Great teams at Startup Bootcamp Investor Day

Attended Startup Bootcamp Investor Day on Thursday. Great group of startups overall. Good pitches. Loved the venue.

Some general comments after seeing eleven kick-ass pitches in less than three hours:

Pitch structure
Everyone – without a single exception – used the same build-up: Overview in 30 seconds, define the problem, describe solution, demo, describe market, describe business model, try to prove traction, present team and say how much you are raising.

A good structure – but I think that having one or two deviate from that formula would have been good. Maybe some of the more rock’n’roll teams like ONEloudr or Balcony TV.

Everyone had only one team member present. Everyone used the same psychology trick of stating their fundraising success / traction as a fact (”we are rasing X / we will achieve Y users in the next Z months” as opposed to ”we are looking to raise X / we expect to achieve Y users in Z the next months”). A bit cheeky when you see eleven people in a row using it.

The mentors were another thing that I think could have been better. During Investor Day that is. I am certain they were invaluable during the three months. On Investor Day, most of the mentors did a high-level description of the businesses. But hey - the teams were doing that 30 seconds later, so why waste your time on that.

They could have talked about the stuff that the teams themselves couldn't say. Like how this particular team worked so hard that they did morning scrum every day at 8am and night scrum every night at 10pm. Or how the CEO has a unique insight into their particular market that makes everyone want to work with him/her. Or how the lead developer chose to work on this startup instead of accepting that offer to go and work for Google in Silicon Valley. Things that investors are looking for in teams when they consider investing.

Their asks
I don’t think that companies like Balcony TV, TrialBee, Briefix or Nippo need to raise a whole lot of cash to break even. But every single team came out with a fairly small ask to the investors. Even the ones that by nature are swinging for the fences like Archify or Eyeproof.

That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Both of those two should – in my opinion – raise >5m euro.

Those two had the potential to beef up their apperance. And especially Archify whose founder has an exit under his belt should either bankroll the next 12 months himself or with the current angel investor – or make a big and bold ask. You are looking to change an industry, so don’t waste your time raising petty cash.

My verdicts
So – I talked to Alex Farcet over a beer the other night and I asked him which teams he thought to have high likelihood of succeeding. Obviously he didn’t want to say. But he told me to see for myself so we could compare notes. Maybe he was just making conversation and being evasive. But I like to think that other people value my opinion, so I took as an encouragement.

I thought: screw it – I’ll do it publically, so everyone can ridicule me later on, when I’m 0 for 11 in my predictions.

To keep it simple (and to not spend two weeks writing this) I’ll do it in a Twitter-friendly format.

Disclaimer: I greatly respect all of these startups. I am in awe of the effort that they have put into their ideas over the last three months. In no way do I mean to disrespect them, their abilities, their intellect or anything else. However, stats suggest that only two or three of them will be around in 18 months. And maybe – maybe – one of them will make it big.

Who the f... am I to think I should be judging these hard-working people? I'm no one.

So take it for what it is - a fun read. These are my best guesses, but the comments section is there for you to argue against my views. I haven't researched each startup and I don't know a lot about many of the industries they're in.

Note: likelihood of success does not mean raising a seed round (which I think that 60-80% of them will) but actually succeeding in building a huge business.

Archify – swinging for the fences means binary outcome. Will change search or go down in flames. Strong team but mission impossible. Likelihood of success = 3

BalconyTV – high-engagement platform but no barriers-to-entry for comp. Dependent on local representatives’ networks. Likelihood of success = 5

Briefix – solving a problem that others have already fixed. Also, don’t address the real issues in customer adoption for B2B tech. Likelihood of success = 1

Groupstream – cute but a FNAC. Facebook could build this in an afternoon and loks 99% like 10,000 other apps out there already. Likelihood of success = 1

Supermama – awesome. Addressing an underserved market. Business model is proven, so can copy 90% from Facebook etc.. Likelihood of success = 9

Nippo – solving an important collaboration issue but in my view betting on one feature. Quick exit to GumTree? Likelihood of success = 3

