the data we collect from our users, and make that part of our overall value proposition. People want to feel a part of a community, and be rewarded for meeting their financial and savings goals. Gamifying the platform and rewarding users with insights and advice is a big part of how we will improve our user retention, and help people to be more financially secure and independent.

Q: You’re based in the Czech Republic. What about the region represents a unique opportunity for BudgetBakers? What challenges does location present for the company?

A: BudgetBakers works anywhere- it works with any currency, and in about 25 languages so far. We have users all over the planet. Of course, because we’re based in Central Europe, this is where we are exploring our first corporate partnerships with banks, telecom providers, and others who can help us add more value for our daily users.

We have a large userbase in the Czech Republic, and that’s partly because of good word of mouth. It’s also because this region doesn’t have access to some of the largest competing platforms, like Mint.com, and because the market here is more fragmented, with more localized apps and platforms, tailored to specific markets.

In addition, banking and financial services are also more fragmented, meaning that building larger partnerships is a slower process than in places like the US. However we count that as an opportunity, to be the first to spread in a way that less ambitious projects haven’t managed to do.

There is no market leader in this category yet, particularly in Europe, so there is a lot of room for growth. Banks and telecoms are desperate for ways to add value for their clients, many of whom are choosing lower-cost, more mobile solutions. We are exploring these types of partnerships that add the value that people are looking for from their financial institutions, but are not yet receiving.

A lot of people (including StartupYard mentors) have challenged us on how “new” and “innovative” BudgetBakers is. There are a lot of expense trackers out there, and budgeting software is as old as spreadsheets. But you have to remember, that the mobile and financial technology that really adds value for end-users is still really new. In the context of business and government, legacy methods are fine, but users today want mobility, interconnectivity, and always-on functionalities. They want their software to work with them, not just for them. So it’s not a new idea, but it is a new way of looking at budgeting for many people.

Q: Tell me about your experience so far at StartupYard. How has BudgetBakers grown during your time here? How have your plans changed?

A:  By entering SY we had to slow down development of the new version of BudgetBakers and start focusing more on management, finances and defining the strategy that will bring us to next level.

At the beginning it was very unusual for me, because i was used to spending my whole day programming. I had to turn towards management, and that was a challenge for me. But now I have to say, it helped me to crystallize my vision in term of growth and success.

I’ve come to realize that our priority has to be our customer experience and our market strategy, instead of just building an ever richer feature set. There’s no use in creating the world’s most amazing software, if nobody is ready to use that software to make a positive impact in their lives. So we’ve had to adjust our attitude towards development, and grow up as a company and a team. That’s been an amazing experience for us, and we’re really glad we decided to do it.

Learn More at www.budgetbakers.com

Follow BudgetBakers On Twitter @BudgetBakers 

On Firing A Startup

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This week, I had to take the difficult but necessary decision to dismiss a StartupYard startup from our program. I did not take this decision lightly, and if anything, it was overdue. What I want to accomplish in talking about this chapter in our blog, is to educate other startups in our community about what it is we do, how our program works, and what we look for when it comes to startups that we accept and work with.

What We Do

We have never dismissed a team from StartupYard before. Perhaps we’ve been lucky. Of course, as we’ve written about on this blog, and as any accelerated company or accelerator team knows, there are always moments of conflict and stress.

In fact, conflict in the constructive sense is really what we are all about. We challenge and push our startups to achieve in areas in which they are not comfortable. Our mentors and workshop leaders challenge the founders in our program to think more globally, to think critically about their decisions, and to grow personally and professionally.

A difficult requirement that we put on our startups is one that we discuss with them from the very beginning. “We own your schedule.” For 3 months, they work on our clock, and they make themselves available to mentors, workshops, advisors, and the StartupYard team during that time. Company founders and sometimes whole teams move into our workspace at Node5 in order to be available all the time.

