Some of you know that InfluAds was one of the 20 startups at SeedCamp Copenhagen. The awesome ITU building hosted an very interesting batch of startups and mentors. Seedcamp recently released the winners (people’s choice). Below are my thoughts about the event.
Lithuania
Interesting to see the batch coming from Lithuania, a country that seems to see some cool grassroot efforts on the web entrepreneurship space. Met ImpressPages, a bunch of cool and passionate geeks working on a very interesting CMS, taking open-source as a model. They got some critics about their open-source based model, but from what I’ve understood not from knowledgeable sources. As Mygdal mentioned, Umbraco is an heck of an example there. They surely need some advisors to help them out on concept and pricing strategy, and even biz members that can boost the business side of the thing but nonetheless…
The Fins
Gotta love the Fins. All these events seem to have cool people contradicting the perception that they are not socially interactive… they do drink.. a lot…
The music
Two very interesting concepts emerged around music: gigswiz.com (Finland) allowing people to choose where their favourite bands will play and tunerights.com (Sweden) allowing people to buy shares on musics/albums.
Interesting ideas where activation, focus on launch markets and market expansion may be key for their success.
Copenhagen and the Vintage year
Someone said that Copenhagen will see a vintage year on the startup community. I freaking agree!!! With some bigger names popping up like Tradeshift and Hoist, and some very interesting grassroot projects blossoming, based on very well defined problems, it does seem so. I said for fun that the CPH teams should defend our colours at the event: claim my.biz, kkloud and NuGames were up to the task. Every single one can be a win. Nop, I’m not including InfluAds for partiality reasons 
Didn’t got it (or the WTF moments of the day… maybe i’m just dumb)
- Queue-it is a Danish company (old school) trying to remove the load and website crashes associated with transaction peaks.. Very web 1.001 IMHO. I could only think that eventbrite and amiando would kill most of their potential target clients. Also, any of the Amazon cloud services would allow a developer to implement scale, avoiding the need for their service. They seem to have some clients though. No idea about their commission structure and types of “transactions” that they support. Companies like CritSend are doing a bit of the same for mass-email sending and i think they could implement the idea in a smarter (web 2.0′ish way) by engaging with AJAX, cloud and seamless UX.
- The WFT moment of the day was when the girl from queue-it (the only one as she correctly pointed out) mentioned that people were not passionate about their concepts… WHAAAT THE FUUUCK???? Some people there came from odd countries, are fighting their asses, are doing their startups on the side because they can’t or going very bootstrapped after their dreams. Sad that some can’t understand that some people (most geeks) don’t always have the Sales bullshit blablabla that others have to sugarcoat their awesome ideas!!! Fuck it, I bet that some of those guys were coding the night before and were even starving for some sleep!!! Comm’on…
- Why did some mentors comment on things they don’t understand. This may seem pretty arrogant as a participant (taking great benefit from their time and experiencing some awesome mentors myself). But when you see mentors giving clearly bad opinions about such important topics like pricing strategy, scalability, the (in)ability of open-source projects as a business model and others, you can’t stop wondering… even other mentors end contradict them often (if nothing else, A/B testing on smart comments works…). I guess you’ll always have to have some that will say the BS lingo words without having THE knowledge to comment but if they were not there, others could have time to dive deep into the issues (Rule #1: don’t talk if you don’t have anything smart to say).
- Why some VC’s don’t know Venturehacks (two at least) is beyond my IQ level. Venturehacks was my ubber cool case where InfluAds is present).
- Why did they fed us so well !!!! Everybody knows that entrepreneurs are fuelled by pizza, specially at early hours of the morning
- Why did they include a service/consulting startup building mobile apps. They were growing x members a week but looking for funding to do something, whatever, that no one understood about. Fine that they are a startup but didn’t seem to fit on the context, and were pitching for something alongside their consulting (or was the consulting itself?) Something was not clear (IMHO).
The bummer
Missed some interesting people. I got to know a few during lunch but catching up and connecting later is a must.
Last but not least: InfluAds
As my own main critic, I have some critics about myself and InfluAds on the event, and may gather some thoughts and write a post about it later. Pitching is not my game(+ a fucked PPT didn’t help). I found myself loosing precious time on the sessions because I had to explain again the details. My bad, gotta be better at it (PERIOD!).
Critics are meant to be constructive and improvement can always exist, if the involved people wanna take it that way.
