Raising money on the public market instead of further Venture Capital is a break from the trend in the region, where a lot of the big startups still are privatly held.

But listing their own firm on the stock market does not seem to have brought a lot of sweat to the founder – as they were seen happily helping out at the big #cphftw Town Hall conference, pro-bono and even sponsoring the beer, for the good of the community, just the evening before. Kudos for such a strong commitment to improving how business grow in the region!

This is awesome: Co-founder of IPO’ing @conferize checking people in at Townhall! This is the spirit of the Danish ecosystem @cphftw pic.twitter.com/O7ej6wmxx1

— #CPHFTW (@cphftw) June 22, 2017

You can read more about co-founder Martin Ferro-Thomsens talks with Danish politicians here, and a piece on TechSavvy about their aim to kick-start the Danish stock listings (in Danish).

The post Great start for Conferize’s IPO appeared first on Øresund Startups.

We had an interview with Martin Ferro-Thomsen, who as a veteran entrepreneur from the startup scene has seen it grow during the last decade. Martins current venture, Conferize, is just preparing for their IPO and he has been one of the driving forces in getting the Danish stock markets to improve.

Hi Martin. How was Folkemødet? Do you feel that there is a good representation of the startup scene there?

“Yes, actually I do. I saw both tech founders such as Tommy Aahlers and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and more “analogue” founders such as Gorm from Gorms Pizza, which is on a roll these days. It’s important to remember that politically the difference between tech and non-tech is often overlooked. Obviously, we need both categories represented well.”

What were your intentions with going to Folkemødet?

“We’re trying to democratize venture capital by using the stock market to raise a Series A venture round. It’s already happening in a big way in Sweden with 80 IPOs so far this year alone. Basically anyone can now invest in Conferize, until Wednesday at mid-night, where subscription ends. This form of capital allows startups much more control over when or if to exit, leaving much more time to grow big than the typical VC-scenario.”

Do you feel you made progress in those questions?

“Yes, very much so. I met both with the Prime Minister and the Danish Secretary of Industry, who very both sympathetic to the idea of an attractive stock market for growth startups. I don’t see anyone being directly against the idea, but how could they argue against of creating growth and jobs and enabling regular people to invest early in high growth startups?”

What did the Danish Prime Minister say about the startup scene?

“It’s definitely on his agenda and I see great initiatives such as Iværksætterkommissionen that I expect actual results from. He said they’ve tried a few things for improving the stock market culture and after the summer holiday they hoped to see more tangible result. The Secretary of Industry said something along the same lines. From people in the know, I hear they’re expecting a stock savings account similar to what we see in Sweden.”

If you try to give an overall opinion, what is the political view of startups?

“Positive overall. But there’s still a lack of appreciation on how to improve the conditions for capital at all stages of a startup’s life. Especially the early stages where today it’s basically up to a few angels and one or two VCs to get companies all the way to series A. It’s as if politicians are stuck in an industrial mindset, where they believe companies should be able to make their own money and grow organically from that. But for a high growth startup, capital is the fuel that powers the engine. We’re still behind the curve on this issue.”

What do you think needs to be improved?

“Tax needs to be considered. Syndication for angels needs to be considered. A more attractive stock market for small cap companies needs to be considered. We can’t afford not to.”

What surprised you the most about Folkemødet?

“That democracy actually works. You can just walk over to anyone and state your case and tell your story. I’m however not very optimistic about the political process that potentially follows. It’s as if we’ve lost sight of any form of united vision for our country and it’s just a dog-eat-dog scenario, where everyone fights against each other instead of uniting around a common cause. Keeping our entrepreneurs in Denmark, enabling them to grow and create wealth and jobs should be at the top of every party’s agenda.”

What do information do you take home that you had not expected?

“I learned there are DKK 800 billion in liquid money sitting around in Denmark. We only need a fraction of this to hypercharge the funding situation in Denmark. But it seems we’re a skeptical nation looking for safety instead of embracing risk and change. In Sweden they have several million private investors and discussing investments is almost a national sport. In Denmark, we like to talk about our mortgages instead. This needs to change and all the big funds, such as pension funds, needs to allocate more means to early stage startups, or they won’t have enough big companies to invest in 5-10 years.”

Interested in being part of improving Danish IPO market? Conferize is closing their subscription period June 21th 23.59, read more here.

Image: Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Martin Ferro-Thomsen, Conferize at Folkemødet 2017. 

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Conferize is a Danish software company, founded in 2012, which develop a digital infrastructure for the event industry. According to the press release, event organisers from more than 120 countries have used Conferize,  and currently 300-500 new events are added each month. By listing on First North, Conferize intends to accelerate its growth in user volume by developing and marketing the platform.