In order to make this work, we encourage our startups to do a few things they aren’t always comfortable with at first. To delay some meetings, and to slow down or halt progress on non-critical development in their products, in order to give more time to the big picture, and to see things from a higher perspective.

This is not to say that the startups slow down work. Quite the opposite, they typically spend nights and weekends to continue developing, even during the program’s busiest times. There are periods in which our demands on their time are very light, particularly in the middle of the program, but nevertheless, the time commitment is large.

We feel, and experience has shown, that this period allows founders to switch from “builder mode” to “leader mode,” and prepares them to grow their teams, take a step back from their immediate needs, and see their work in a broader context. We have seen this experience deeply transform startups, and we think it works.

When That Doesn’t Work

In this case, early indications of pushback quickly became apparent. This startup, unlike most startups we accept, had majority shareholders who were not the founders. That had not been made clear in our initial meetings, and it proved to be a sticking point.

In addition, it quickly became clear that the founder who had applied and been accepted to our program did not have, as he had represented, a co-founder or near equal partner with whom he could share responsibility.

We don’t take single founders for a good reason. The demands of this program, and simultaneously running a company, are too much for one person to handle. While our founder teams often have a leading partner, they share the workload, and they are each empowered to represent their companies on their own. This allows them to do much more at StartupYard, and it allows them to maintain a better institutional knowledge and memory. Two founders can balance each other. One can become lost in the wilderness.

This founder was simply not present- whether due to the demands of his job, or his partners, or to lack of interest. He appeared only sporadically, and missed a large part of the program, including mentors, workshops, and other meetings. He sometimes sent representatives from his company to some of our program events, however, the purpose of most mentorship and workshops is to engage directly with a company founder.

So, for example, a marketing workshop, or a workshop on PR or UX, or a mentoring session with one of our 60+ active mentors, is meant for a founder, even if the founder also has team members who work in these specific areas. The team members may also benefit, but the founder benefits equally in understanding what it is that members of their team can do, and what measurement of success can be applied to that work.

It was apparent by the end of the first month, that this founder was simply not prepared or not able to engage with the program to the level that we expect and demand.

Bad Faith

StartupYard is ultimately a business, even if we try hard to make sure it’s a highly altruistic one. We depend upon the good faith of our startups, partners, mentors, and investors that we all have the same priorities.

Our priority is to help startups grow, and to help them do good work that is valuable to others, and profitable to themselves, to us, and our investors. We do well when our startups grow in value. Moreover, we feel that the price we ask for the value we provide, much less the money we invest, is not onerous.

As we have written before on this blog,  we are not about giving startups cash. The money is there so that they have time to work with us, and to grow with our help. If a startup’s first concern is the eventual cash value of our stake in their company, then our priorities are not in sync.

In the end, despite a series of promises and deadlines broken, and unending complications that seemed to arise from nowhere, it became clear that this startup, its investors, and its founder had no intention of acting in good faith with the terms they had agreed to upon being accepted to the program.

In addition, the founder also failed to meet every milestone that was set for him in the program, neglecting every deadline for user projections, business and investment plans, and other reporting. We heard only excuses and explanations, but never saw any results.

When a startup enters our program, we are making a statement that we believe in its potential to be an engine for growth, and its team’s ability to execute on a dynamic, exciting vision. Our seal of approval means something, and has been a boon to the many startups that have gained investment, or been acquired following our program.

At the same time, if a startup team or its investors act in bad faith with our arrangement, we have a duty to share that experience with our investors and partners, which we have done in this case. Our ability to provide the value that we do depends on our reputation being linked with companies that act in good faith, and are aligned with our vision.

Our Mistakes

These things happen. I believe that we can learn from this experience.

First of all, I feel that we were too focused on the profit potential this company showed. We saw that they were attractive to investors, and that they had already gained some investment, and this fact blinded us to concerns that were raised even during the selection process. We didn’t examine closely enough whether this company and its founder should be in our program, or would be able to engage with it fully.

