David Helgason, founder of Unity, told an interested audience how the company was one of the first to fully benefit from the smartphone revolution, where you suddenly could access 2 billion consumers though an inexpensive and efficient channel.

Delivering a game engine used by a third of all mobile games publishers has made their software get onto more than 2 billion handsets.

A key factor in their success was the timing, but also that they moved to Silicon Valley and lived the “Silicon Valley Playbook” by going freemium at a time when that was not at all common.

Unity’s pricing model where they made it easier and cheaper to buy their software compared to the competition was also key to success.

Your business model determines your destiny!

Your business model is what makes you scalable, it’s the denominator of whether you are successful or not: If your business model is not good enough and you try to scale, you will fail. Lose money, implode.
If you have the right business model you can scale. Then it makes sense to fuel your growth with venture capital.
Listening to six founders who got it right was inspiring, when each of them took the stage at the Nordic Growth Hackers #7 on January 25th at Founders House in Copenhagen.

Siteimprove cracked onboarding

Waiting 12 years before taking in any external funding secured full control of the company, explained Siteimprove founder, Morten Ebbesen. And he stresses that full control is essential to early growth.
But some things cannot be controlled – and sometimes love overrules your business plan:
A Danish VP of Siteimprove fell in love with a Minneapolis resident. Now they have two kids and he’s managing 150 people – in Minneapolis. This proved to be less expensive than the two typically preferred cities for startups going to the US – San Francisco and New York .

SiteImprove has added more than 100 salespeople over the past year. The only way to do that is by onboarding in an extremely structured way. Hiring an external recruiter to take care of the full process of hiring and onboarding has proven very successful, reducing churn and improving sales performance.

Know your customers

Penneo’s greatest growth hack was to change from a free-signup-and-pay-per-use model to a prepaid subscription. That took the two year-old company from 0 to 10 million DKK in revenue.

If you’re planning to sell different kinds of soap products in the future, keep in mind that custom soap boxes are very creative and a great tool for marketing.

Along the same lines, Iconfinder found out that they had a wrong idea about how their customers paid for their service. Designers & developers rarely have a company credit card, so the model of paying separately per icon download really held their users back. Switching to a monthly subscription with (almost) unlimited downloads made their revenue skyrocket.

No more awkward board meetings looking at 0-growth. Or at least not that awkward, Martin LeBlanc Eigtved of Iconfinder added. The board didn’t allow him to rest on his laurels but asked for even more growth: True growth hacking mindset!

Tradeshift is about democratizing business. Kind of a bold vision, but constantly repeating this big, hairy, audacious goal was what propelled the six year-old company into many Fortune 500 companies and made it sensible for them to host their own events at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.
Control your key revenue drivers

Tactile Entertainment is a game studio delivering very visually appealing mobile games, primarily in the categories “endless runner” and “casual puzzles”.

Asbjørn Søndergaard, Founder & CEO told that initially they left the marketing and monetization via in-app ads to a third party, but things never really took off. When they developed their own marketing platform instead and took back the whole process, revenue started to grow exponentially.
Lesson: Make sure you control your key revenue drivers.

NGH#8 in March or April

The next Nordic Growth Hackers will be in March or April, according to the organizers and initiators behind the Nordic Growth Hackers community, SimpleSite.

Follow the NGH community here: nordicgrowthhackers.com
Twitter: @nordicgrowth

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Providing an online marketplace for passionate icon designers to sell their work directly to consumers, Iconfinder is now the ‘go-to’ website for anyone in search of Icons. The platform works on two levels: Users can search from a million icons to find the perfect fit for their needs and Icon designers can now make money using the site.

“What started out as a side project many years ago has transformed into a fully functioning digital marketplace. The fact that we just celebrated 1 million icons on the site and nearly doubled 5 years worth of growth in 12 months is a testament to that.” says CEO and Founder, Martin LeBlanc Eigtved

Previously, the website was a place where consumers could search and download icons. These days, consumers also have access to a premium subscription service, a feature that offers designers to sell their icons. This new feature aligns with their mission which is to help designers make a living doing what they love.

