SeedcampCapacity Building for Europe’s Next Generation Technology

Entrepreneursinfo@seedcamp.comtwitter: #seedcamp

#rsohoni

What is Seedcamp?

• Catalyst for generating Europe’s next generation of entrepreneurs

• Focused on providing mentor connections and initial seed capital

• Targeted at EMEA’s brightest and most ambitious young entrepreneurs

• Organization dedicated to helping them take risks to create world-beating businesses

Jan-JunMini

Seedcamps

TEAMS

PROPRIETARY CRM

DATABASE

LUNCHES, DINNERS WITH

MENTORS

DEMOINVESTOR,

BROAD INVESTOR DAYS

TRIP TO VALLEY AND

CONFERENCES

20MENTORS200+

INVESTMENTS7-10

OPEN APPLICATIONS

PROCESS APPLICATIONS300+ SHORTLISTED

MINI SEEDCAMPTEAMS

PROPRIETARY APPLICATIONS AND JUDGING

SYSTEM

ISRAEL, PARIS, LONDON, PRAGUE, BERLIN,

DENMARK, CROATIA STARTUPS160

LOCAL ADVISORS350

Jul-AugOpen

Applications

SeptSeedcamp

Week

Oct-Dec3 Months

Seedcamp sees a huge number of seed deals in Europe

What we’ve seen• Invested in 21 startups – 2 to 4 person teams – in past 2

years

• Mentored 100s of teams/companies

• Received over 1500 applications as part of Seedcamp

• Personally – Have worked closely with 50+ startups in the past 10 years; Started 2 startups – Seedcamp and Innovation Advisors, Worked in Incubator at Softbank

We have invested in 21 companies to date

Kyko

Lean at Seedcamp• Recommended readings: 4 Steps to Epiphany, Startup Lessons Learned, Metrics for

Pirates, etc

• Masterclasses with Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure

• Constant mentoring, lunches, dinners with experts

• Blogging/sharing lessons learned between Seedcampers, sharing resources - http://biztools.pbworks.com/ , http://startuptools.pbworks.com/

• Focus on product build (Demo Day) and progress milestones (Investor Day)

• Get product in hands of users as quickly as possible, Iterate and build based on user feedback

• Start to get users converting to customers, protect the bottom of the funnel

• Work towards scaleable customer development and building the top of the funnel

• Seedcampers end up raising and therefore wasting less capital getting to product, users, customers, Revenue, and Profit

Staying lean, showing results

(Tablefinder, Kublax) 2 dead

LAUNCHED PRODUCT20 of 21

REVENUE PRODUCING

(2 are cash flow positive 1 year after launch of service )

16 of 21

HAVE RAISED FUNDING

Raised follow-on funding within 3 mos after Seedcamp

Week (€250K-€1.5M)

15 of 21

Making the Unknown Known – Customers and Features• Original product around video hosting built on consulting work done for clients• Went through 2 Seedcamps (3 mos) iterating what the business and product

proposition could be – mentor feedback on product need, users vs customers• 3rd Seedcamp, really focused on a video monetization solution b/c that’s where

the greatest opportunity and willingness to pay lay

Analyze, Validate, Execute – Product Build, Sales, Product Build • Approach the large media companies first to understand what their needs

were Not just try to fit a product into the business• Identified decision makers and actual users• Dynamic feedback loop – where these needs were communicated back to dev

team to develop w/in the week after every meeting• Philosophy of continuous deployment - Looped back to potential clients with

links to demos of use cases that were directly relevant and implementable right away

• Time to complete a sale has dropped. Trials launched with the big media players. And several smaller companies signing on more quickly as the product fits their needs and their buying decisions are quicker

Customer Needs Development – Stop Selling, Start Listening• Founder is a patient – Needed this type of solution - US hospital research provided

long list of features that would help patients and clinicians to interact together online

• Started small meetings with doctors and hospital execs in UK to understand what their biggest problems were

• Mapped problems with the long list of features• Used same language to communicate features to solve problems and assessed

which were priorities• Online consultations kept topping the list. This feature had not been prioritized

before by PKB as they had expected sharing of test results being more crucial • Consultations became the minimum viable product to both get customer trust and

Revenue – Patient and doctor trials have yet to begin so we do await to see how the product works

• Another organization had spent 80M pounds to make the same discovery• Beating the skeptics, this is how PKB got into the NHS, hospitals, doctors, and

patients hands

Validated learning about customers (Sales build)• Got one hospital to sign a 3-year contract and used that hospital to bring

them into the NHS network• Took the NHS contract to Bupa and got a paid trial there for a small group of

patients and connecting with NHS hospitals. Spec’d and built some functionality together

• Took that contract to the hospital and got a paid trial for the same group of patients. Spec’d and built some more functionality together

• Took both contracts to another hospital and they want the product plus more features that they’re willing to pay for

Parallel processing product build• These customer meetings are shared with the dev team on calls 3x per week.

Weekly sprints are done • Users are video recorded and shared with the developers• Each stage of development is built to be secure and scaleable for the small

number of requested features being built

Everyday action on implementing the Lean Methodology• Scaled up dev team fast as team has grown from 1 person to 6 quickly• Would have wasted a lot of time and Cash without these strong processes.

Constantly iterating based on listening to users

• Product backlog  - a laundry list of all features for development -> sorted into releases, prioritised, time estimates made. Record kept of what’s ongoing, done (moved off), or planned.  It’s a fluid tool, and it needs to be ‘agile’ to reflect current priorities, so recognise things on there will change.  Each week they go back to the PB and check priorities and move things currently relevant onto the sprint plan

• Sprint plan – plan of action for that ‘sprint’.  Weekly sprints, which is on the extreme side of agile.  The idea is, you plan the sprint at the beginning, size the tasks, and generally don’t add new items during the week.  But we’ve found that about a 70% sprint to 30% ‘other urgent stuff’ ratio is needed, since unknowns (urgent bugs) always happen.  At the end of the sprint ideally you put another version of the product into production

• Daily ‘scrum’ calls. Basically at 9am every day the whole team gets together for just 10 – 15 mins to say a) what you’ve done the day before b) what items from the sprint you plan to do that day and c) any problems that the team needs to be aware about.  Strictly it should be the dev team, but they report back on ‘business’ stuff too since it’s good that everybody is in touch with what everyone’s doing. It’s a small team

• Read 4 Steps To The Ephiphany and chucked out the homebrew and implemented Customer Discovery

• been running Customer Discovery for about 6 months

• results:– too early to tell properly, but

• very happy with super-low costs• implementing customer-driven change/feature pull (eg

kanban)• works well with the continuous deployement/daily build

system developed on the technical side• still have teething problems with customer dev/product spec

(eg heijunka – production smoothing)