The post Conferize aims for an IPO at Nasdaq’s First North appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“When I met Lars Kolind, he was very excited about what we were doing. So, when we got an offer we could not resist,” – says Martin Ferro-Thomsen, Managing Director and the co-founder of Conferize.

Conferize mission is to enable anyone to gather a community or share knowledge. Since its establishing in 2012, Conferize has created digital packages for event makers to organize meetings, seminars and conferences with the participation from 50 to 1,000 people. Their platform enables event organizers to create the future event websites, sell tickets, build social media platforms. Thus, the participants can network before, during and after the conferences. All this, in turn, improves the quality and attendance of the events. In addition, it saves time, money and headaches for both organizers and attendees.

“We are a growing company and the capital is the fuel we need now. We have created something that works and is becoming popular in more than 120 countries,” – says the director Martin Ferro-Thomsen.

With the new investment, a new chairman appears on stage – Allan Søgaard Larsen.

“I see significant commercial value in developing and operating an Event Management System that makes it easy and simple to organize any social event.” – says Allan Søgaard Larsen in his press release.

Another new investor, Lars Kolind, also considers that Conferize has created a solid foundation for its future.

“With the increased capital, the company will strengthen its position and will lay the foundation to become a global company. The investment ensures that the founders will retain their central role in the company. They have a unique insight into the tension between tech and networking. In addition, they possess the necessary execution power to ensure Conferize’s success,” – says Lars Kolind.

The post Lars Kolind and Allan Søgaard Larsen invest millions in Conferize appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“At Conferize, we want to turn tickets leads into people by offering everyone their own social profile and the ability to meet up and share ideas – before, during and after the event.” says Martin Ferro-Thomsen, CEO

It’s a powerful package, used by events in over 100 countries already.

“Conferize Registration is probably the most social and attendee-friendly registration system ever built. It’s also among the most affordable, as we charge zero in commission, even for paid tickets.”

Tickets plus social network

The idea with the new Conferize is to be either a stand alone tickets selling tool, or to work together with the social network tools.

“The social event website from Conferize is the perfect companion for selling tickets. It’s highly flexible to fit the particular needs of creative event makers. We provide a bunch of tools to easily organize and socialize any event, such as our schedule, sponsors and speakers modules.”

The new Conferize in a nutshell

• Launched a new product suite to help events go online: Event website, Ticket sales and Social community – all in one place.
• For event organizers it saves time and money by solving core needs in one solution. It’s also free, with no ticket commission or subscription costs needed.
• For event attendees it removes the pain of having to sign up multiple times and eases planning, networking and attendance significantly.
• Works globally: For events in any country supported by Paypal or Stripe, and for ticket buyers anywhere in the world.
• Unlimited tickets and multiple ticket types. In addition to regular free or paid tickets, it’s possible to set up hidden tickets and even donation tickets, where attendees pay what they want.
• Events can change the number of available tickets at any time, or activate a waiting list.
• Start and end time for the ticket sales can be set on each ticket, making planning easier.
• For more professional usage, they also offer options to add local taxes and issue invoices automatically with each ticket sale.

“We believe people should be able to find and meet each other and and share ideas – before, during and after the event. We also offer easy email newsletters for organizers to reach their attendees, speakers and followers. The community is offered free of charge with Website and Registration.”

You can read more about it here.

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“We see an exciting opportunity, for both Conferize and investors, in financing our growth via the stock market. A venture company like ours will usually only IPO after the majority of the value increase has happened, but we see many advantages in opening up to the stock market earlier – not least for new investors.” says CEO Martin Ferro-Thomsen.

A social network for the billion dollar event market

Conferize, started 5 years ago, has pioneered how events create a stronger and more dynamic impact online, by offering a social community for event organizers and attendees. This means that people can network and share knowledge – both before, during and after the event. This in turn extends the lifecycle of the event and helps them reach larger audiences than before.

“Attendees and networking is at the heart of most great events, and this is where Conferize adds unique value,” says Martin Ferro-Thomsen.

With additional tools for creating, promoting and selling events, Conferize will soon offer their social technology with a powerful turnkey solution for creating succesful events.

The world’s biggest social network for events

This unique technology, which integrates with all the major social networks using the Fonds App, has made Conferize the biggest social network for professional events. They are powering over 25 000 events around the world. The world’s leading event brand, TEDx, is already a global partner and Forbes considers Conferize “the best networking app for professional events”, mentioned above Twitter and LinkedIn. Thousands of event organizers, primarily from the US, are already using the platform, and the capital from the IPO will rapidly help grow the customer base and further develop the product.

