Here’s an awesome story from Hike on how they applied to Pitch In Berlin and ended up joining HackFwd. Includes cool photos from the last event! Yes, we bring retro arcades into the Build events, in addition to the coolest startups and the best speakers. Want to join us? Apply to Pitch in Berlin by the end Tuesday, May 15th! Hike applied 6 minutes before the deadline - so you too still have time.
A few weeks later I was waiting for my flight from Cologne to Hamburg to take off, when a last mail check prior to turning off my cell contained an invitation to Berlin. It was the invitation to Pitch In Berlin at HackFwd. From there on out IT WAS ON like Donkey Kong!
Read the whole story on Hike’s blog.
We have a very exciting announcement coming up on Monday regarding our Build events. For that reason, we wanted to extend the deadline of the Pitch in Berlin contest until the end of day Tuesday, May 15th. Given the quality received this far is already high, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Apply to Pitch in Berlin here!
We’re proud to announce Hike as the latest addition to our portfolio! Hike creates awesome apps for Facebook Pages and is based in Cologne, Germany. The startup has been in existence for less than a year but already their apps are used by 65,000 pages around the world. Join us in welcoming Hike by giving them a like on Facebook here (+195,000 people already have).
We’re particularly excited to announce Hike since they were discovered through the most recent Pitch in Berlin contest where they won the jury vote. The current Pitch in Berlin contest is accepting applications until the end of day this friday (May 11th) so make sure you apply soon, or if you know someone else who should apply, let them know. Go to Pitch in Berlin!
You may have noticed HackFwd doesn’t have any mentors. Maybe you think that’s crazy given the fact that most startup incubators, accelerators, etc take great pride in their mentors and highlight them boldly on their websites. In fact, it appears that most startup programs believe the more mentors the better. If I’m a first time entrepreneur it must be reassuring to see 50, 60, 70 or 100+ people (seasoned experts?) who will be giving me advice, right? We don’t buy into this theory at HackFwd.
One of HackFwd’s Referrers, Alex Barrera posted an article about this on The Kernel. It’s a very interesting read about how startups are potentially being “over-mentored” to the point where they live in a state of constant confusion.
Another example is the recent post on the Kicktable blog citing having met with 90 mentors over the course of 10 days. Conclusion: “After 10 days, the main lesson is the following: nobody knows! This is our business, our vision, our users. These are the only things that really matter.”
Assigning mentors and forcing startups to meet with them is not working. It’s overkill and most importantly, it’s incredibly distracting. It’s not about 10 minute mentoring, it’s about building a long-term, lasting, trusted relationship. This is why we don’t have mentors at HackFwd and two years into our operations, we believe it’s working.
We believe that at the core our geeks know what they are doing and we trust their intuition. We have a very strict selection process, after all. But along the way when they have questions and want to sidestep known errors, they can talk through the lessons learned with seasoned experts. That’s why we have quarterly Build events throughout the 12 month HackFwd journey: to speed up our companies and help them to make better products and dream bigger.
Now you say, well what’s the point of a startup program without advice. We do have an amazing community of people involved with HackFwd – our Staff, Board, Referrers, Founders and Alumni. All of these individuals and their networks form one of our key competitive advantages. We can put founders and startups in touch with just about anyone. But, it’s up to those founders and those individuals to see whether forming a relationship makes sense. We provide our startups with descriptions of people in our community and say – who do you want to meet with and what questions will you ask. Startups take the lead in identifying and developing potential relations.
At HackFwd, we believe it’s much wiser to invest in extremely talented geeks and give them the opportunity to ingest all the business knowledge we can provide them through connections and experts at our Build events. We also publish all of these talks which we hope will benefit the entire startup ecosystem on Passion Meets Momentum.
In the end, it’s relationships which matter most. Both the founder/startup and the connection need to click. Both must sense excitement in working together, exchanging ideas and building a success. It’s only through the journey and taking every advantage of interacting with experienced people that you will discover the right people to coach/support/mentor you and your startup on the way to success.