Trialbee – real problem, huge market, simple business model. Can they overcome archaic mindset of pharma? Likelihood of success = 8

ONEloudr – niche within music industry. Have done their homework on IP and copyright and carved out a good niche. Likelihood of success = 7

egoArchive – nice app but a FNAC. No business model. Google will offer this for free soon. Likelihood of success = 1

Eyeproof – if hardware works they’re off to the races. Huge industry that’s booming. Desperately need a VP of sales. Likelihood of success = 9

VideoAvatars – ad format that’s hard to use well. Never rely on media agencies for distribution. Likelihood of success = 2

PlayerDuel – are relying on players who are losing duels to pay to lose more. Works for casinos but not so sure. Likelihood of success = 4

That’s it. Once again let me emphasise that I have the outmost respect for the teams. It's been blood, sweat and tears for the last three months. And they have made impressive accomplishments. The above is nothing but my Monday-morning-quarterbacking. So if you are one of these teams, please prove me wrong. And I'll buy the drinks next time I see you (even though, in that scenario you don't need me to buy you drinks...)

And if it makes you fell better, use the comments section to write the reasons why Admazely will never succeed. Odds are stacked against us - like any other startup. So there's a good statistical chance that you'll end up being right.

What variables are in your market equation?

I have been talking to a few people in the past days about unIQad. It has been great to get more people’s thoughts on what we’re building. Getting feedback from potential customers, from partners and from people who make a living investing in growth companies. It all adds to my understanding of myself, of our company and of our product.

One thing in particular that struck me and made me want to write a brief post was a conversation I had with a partner of a venture fund last week. How we have made the same fundamental analysis but have arrived at very different results. Because the variables we put into the equation were slightly different.

This VC has other investments in online advertising, so they have a pretty good feeling for the space. They had discussed unIQad at their partner meeting and he had some concerns that he wanted to share with me. Basically, he said, they were afraid that we were late to the party. That the market was already saturated and that incumbents were going to be very hard to unsettle. That it had become a game of scale and it would require too many resources to take market share.

If you look at online display advertising as the market it is today, I suppose that I would find it difficult to disagree with their analysis. Take a quick look at the LUMA Scape below, which I have snatched from here. It’s a hugely complex landscape constantly evolving. It’s insanely competitive.

So why did I disagree with them? Well, simply because we have put different variables into my equation that they did into theirs.

We see our customers differently. We see our market differently. We see our competitors differently. Maybe it’s a naïve and immature way of closing our eyes to the obvious failure we’re walking into. But maybe it’s that conventional wisdom is the wrong lens through which to view unIQad.

Studies from Econsultancy and Forrester Research show that around 3% of online retailers are leveraging the benefits of retargeting while 73% say that it’s a priority for them to start doing so. That doesn’t sound like a saturated market to me.

If we were competing for the same Top 1000 global advertisers that the rest of the LUMA Scape is hunting, then I’d agree. It’s cut-throath. But what if you look at the retailers that are outside the Top 1000 bracket? There are endless amounts of them. The people who don’t use Responsys or ExactTarget for their email nesletters but use MailChimp or Constant Contact. The people who don’t use ATG as their commerce platfor but use Magento.

So – from our perspective, we’re not so much in the display advertising market. We’re in the “get-more-customers-market”. And we have decided that the way we compete in this market is to help medium-sized webshops punch above their weight when it comes to bringing back visitors that didn’t convert in their initial visit.

Close to zero of the vendors in the LUMA Scape think about those companies. And if you analyse the market with the LUMA Scape as your reference, you’re going to end up with a conclusion like the one that the formerly mentioned VC arrived at.

unIQad has an ambition to expand the number of online retailers that do display advertising. To leverage the fact that most retailers honestly don’t care about the nitty-gritty of fine-tuning their display campaigns – they just want more customers! At the moment they don’t use retargeting to get more customers, because getting started with retargeting is complex, time-consuming and expensive.

That’s the pain we’re trying to make go away.

Sometimes it’s the subtle differences in your perception of the variables in the equation that lead you to vastly different results.