So in a sense, we lost sight of our mission in this case, and the result should have been predictable.

In retrospect, it’s obvious now that this founder was unclear about the nature of our program, and was never willing or able to commit to it in a way that we required. He had too many other responsibilities. His company already had too many moving parts to allow him to step back and change direction. Too much money had already been spent. In short, there was no helping him, because he had already been locked into most of his decisions before the program started.

Because we liked (and still like) the product and business idea, we overlooked these issues, and tried to sweep them under the rug. That put us in a poor position, because we were expecting results and engagement that, again in hindsight, were probably not reasonable to expect.

We have seen this sort of thing happen in the past, and thankfully more than one company has decided not to join because of the expectations we have. Not joining an accelerator can be an enlightened decision, if a founder feels that he can’t effectively implement the feedback he or she gets from the program.

Fail in Order to Succeed

So in sum I don’t view this is a dark chapter or a catastrophe. It is a failure, and we are experts at learning from our failures. But it is a failure that will not cost us much, and will benefit us hugely in the future, as we work towards becoming better at identifying the companies and founders that can benefit most from our support.

Lastly, with no ill-will, we wish this company and founder the absolute best, and we look forward to their future success. Growing pains and mistakes are a part of this business, and a necessary part. Our hope is that we all learned something from this.

StartupYard Month 2: The Emotional Journey

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The StartupYard teams have spend 2 months at the accelerator so far, and it’s past time for a look at how they’re all doing. An accelerator round goes by in a big blur. You can hardly believe, when it’s almost over, that you’re talking to the same people who started the journey together just a few months ago. It’s an emotional experience, as well as an intellectual one, and I’m going to talk about that emotional journey.

Frustration

A big and necessary part of the accelerator experience is frustration. Frustration with oneself, with a lack of time, with the difficulty of certain questions, and with the fluidity and uncertainty surrounding so many important decisions. Everything is in a rush, but at the same time, everything depends on someone else’s input, or someone else’s time, be it a team member, a StartupYard team member, a mentor or advisor, or even an investor.

Between daily meetings with up to 5 mentors, meetings with test users, pilot customers, early investors, and the StartupYard team, there isn’t a lot of time to do what the startup teams are used to doing with their days- working on their products and making them better. The life of a startup is highly dependent on influencing other people to make fast decisions, so we all get a little harried from time to time.

I caught myself recently asking the startups to fill in their company information for the Demo Day program (we hope to see you there May 28th!), and writing “get this done ASAP.” One of the startups pluckily responded via the #events Slack Channel. “Everything is ASAP!” He was right, and in truth, I could have waited more than a week to get their feedback. But in the constant push to cut through and grab their attention, I had accustomed myself to demanding that they do everything I ask of them immediately, lest they forget to ever do it at all.

But a certain level of frustration is necessary because at StartupYard, the goal is to interrupt and challenge a startup’s established patterns, and force the teams to face issues they might, left alone, choose to ignore, with possibly fatal results.

We ask big questions, in our mentorship sessions and workshops, and we ask them of teams that don’t always have enough data to answer them. That’s to the good. Because every time a startup founder doesn’t know the answer to a question, they’re reminded, or they can discover, that they have more to learn and more room to improve.

Still, the experience is one of constantly feeling behind: by the time the founders answer our demands for business plans, user projections, financial projections, and marketing plans, we’re on to new and more complex demands.

There’s no slowing down to celebrate small victories- and nothing is ever really finished. That’s a recipe for a certain level of frustration, and the only way to overcome it, eventually, is to do more than they’ve ever done before, in less time than they thought they could.

Ego

 I think it takes a certain kind of person to quit their job, spend their savings, and build something no one has ever built before, with the certain knowledge that it’s brilliant and unique enough to a) get someone else to pay for it via an investment and b) eventually get people to buy that thing, and get potentially dozens or even hundreds of people to devote their working lives to building and maintaining it.