“Events are all about meeting new people and learning something new. We enhance that with our integrated and social solution, that anyone soon can use to solve all their digital needs in one cloud. It’s a huge advantage and time saver for both organizers and attendees,” says Martin Ferro-Thomsen.

Freemium business modell

Conferize targets the long tail of events with a freemium model for small and medium event organizers. They can freely use Conferize for multiple purposes, which already attracts a large number of event organizers from all over the world, without any conventional marketing.

“Succesful internet companies, such as Google, LinkedIn and Issuu all offers something unique with a low-cost model. Conferize is based on the same principles and it’s our ambition to become the biggest event platform in the world by offering our pioneering services at the most world’s affordable prices, starting at free,” says Martin Ferro-Thomsen.

First North – the right place to IPO

Conferize is aiming for an IPO later this year with assistance from Kapital Partner. Nasdaq first North Denmark has been identified as the best platform for a successful IPO and continued growth as a public company.

“Many Danish companies have experienced great difficulties IPO’ing outside of Denmark, where the interest from a Danish company can be hard to establish and maintain. Due to an unprecedented interest in tech and growth cases from Danish investors, we consider the Danish market the best and most natural place for Conferize to IPO and secure the needed capital to grow.” says Jesper Ilsøe, Partner of Kapital Partner.

The post The world’s biggest social network for conferences to IPO on Nasdaq First North appeared first on Øresund Startups.

The funding is as grants, without any equity stake. The aim of the Market Development Fund is to help startups and enterprises bring new products to the market faster and making it easier for public-sector institutions to obtain innovative solutions. The funding goes to both biotech, cleantech and ICT innovations.

“The latest round of application testify that we in Denmark are skilled to develop good, innovative products – especially in health technology. It is positive for both the welfare and growth, because in the future of health care will be fewer hands to take care of an increasing amount of patients” says Carsten Bjerg from the fund.

Receiving the funding also requires to be partially financed by other sources. In total the Market Development Fund has € 18 M which are granted in 3 phases.

19 projects got funding

Amongst those that got funding are both new startups as well as established ones.

• Inrotech – 3D Adaptive Multipass Welding – € 295 000
• Traede – B2B sales software – market maturation of an innovative and disruptive Retails/B2B trading software – € 415 000
• Immudex – better treatment for Virusinfections – € 400 000
• Penneo – Protecting cloud data against hacking – € 616 000
• Monsenso – Data-driven mHealth platform for treating mental illnesses – € 388 000
• Conferize – Digitalising events and conferences – € 530 000
• EasyCorrect – A tool for helping teachers – € 240 000
• FirstAED – A smartphone based emergency system – € 295 000
• Dripmate – Developing a infusionsregulator – € 280 000
• Kroma – Creating a better fish slaughtering plant – € 450 000
• Nordic Power Converters – Making LEDs more efficient and longer lasting – € 280 000
• Manuxa – Aid for people with grip deficiencies € 470 000
• H.E.W. – Efficient cleaning of supermarket carts – € 240 000
• Voiceboxer – Multilingual Webcast Solution – € 250 000
• MySharps – the smart personal pocket container for disposal of used insulin pen needles – € 200 000
• Planday – Taking employee scheduling online globally – € 316 000
• SiloSense – Making estimations of silos better – € 385 000
• TableBox – A box that enables dining without a table – € 250 000
• VoxIP – Making international roaming cheaper – € 280 000

The entire list with further information and co-financing details can be found here.

The post Conferize, Planday and 17 other receive funding from Market Development Fund appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Conferize Organizer is aimed to help professional events to reached out globally. This is done trough the established Conferize- community, which includes social networking and content- sharing, but on an own website domain with one of the best web designs by https://the-indexer.com/web-design-companies/. This opens up the possibility to share an event with 5 million people listed at Conferize. As the company describes Conferize Organizer on their blog:

“It can effectively save you the time, headaches, and costs of building your own website, while offering your attendees, followers, speakers, sponsors a much more engaging event experience.”

Event experience online

Since Martin Ferro- Thomsen founded Conferize in 2011, the company has worked on connecting events in an open online platform that runs worldwide. This makes it possible to participate at an event even though its physical location might be on the other side of the Earth. The audience- both on site and virtual- can not only access the presentation and videos, but also interact with each other by taking part of conversations, tweets, papers and live feed of images and videos. The event can thus be shared around the world and reach out to a much larger audience than those on spot.

