“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 is a spreadsheet from my investment newsletter club with all the investments that we have gotten to our attention during 2013.
Disclaimer: There are, most likely, many more investments that we do not know about (yet), and we will try to update the document when we get to know about more.

Some interesting stats from investments in the region 2013

Updated 2014-01-02: got more information from Hampus Jakobsson. If you have any further info we should add, let us know.

• Total sum of investments: 55 million euros (roughly, with qualified estimates in those cases where the sum is unknown)
• Total number of investments: 52
• Most number of investments: SEED Capital (7)
• Largest investments: Sol Voltaics and Vivino

As can be seen from the numbers, none of them is big single investment (such as last years € 45M investment in Zendesk). So this year it has been mostly seed, series A and series B investments in the region.

Other interesting things from 2013

A very noteworthy happening from 2013 was Unitys rumored ‘no thanks’ to a € 575 million deal. Very interesting for them and the whole startup and gaming scene in the region!

There where also some interesting crowdfunding projects, most notably the release of the game Forced which got a lot of attention for its story, but also gadgets such as Leikr and NSA defeating services such as Heml.is. Also two very high profile ones, that however are still ongoing – Airtame and No More Woof. These are not in the list (even though they are already 100% financed) because they will first close in the beginning of 2014.

Why a focus on investments and funding?

We look at investment and funding for a couple of reasons:

1. It is relatively easy to get the information.
2. A startup that receives investment is ‘validated’ – it is not just a cool idea, somebody believes in it enough to put money into it.
3. Especially the later stage investment rounds (series A and above) are crucial for a startup to make it big. Therefor we deem those as very important.

What do we think about bootstrapping?

Our focus on investments does not mean that we think bootstrapping is in any way wrong. Indeed, my own company, Contentor, is bootstrapped. However, bootstrapping is in my opinion something that is great, especially in the first 1-5 years, but after that to grow truly international and make a difference, funding is almost always needed. Not just for the money and the people that can be hired because of the investment. It’s just as much for the connections and knowledge that the right investors bring. Connections such as inside-people at Google, Facebook or other important collaborators for the startup. Or connections to goverment and politicians that are relevant. Or for further investments and a future IPO. Having people onboard who have experience from earlier in very helpful in those cases.
So I believe bootstrapping is great to get going, try the product and build the first million euros in revenue. But to take it to the next level, to reach € 10M or more in revenue, funding often makes the crucial differences and speeds up the process.

Because of this, we care about funding here at Øresund startups.

Reporting on other stats as well

We will aim to try to get more numbers out in the future. Both Sweden and Denmark have core company numbers available for companies public. We will see what kind of report we can build form that – such as matching the startups in region to their revenues!

The post Updated: The year of 2013 – investments in startups in the region appeared first on Øresund Startups.

It was held over lunch at CreativeLab, the creative event concept at the SHIP co-working space. Because we have a policy of livecasting whatever we do, you can watch the recording above (Our new Bambuser channel can be found here).

If you want to download the slides, I have made them available on slideshare but there are quite low resolution there, so can be found as pdf here as well.

I am probably describing some of the startups a little bit wrong (sorry for that), and I missed some things in the presentation (corrected in the downloadable versions). But I hope it creates some value for you as the viewer anyway.

Update 1: Some have asked why so many people are walking around and the background noice – the location where the presentation was held is the auditorium in the CreativeLab, called “trappan”, and is just that: the main stairs between the first and second floor. It is designed to be in the middle of the entire place, so that any presentations held there can have drop-in / drop-out flow. A somewhat special enviroment, but I love it, often with a lot of student from Lunds University sitting around in the open areas, and the business and entrepreneurs on the stairs themselves…

Update 2: I should of course list the top 50 startups mentioned as well! Here they are (in the order presented, i.e. in alphabetical order after category):

Series A + B

B2C

• Billetto
• Miinto
• Vivino
• WatAGame (GoSupermodel)
• Zmags

B2B

• Codesealers
• Falcon Social
• FlatFrog Laboratories
• iMotions
• Neo technology (Neo4J)
• Octoshape
• Opbeat
• Serstech
• SimpleSite (123hjemmeside)
• Tradeshift
• Trustpilot
• Unity
• Vopium

Seed level

B2C

• Bownty
• Click-A-Taxi
• Coolstuff
• Flattr
• Foap
• Tasspass
• Retevo (Roliga Prylar / Alphageek)

B2B

• Anyfi
• Atosho
• Conferize
• Crunchfish
• Deskwolf
• Dexplora (GetSalesDone and brisk.io)
• Firmafon
• GameAnalytics
• Graduateland
• InRiver
• Insurance Business Applications
• OneRecruit
• Sepior
• The Eye Tribe
• Wallmob
• Zaplox

Other prominent startups

• 23
• Echo.it
• Kvittar
• MovieStarPlanet
• Momondo
• Planeto
• Riidr
• Zendesk

The post Øresund Startups: Top50 and state of the region appeared first on Øresund Startups.

One of the things we want to focus on with Øresund Startups is tracking funding in startups in the region. The reason is simple: funding is an external validation that proves that somebody believes in a startup, and that it is not just a great idea, but also an idea that can be executed. We also believe that it is of interest for others seeking funding to know what funding deals have been made, and who possible investors are.

Therefor we have put together the data that we have been notified about the last 6 month, january – june 2013. We have done that in an simple spreadsheet, and listed a couple of data points:

• Date (approximatly)
• Invested amount (when disclosed)
• What startup
• Which investors
• Business sector of the startups (if B2B or B2C)
• What cluster in the region the startup belongs to

Some interesting investment highlights from the first 6 month of 2013:

Update: after publishing this we got some feedback with more investments we had missed. The numbers below are updated with the newest stats!

Of the investments we have registered:

• A total of 28 investments have been tracked. The total is not officially known, but our estimations and words from unofficial sources put the total to between 18-21 million euros.
• 14 of the 28 investments are Copenhagen based
• The biggest investment was in Crunchfish, but it was only slightly larger then others
• More or less equal B2B then B2C startups have received funding (14 B2B and 13 B2C and 1 that is both)
• SEED Capital was the most active investment fund
• SEED Capital was also the fund which has invested the most money in the period (according to released numbers)
• Half of the investments (14 of the 28) where from private investors, either a known angel / VC or a multitude of angels.
• Private investments also account for roughly half of the total value invested, around 8-10 million euros of the total 18-21 million euros (estimated in cases where not publicly known)

Note that the list above is only with data from 1 january – 30 june 2013. The recent big investments in Vivino as well as Opbeat are not part of it, they will be part of the next report.

As a bonus we also put together the numbers for our first month of operations, september – december 2012. However, as that is not a complete 6 month period we did not want to make a full report of that. The numbers can be found in the spreadsheet, in the second tab. These numbers may also be quite incomplete, as during that period we just started tracking startups and might have missed a lot.

Also – if you know about investments which we have missed, let us know! Either in an email or in the community group.

The stats are embeded at the top of the posts, but if you have trouble viewing them you can find them here as a Google Drive spreadsheet.

If you want to download the numbers as .csv you can find them here.

The post Updated! Report: investments in web and tech startups in the region – spring 2013 appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“Kaare Danielsen has had great success in selling services online to businesses in the form of advertisements and therefore it has a large value to us that he is now entering the board and that he puts money in Firmafon,” says Firmafon Manager Peter Engelbrecht

Firmafon specializes on B2B telephone solutions, focusing on SMB costumers. Their aim is to use technology to make phone-services radically better.

The post Firmafon receives a €1.3M investment appeared first on Øresund Startups.