We say that startups have their own unique cultures- well it takes a certain kind of ego to think that they’d be happier and better off starting something like that from scratch. So I have immense respect for the people I work with on a daily basis.

These people couldn’t do what they do if they didn’t have powerful egos. At the same time though, the accelerator process is a repeated assault upon ego, pride, and a person’s sense of themselves and the truth of their personal vision.

Fiodor Tonti, of Numa Paris, destroys egos with his UX/UI workshop

 

Every round, we see startup founders follow a similar emotional path. They come in at the top of the pile- the best handful of startups out of an application round of over 200. They know they’re hot shit, and they have accomplishments to be genuinely proud of.

And then mentoring starts, and they’re almost constantly on the defensive for the next month and a half. Every advisor and mentor has a different opinion, but they all reassure the startups that they *definitely* aren’t ready yet.

Nothing satisfies. Nothing is where it needs to be.

Just when these mentoring sessions start to slow down, and the startups now have a really good sense of how to talk about their companies and the direction they want to go, a new assault begins. In month two, we bring in domain experts in UX/UI, publicity, marketing and growth hacking, and financial planning, and we beat them all back down again.

Last week, Fiodor Tonti, a team member at LeCamping, in Numa Paris, came to Prague to do a private workshop on UX design with our startups. One of the startups came out of a session with him and told Cedric, our MD, “that was devastating.”

Later in the day, we sat with another startup doing live user testing, and a dozen people watched as a test user stated that they were ready to quit trying to use the application, because the onboarding process was just too frustrating.

A few weeks ago, I gave a workshop for our startups on homepage/landing page design. Then I stood up in front of all the startups, and we critiqued each of their homepages together, in some detail. They were hard on each other. One of the teams commented afterward. “I can’t believe how bad our homepage is. I didn’t see how big a problem it could be.”

Software engineers, in their comfort zones, are not used to the creative suffering involved in watching their work being misunderstood, or worse, actually disliked and dismissed. Most work on minute, specific problems, the solutions to which may be complicated, but are at least fairly clear. But startup founders work on big, holistic problems, the solutions to which are far from clear, and so their egos suffer miserably when their noble efforts fail, as they invariably do in some way. 

Fear 

Of course, we’re all afraid of failing. And with startups, failure is perhaps not the most expected result, however, it is definitely the most common. And as Frank Herbert famously wrote in Dune, “fear is the mind-killer.” Fear stops you from acting, even when action is necessary. The thinking goes, I suppose, If I don’t make a decision, I can’t fail. Or at least, if I fail because I don’t act, I will at least know why I failed.

Inaction in the face of fear is a way of staying in control. So it goes with many of our founders, especially in their first month or so. In the face of harsh feedback, or suggestions they don’t agree with, or weren’t expecting, they don’t refuse to listen. They simply refuse to act. They say: “yeah, I’ll think about it,” or they’ll make other excuses: “well I’ll work on that stuff when I’ve finished doing X, Y, and Z.” Of course, X, Y, and Z are never-ending jobs, like working on their backends, or their webpages, or refining their mobile apps, or introducing new features.

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Sometimes founders get stuck in a rut that seems incredibly productive, from their perspective. They’ll work on a new feature, and then realize that the backend needs to be reconfigured, only to discover that they need to develop something else from scratch to make that work, and pretty soon they’re rebuilding their whole product.

One team, until well into the second month of the program, couldn’t be convinced to start developing new features and testing new business models. They had gotten so used to focusing on their existing users, most of whom were not paying for the service, that their answer to anything new was to study their existing userbase.

A fear of losing something they’d gained, even if there wasn’t as much value in it as they had thought, was hard to overcome.

Similarly, another startup this year had great difficulty in deciding to rebrand. Despite a large number of downloads of their app, their paid userbase was small, and their traction was relatively poor.