“Conferize is an online platform that opens up professional events to the world. We’re connecting events, people and thought leaders from any industry. We’re helping event organizers build communities to increase quality and attendance of their events“

5 million users and growing

At present, Conferize has over 5 million users, 50.000 speakers, 18.000 events and customers like TED, The Guardian, Ad:Tech and LeWeb. Conferize definitely opens up new doors for event organizers to reach out to a broader audience. And for curious people to learn new things and interact with peers.

“We believe professional events are unique sources of new knowledge and networking, almost like a backbone of the knowledge economy” says Martin.

Interested in Conferize? Take a look at their homepage for more information and to sign up!

The post Conferize: free social event website for everyone appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“An evening with focus on mechanics, and not on pitches or value proposition, that or often heard at startup events”

– welcomed Morten Elk, CEO at SimpleSite and initiator of the event. It was a packed evening, at Founders House in the Startup Village. The guest list of 100 people being signed up already weeks in advance. Also very interesting, and good, was that a lot of the audience was not just entrepreneurs, but also key employees at startups, especially the larger ones.

6 presentations on growth hacking

All six presentations were by very interesting key players – who work with growth hacking on some of the larger startups in the region. A great line-up.

• Christos Iosifidis from Vine app Vivino
• Peter Engelbrecht, from phone company Firmafon
• Ronja Gustavsson, from social media management Falcon Social
• Martin Thorborg, from accounting service Dinero
• Jonas Nielsen from website builder SimpleSite
• Jon Schäffer from digital conference service Conferize

Some take aways and lessons learned

Christos from Vivino talked about how they use growth hacking, and how his background from the games industry influences it.

“It’s about understanding core product value and user behaviour”

He talked about his view on the core concepts, but also that tests aren’t the most important thing in Growth Hacking

“It’s not just running a test. I became sceptical to test. You cannot really test everything.”

“However, it can be used as a tool of knowing versus understanding”.

He outlined 3 key things that you need to understand to do good growth hacking:

• Where are your users coming from, how and why
• Are they served core product value within the first 60 seconds? Especially true for mobile he mentioned.
• How do they engage and how often

Excel, Google Spreadsheet and RStudio

Peter from Firmafon, a B2B phone company that is not awful, as he introduced it himself, was ned up and went into details .

“Do not waste your time on growth hacking when you only 100 visitors a month”

He went thru tips for tools. He mentioned that Moz and Optimazily are great tools, but everyone uses them as well, so it is hard to differentiate with others. Doing manual and custom analysis was important. For that he went thru the differences between Excel and Google Spreadsheet, with a strong preference to Googles solution. he gave a couple of great tips:

Google spreadsheet vs excel:

• Cloud – everyone works in one master document
• Powerful scripting – Google Apps Script is javascript, and runs in the cloud.
• Connected sheets – everything is in the cloud, instead of needing to be on one computer. He mentioned functions like URLFetchApp and to_google_spreadsheet, that help a lot.
• Powerful analysis – Amongst other FILTER and QUERY are powerful lookup tools.

“But google docs will only get you so far. ones you put half a million values in it, it gets kind of stuck. Then we discovered ‘R’”

He went on to go thru Rs benefits to spreadsheets: R is a programming language. It is better then any spreadsheet, very powerful analysis. It’s unifies logic, which is a lot better then having your ‘logic’ is spread out over multiple formulas in different cells, spreadsheet, or scripts, that get impossible to trouble shoot when it gets too complicated.

It is a universe in itself, so he mentioned amongst other that, RStudio IDE together with RMySQL, dplyr and ggplot2 are good resources to start with.

Peter also gave tips for what to analyse. He mentioned that cohort analysis is a great thing to do, it gave them an enourmous insight. Amongst other that there is not just one life-time value. Segment costumers, they might have different life time values.

Growth hacking management

Ronja from Falcon Social talked about her team, and growth hacking from a management approach. Falcon Social has had a remarkable 640 % MRR for the first full year of sales. Already growing faster this year.

She highlighted 6 things to think about a team that has a growth hacking mindset.

1. Context – put up absurd goals, and prepare people for that it will get hairy and complicated sometimes.
2. Goals – here she talked about MQL, marketing qualified leads, which was their main KPI.
3. Data – an important insight was that not the entire marketing team was data-savvy. Therefore visualising data on screen in the department helped everyone keeping track of it.
4. People – Her lesson was to be extremely sceptical. Take your time to hire the right people with the right mindset. Every team member counts.
5. Listen – She mentioned how they use listening to be flexible and take advantages of external changes. Such as creating landing pages or blogs for specific events very quickly. Or about contacting companies depending on what your competition does, or what happens in your business area.
6. Process – create processes, but if they don’t work, kill them.