HackFwd is about relationships and fostering the ones that make the most sense.
David Bizer, Talent Geek (@hackfwdtalent)
In this short and punchy talk Sean Seton-Rogers of PROFounders explains how the investment market is responding to today’s lean startups.
PROFounders Capital is based in London and currently has made 17 investments throughout Europe, including Tweetdeck and Made.com. PROFounders has an early stage focus tailored to fit closely with the lean startup way of running a business (also watch Alex Barrera’s summary of lean startups).
Sean explains that the “old school” venture model was a “staircase” – three discontinuous stages of funding from the initial “friends, family and fools” pool, to the Series A/B/C funders, to the late stage private or initial public offering. This model worked fine for companies that needed several stages of investment, and that could demonstrate traction at each stage. But, says Sean, the lean startup has blown that model out of the water.
Products are now built with small, tight teams. Marketing can be achieved through social media platforms and pay per click advertising. Cloud computing, open source software and powerful platforms like Facebook and Twitter now mean that a company can launch with one tenth of the “old school” level of investment.
The arc of a lean startup is very different from the stage-by-stage growth of a traditional startup. It can be relatively cheap to prove initial traction, and revenue starts coming in early, but there is a sudden steep acceleration in the need for investment around the time that the company matures into a large organisation. The old three stage investment model doesn’t work anymore.
But, Sean explains, the investment market is responding, with super angels and micro VCs taking on a lot of the initial traction stage investment. Venture capital needs to adapt to the lean startup model as lean companies make it hard to put large funds to work. Lean startups have the potential to be more volatile than their traditional counterparts, so investors need to be active and engaged with the iteration to market: both as a source of support, and in order to pick up the early warning signs of a potential problem.
Micro VCs and super angels are good news for entrepreneurs, who can dilute their investment to a far lesser degree than with a traditional investor. The appetite for this model on the part of entrepreneurs is evident in the number of micro VCs (or roughly equivalent model) in the marketplace, with HackFwd and PROFounders being two of the investor organisations that are responding to the market situation and demand in Europe.
Sean is driven to see these companies go for the long haul. For the cycle of growth and investment to continue, some of these startups are going to need to become Google-, Microsoft- and Facebook-size successes. “You have to dream big,” he says. “We still want to create amazing companies that help fuel the ecosystem and create world class companies out of Europe.”
Watch the video to find out how micro VCs and Super Angels can fulfil the needs of lean startups, now and in the future. And head to Passion Meets Momentum to watch more videos for startup founders. If you want to come and pitch to HackFwd - and also get to watch the next awesome speakers live - apply to Pitch in Berlin by May 11th!
HackFwd’s BeamApp was initially participating in The Next Web conference in Amsterdam to find developers for a limited number of API keys they are making available, until the event organizers pulled Heiko up on stage to pitch with a ‘wildcard’ - an invitation to the startup contest. Heiko prepared for his pitch all of 30 minutes, and the jury was duly wowed, awarding BeamApp the Most Innovative award of the conference. Here’s TNW on BeamApp:
BeamApp was another wildcard…and it is pretty awesome. It lets you share content seamlessly between devices, by ‘beaming’ content. You see a telephone number on a Web page or in a PDF on your desktop? BeamApp enables you to dial the number instantly from your mobile phone. And it also lets you play music and videos between devices, as well as a whole host of other content. It’s still in private beta, and we’ll be sure to bring you more on this startup shortly.
Here’s the article on all the Startup Rally winners on TNW.
Pitch in Berlin is a pitching contest for European early-stage startups. To apply, submit the details of your startup at PitchInBerlin.com by May 11th. The audience consists of the HackFwd network, top European investors, startup veterans, future stars and members of the press.