Rebranding in this case was meant to improve user retention, because it appeared that users coming to the app were not really the right market for it. It got downloads, but it didn’t convert. The idea for this founder of giving up app-store positioning and rebranding away from a name that had so many downloads was very difficult. The fear of letting go of what he had in favor of what he might get was real. But in the end, he made the decision to rebrand.

automation

On another team, the founders repeatedly missed other deadlines during the first month of the program, because they were so focused on finishing and distributing a new release of their product. Meanwhile, we had to work to convince them that the feedback they were getting was as relevant to the new product as to the existing one. Their answer, every time someone brought up a problem with their model or their product, was that it would be fixed in the next release.

Engineers and developers build. That’s what engineers and developers are good at, so that’s what they want to do. And when it comes to user-testing, and talking to investors, the new features and the new plans are always on the horizon- something to be talked about, but not revealed. Constant work is a way of putting off criticisms, and putting off the fear of failure.

And one can always point to future plans and future features which will make the criticisms of today obsolete. We see founders duck these problems all the time, telling mentors that they’ll have everything solved when the new update comes out, or the new marketing manager gets hired. As any accelerator can tell you, this can become a bit like school- founders fall into the same patterns they’ve had since childhood, to avoid doing the things they don’t like doing, or are afraid to fail at.

The old saying “the better is the enemy of the good,” is something I find myself saying very often. Along with another stock phrase our startups become very tired of hearing: “If it’s stupid, and it works, it’s not stupid.”

Not accepting current and past failures just perpetuates them. and focusing on the future means you’ll constantly be catching up to yourself- constantly making teh same mistakes. You can’t learn from something you aren’t willing to face up to, and a big part of the learning curve at StartupYard is in gaining the willingness not to make excuses.

One of our founders came to me this week, having made a realization about his priorities in this regard, and said: “I feel like I have to learn to become a different kind of person now.” In a sense, he does. He has to hang onto the tenacious effort and skill that got him this far, but he also has to accept his limitations, and be ready to fail at new things.

Programmers are possessive of their work and of their ideas. Putting them out in the world, testing them, and seeing what people think about them, means giving up ownership, and giving up control. If I let someone see my work, I don’t own it anymore- I can’t control what they think about it. That can be a terrifying feeling.

Wisdom

So far, I suppose I’ve made the StartupYard experience sound pretty negative. Well there are tough moments for all of us. If it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

The only way to become wise, is to fail. To push past frustration and ego, you have to accept failures and learn from them, rather than dooming yourself to repeat them again and again. Often when I am recruiting applicants for StartupYard, I tell them this: “an accelerator speeds up failure, and gives you a place where failing is acceptable, and profitable.”

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So in that light, as our startups are just beginning to practice their pitches and prepare for their premieres at Demo Day, I like to see the final phase of StartupYard as the most constructive. Having exposed themselves to a great deal of criticism, advice, and probing explorations of their motivations and their abilities to deliver on their claims and their visions, the startup founders are now much wiser than when they started.

Questions and doubts don’t bother them. Criticisms are expected and welcomed. in two short months, they’ve found every way to fail, and are ready to succeed.

Joy

I used to teach high school English. I loved the work, but I mostly hated the job. Schools were underfunded, and overcrowded. Teachers got little respect, and even less pay. Much of the job is demoralizing, and the hours are long, and often boringly repetitive. You experience the same problems over and over, and have little power to effect change.

However, there were moments I had as a teacher which I will remember for the rest of my life. A student, some years after being in one of my classes, ran into me in the street, a fully grown adult, and stopped me to tell me that I had changed his life. That he had decided to study English, and he had gotten involved in local politics, and that my lessons had changed his worldview, and given him hope for his future. I was blown away. That’s something teachers live for, and rarely get.

Well, not exactly.

Well, not exactly.