She also talked a bit about content marketing:

“Don’t worry too much about what to write in the beginning, probably no-one will read it anyway. just write articles and get them out, learn from there.”

Crazy stories from the past

Martin Thorborg was next up, talking with humour about stories from his entrepreneurial past. He mentioned both the game Fight Club and the software Spamfighter, with stories about smaller changes they made, that affected signup rates enormously. The main take-away was:

“There is always, always, always something that you can take you sign-ups to 5 times or 10 times your current. You need to think about it hard, and maybe drink a lot of beer or smoke stuff – but there is a way”

Growth hacking at SimpleSite

Jonas from SimpleSite presented how they work. SimpleSite has really been growing recently, having reached 400 000 signup a month, and having reached 80 000 paying subscribers.

Jonas talked about how they now with the volume are really data driven – and have tested both smaller changes, as well as large strategic things. One of them that he highlighted was going from premium (with a 30 day trial), to freemium – begin free ‘forever’ but charging for services that advanced users will want to use. This they tested first on selected markets, and found out that they would loose 10% of the paying costumers. – something they felt confident that they could regain with the added signups freemium would bring in.

He also mentioned that some things they found out by blind luck – such as adding a questionnaire at the beginning. This was expected to be bad, but instead showed a 12% increase!

“If you have the volume to do test, do them. You do not know what will work.”

He also showed stats of the past 100 tests they have made, and the changed they tracked. Clearly, most tests had resulted in worse conversations:

“1 in 16 tests works out for us”

Growth Hacking to build a community

Jon from Conferize was the last to present. He mentioned how they grow users thru both conference organisers, speakers, as well as community. One driving factor right now was thru email, often from conference organisers, where he shared some data, open rates amongst attendees and speakers being roughly 70%, of them 30% clicked thru and of those around 50% signed up.

‘Save the leads’ hack are they trying right now. Giving users the chance to have a discount at conferences if they invite 3 friends.

Key take-aways from it all

Important take-aways: don’t test unless you have enough data. Use common sense or costumer interviews in the beginning, When you have users in the thousands then maybe you can start to test.

Some rule of thumbs mentioned: With 1000 interactions you can measure changes of around 10 percentage-points with statistical certainty. With 10 000 interactions you can measure 3 percentage points.

Also, there was a discussion when it comes to B2B, if free trial or demo was the way to go.

“Free trial did not work for us. With a free demo, we gave them a call, and that moved the sales process.”

Was Ronjas take on it, while Peter instead said that for them free trial is the way to go:

“For us ease of use is important. If free trield would not work, then we have a problem with our product”

Growth hacking has not one certain formula, and if that was not clear to the attendees already it certainly became during the event. However, a lot of people got useful information they can put to use themselves, and the entire event seemed very appreciated.

The entire event was filmed, and the films will be realeased later. We will out them up in our video section when they are out.

The ambition is to have the Nordic Growth Hacker event quarterly, so we look forward to the next one in the beginning of 2015. This was a great event, and something that shows the strength of #cphftw – leveraging the community to reach out to relevant participants.

The post First Nordic Growth Hackers meet-up appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Above you can see the some footage of the opening ceremony, where Zenia Francker from Founders House held the inauguration talk.

Founders house is a initiative where some of the most successful startups from Copenhagen have co-located in the same block. Startup Village is located at Islands Brygge on Njalsgade, in the old pakhusen. Some of the startups have had their offices there for a while already, but with the latest startups moving there the idea of branding it as Startup Village was born.

The houses are 4 old warehouses remodeled by a local floor marking contractor, with some startups having smaller spaces and some entire floors. It is a distinct historical area with great flavour and both indoor as well as outdoor locations.

Entrepreneurial initiative

Behind the initiative are the different startups, with Founders House moving there being one of the driving factors. It is a completly private initiative, with the aim of helping all startups located in the village. Somewhat ironically, the business department of the Copenhagen Municipallity actually had their offices just next door, until they moved to a new location, this summer.

Startups present

Some of the biggest startups present in the Startup Village are:

• Autobutler
• Bellmetric
• Churchweb
• Conferize
• Everplace
• Graduateland
• Labster
• Nabby
• Opbeat
• Planday
• Riidr
• Realm
• Shape
• Vivino

With the Founders House co-working space there are also a larger number of smaller and newer startups present.

Not just startups

The village also includes a café and a restaurant, as well as a Yoga center. Some ‘regular’ companies are present on the premises as well, such as White Arcitects office, as the this has rather been a gradual growing conglomeration of startups and not a top-down planned takeover, such as Berlin Factory. The idea is however to enable further startups to move there, with the assistance of a service like business moving services, as soon as floor-space becomes available.

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