We are now running the pitch contest for the fourth time. Here’s TechCrunch on a previous event, and our blog post on the startups participating in Pitch in Berlin v3 - including the winners. For Pitch in Berlin v4 we are again encouraging founders to submit their startups early, and make especially sure that you have a video pitch of your startup, preferably featuring your team.
Apply to Pitch in Berlin and spread the word!
Alex Barrera is a serial entrepreneur whose latest venture, Press 42, is a startup-specific wire service that aims to link startups with journalists and bloggers. In this talk he evangelises the “lean startups” approach, which he believes is the surest path to successfully building products that people care about. Alex is also a HackFwd Referrer.
When Alex takes a straw poll in the room he discovers that many of the entrepreneurs in the audience are aware of the concept of lean startups but not many are sure if they are implementing the approach in their own organisations. In this talk he offers a historical overview of the lean approach, from its origins in Japanese manufacturing through its development in product design circles in the mid 20th century, to its use in customer design today.
Alex points out the three types of waste that the Japanese approach has identified: “muda” – anything that doesn’t add customer value; “muri” – excessive overheads; and “mura” – not doing the right thing at the right time. He explains how many startups are creating “muda” products, and how they can use the process of “kaizen” or “continuous improvement” to break out of the trap of trying to sell things that no-one wants.
The Demming Cycle as presented by Alex
The problem with many startups that Alex has seen is that they stop half way through the improvement cycle. They start with an idea, build and launch a product and then stop. They have no idea whether the product actually works for the customer or not. Alex says that he has encountered far too many startups that lament that they “don’t know why users aren’t using our product,” when they’ve never collected any hard data on their customers.
In this talk, Alex introduces us to the most important questions every startup should ask: “do my customers have a problem that needs solving?” and “is my product solving that problem?” He explains how bucket testing and learning through validation can help you iterate your way to a winning design and he busts some myths about the “minimum viable product.”
To discover how ideas from Japanese car plants in the 1940s can help startups worldwide in the 2010s, watch Alex’s talk. For more videos for startups, head to Passion Meets Momentum.
Carlo Blatz is a serial and parallel entrepreneur, now running Interactive Pioneers, who has been using the effectuation technique as a way of building successful businesses for years. He is also a HackFwd referrer.
“Future is unpredictable, but you can control it nonetheless.”
While effectuation is a relatively new technique that is being taught in some business schools, it actually draws on the kinds of skills that successful entrepreneurs practice intuitively. In this talk, Carlo gets the audience to be more mindful about the way they approach developing their businesses and products, and to apply the lessons of agile software development to the practice of growing the business.
Effectuation is the opposite of the think-plan-act approach that most of us were trained in at school. That sort of planned, causal logic is great for the kinds of highly controlled situations where we can predict the relationship between cause and effect. But for entrepreneurs, that level of prediction is usually an unattainable luxury. Instead, we need to respond flexibly to ever-changing circumstances. The good news is that, contrary to what they teach in business school, you can control what you can’t predict.
Effectuation is a process of evaluating each decision point, no matter how small, by looking at your resources and the possibilities that they afford. Your resources are the things you own, the things you know and the people you know. At every moment you can choose how best to deploy these resources.
Carlo suggests that the most important thing that startups have on their side is speed. Because you can move fast you can fail quickly and cheaply, learn from the data you collect, and aim to be more successful in the next phase. He suggests working on the “acceptable loss” principle – keep investment in each stage small and don’t risk more than you’re prepared to lose.
Each decision opens up new possibilities, new learning and new successes. That means that you need to review your plan to determine what you can do now that you couldn’t do before. The same goes for surprises and mistakes: sometimes you’ll be blown off course by an unexpected event, good or bad. Incorporate what you’ve learned and respond appropriately.
Business management can be as lean as product development if, at every stage, you take an inventory of your assets, develop an idea of what you want to achieve with those assets, and interact with people to test out your ideas.
You can’t predict the future, but Carlo’s talk will explain how you can respond nimbly to whatever it may throw at you.