With startups, it’s much the same. The hours are long, the pay is not good (or non-existent), and founders often have to question whether they’ve been wasting sometimes years of their lives. They’re sometimes seen by their friends and family as dreamers, or unrealistic. They’re constantly being doubted and tested by others. And then something can happen: the first paying customer, the first happy testimonial from a user, the first really killer pitch, and an investment offer. This happens every year with StartupYard, and it’s magic.

The joy of having created something, and having gotten that thrill of seeing it succeed in some way; change someone’s life or even just make their day better, is unparalleled. That’s not a feeling you’re likely to get in your typical day job, because there, our accomplishments are never really our own- we are just doing our part.

As a startup founder, you’re insisting that there’s a new way of doing things: a new model that works more. Seeing that validated, for real, is a unique experience, and one I love to witness.

 

 

Introducing the 2015 Startups: Shoptsie: E-Commerce and Marketing For the Rest of Us

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Mathé Zsolt-László and Ordog Zoltan, Co-Founders of the online store creator Shoptsie, are two entrepreneurs that the StartupYard team truly admires. Coming from a Hungarian community in Romania, Zsolt and Zoltan rode a bus for 24 hours to make it to their first meetings with StartupYard mentors and stakeholders. Then, to our amazement, they got back on the bus and rode 24 hours home as well.

From our first meeting, we’ve noted their incredible dedication to the Shoptsie mission, and their ability, time and again, to deliver on the promises they make to us, and to themselves. We’ve been impressed, and we’re sure you will be too. I caught up with the duo to talk about Shoptsie, and their time so far at StartupYard.

Shoptsie currently has over 6000 products listed in over 1000 online shops, and that number is growing daily.

Shoptsie-logo

Hi guys! You’re unique among all StartupYard startups. You’re not our first team from Romania, but you are our first team of Hungarians. Tell us a bit about yourselves, and where you come from.

Zsolt: Originally I’m from the smallest city in Romania, in Transylvania, called Baile Tusnad and recently moved to Miercurea Ciuc. I crafted websites for more than 15 years and also I worked 8 years as a database engineer for the government. Now with the launch of Shoptsie this will change. As CEO I will concentrate on running the company, managing the day-to-day operations.

Zoltan: I was born in Miercurea Ciuc and I live there too. After I’ve finished the college I worked in a printing house, then I started to create websites as a webdesigner. After 10 years and numerous websites I joined to Zsolt to work on Shoptsie.

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Co-Founders of Shoptsie: Ordog Zoltan, and Mathé Zsolt-László

Tell us about Shoptsie. Who is it for, how does it work?

Zsolt: Shopstie is an intuitive online store creator for creative people who don’t know how to sell online. It’s very easy and simple. With Shoptsie anyone can create an ecommerce website that can be integrated into Facebook Pages and existing websites or blogs without any coding skills.

After a quick registration you can upload your categories and products, choose a beautifully designed template that can be customized to match with your brand look and feel.

Shoptsie also provides a set of marketing applications with which the store owners can reach more customers. We also created a knowledge base blog where the store owners can learn how to create an email campaign and how to advertise on social media.

shoptsie

Q: How is Shoptsie different from other store creators like Shopify, or marketplaces like Etsy?

Zsolt: Out motto is “We grow with you”.

Unlike any other pay-as-you-go services like Shopify, Shoptsie gives beginners a risk-free entry into online sales.

This means that you can list up to 20 products for free in your Shoptsie store, and sell them at no upfront cost. We don’t make money until you do.

Another differentiator is that we can teach you where and how to advertise to start making sales online. Marketplaces like Etsy are good solutions for selling, we don’t say that people should leave them, but there is a big chance that your product will be listed next to your competitors’ products.

Stores on marketplaces look the same, all you can do is maybe upload a banner. With Shoptsie you can have your own professional e-shop which you can personalize to match your personality, your brand’s look and feel.

Also, when you are advertising your marketplace store, you’re also advertising the marketplace at the same time. Why don’t you spend your money on advertising your own brand?

Q: How can your users advertise their goods, and where can they sell them? Do they need their own websites first?

Zoltan: They can use their social network, without having  their own websites. That’s a key area of growth for small scale businesses selling online. Shoptsie offers an app that helps these sellers find Facebook Groups with similar interests, and another app with which they can create a Contest to collect emails. Another – quite popular – app is the Facebook App that let our users embed their stores directly in their own Facebook page.

This is part of what makes our approach unique: we aim to provide all the tools a seller needs to market and sell their goods online, so Shoptsie is more than just a place where people can find your goods – it’s also a tool that gives you comprehensive and easy access to marketing tools, and shows you how to use them.

Have your users been able to make those tools work for them?

Yes, and I have a great recent example. A few weeks ago we noticed a spike in one store’s statistics. We saw a huge number of visitors from one day to another that we did not expect. It turned out that one of our store owners started a really successful contest on Facebook. He grew the number of visitors by 200% using our tools.

He’d decided to promote one of his products by making it free for a whole week. Then he held a raffle for anyone who shared the link and liked his Facebook store page. This simple trick was enough to drive and increase the traffic to his online store, and his sales increased as well.

Because he was offering a free product (charging only for shipping), he was able to make a lot of sales quickly.

People started to order this product, but some of them added another product (that wasn’t free) to the cart. So the next day there was a big list of orders waiting for delivery.

Now that he has contact information for his clients, he can create email campaigns about new products, promotions and other contests.

So, by giving away one product and sharing this on his Facebook page, in two weeks he managed to increase his sales by more than 80% and collected a big number of email addresses.

That approach is also showing results when it comes to our own growth. Because we focus on helping our sellers market their shops and goods, we’ve seen user-generated sales campaigns that have also increased awareness of Shoptsie. The more quality shops and sellers Shoptsie has, the more we are able to reach first-timers who have never really considered selling online before. When they see how easy it is for others to do it, and that our approach is risk-free, they’re much more likely to try it for themselves.

Screenshot 2015-05-05 16.51.04What types of sellers are you focusing on at first, and why?

Zsolt: We are focusing on handcrafters and fashion designers. At the first we wanted to give a solutions for everybody but we saw that most of our customers came from the crafting and fashion industries, so we are focusing on creating the perfect ecommerce solutions for them.

In the future, as we implement support for digital products, we want to reach creative artists, designers and creative writers as well.

Our near-term goal is to attract as many high-quality, active shop owners as we can. We grow with our user base, so their success is our success. We think this is a model in which everyone wins, from the consumer, to the seller, to crafters who have never tried ecommerce before.

Will you focus on specific geographic markets when you launch?

Zoltan: Yes. Because we speak the languages and we know the region, first we want to focus on the Hungarian and Romanian markets. As the number of our clients from UK and South  Africa is also increasing, we want to focus on those markets also.

Q: How has your vision for Shoptsie changed in the past few months? 

Zoltan: Two months ago we had a picture in our minds about how we wanted to develop Shoptsie further, so we thought. But at StartupYard, that picture was slowly replaced by a more concrete reality. The plans we make now feel much more real- much more solid. 

We are grateful that we can be here. This is a big opportunity for us to learn and to meet mentors who can answer our questions, and shorten the feedback cycle, so that we don’t repeat or fail to notice the mistakes we make. 

We were encouraged by mentors like Liva Judic and Wallace Green to continue what we started and keep our users’ needs in mind. 

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges you face in getting people to adopt your solutions?

Zsolt:  It’s an interesting question. We see fear of the unknown as our biggest challenge. People are afraid to start selling online. They are good at what they do, crafting or designing, and they think that creating an e-shop is rocket science.

Well it’s not. Shoptsie provides them with everything they will need to create, promote, and run their online store, easily and without any coding skills.

Shoptsie is now live. Create your own Store Here.