“We see designers cashing out $4000 per month fairly regularly. It gives them the money to keep doing what they love – designing great icons. Some of our designers are even setting up companies based on the revenues they’re generating from the Iconfinder platform.” says Martin

Iconfinder is an international startup with a global customer base. The team includes people from Romania, the US, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Denmark. The team was funded by 500 Startups in California along with VF Ventures in Europe.

The marketplace they have built is the biggest indicator of their growth. They’ve built an ecosystem for icons that didn’t exist 2 years ago and have seen tremendous growth both as a product and as a team.

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Iconfinder has built a user base of more than one million monthly users and with thousands of contributors that earn money by selling icons on the site. Previously, Iconfinder only offered premium icons through a classic credit card system. Now, professional users have the choice of getting rid of the hassles of receipts, license management and finding the right credit cards with a subscription plan.

And the adoption has been good – Martin LeBlanc, CEO said only days after the release:

“Iconfinder Pro is now delivering more than a third of our revenue.”

Iconfinder Pro is made for teams of professional designers often working on multiple projects with a lot of iterations, prototyping and a high level of quality requirements for the finished design.

“This is what Iconfinder Pro is built for; a product that is always there when the user needs it, with virtually no barriers between the user and his design.” says Martin

The launch of Iconfinder Pro marks the first step on the road towards making Iconfinder one of the essential tools in the professional designer’s toolbox. The team is already working on the next set of tools and features making Iconfinder Pro even better with additions such as a desktop app, a Photoshop plugin and an icon font tool. And, to make life easier, a new image recognition algorithm will help contributors automatically tag uploaded icons and provide an even better search experience for users.

Starting at just $29 per month, Iconfinder Pro is aggressively priced compared to buying icons through traditional stock photo sites such as Shutterstock where a monthly subscription starts at $249.

Those who do not need permanent access to hundreds of thousands of icons should not be nervous; pay-as-you-go solution goes nowhere. Martin LeBlanc Eigtved says that for some users it fits much better to buy individual icons. This applies to freelancers and other private.

IconFinder is one of the more famous startups in the regions. Three years ago, led the good idea and impressive traction IconFinder won the award for Best Idea to Venture Cup. In 2012 IconFinder the first Copenhagen startup that received investment from the world-famous American accelerator 500 Startups.

You can read more over at Trendsonline as well.

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Last year IconFinder has reached some impressive numbers. It is in 2013 that the number of icon downloads has hit 156 million! At this point IconFinder hosts the world’s largest collection of premium icons, with over 340.000 icons in stock and 2.1 million visitors per month (more stats).

Of course, there are some challenges that kick in as companies start growing. In 2013 IconFinder had to deal with challenges related to building a new marketplace on the site. According to Martin LeBlanc, IconFinder is a large IT project to manage and execute. It requires tons of decisions on code structure and design as well as business related aspects such as pricing and policies. On the other side, there was a challenge to convince all the talented designers to upload hundred thousands of premium icons to the site, answer questions and fix bugs in the process.

“Unfortunately we didn’t have the bandwidth to both focus on building all this new stuff and the supply side of the marketplace, so we didn’t do a lot of new features for the end users, which leads me to the plan for 2014!” shares Martin LeBlanc in the email.

It is still January but IconFinder is only one week away from a major revamp of the front-end where they will introduce some very useful (and requested) ways of filtering icons in styles (e.g. glyph, flat, 3d etc) and categories (e.g. finance, health care, Christmas etc).

“Most of 2014 will be focused on making the site super useful, now that we have the content in place,” says Martin LeBlanc.

2014 will also be about marketing and getting people to use Iconfinder. It is estimated by the company that about 80% of American web developers and designers don’t even know about Iconfinder, so the management sees there an opportunity for massive growth. However, the difficulty is in finding a scalable model for this ambition that won’t cost a ton of money.

“We expanded our team with three new talented guys in 2013, a backend developer, a designer and a marketing guy. A front-end developer has joined us on freelance basis in 2014, so we are moving faster than ever now and it’s a lot of fun!” says Martin LeBlanc.

IconFinder is definitely winning on being user-friendly and super simple to use (judging by how easy it was to find their own logo in different formats and sizes just with few clicks). We wish them good luck with agenda for 2014!

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The event was marked by a great spirit and community feeling, and will probably be looked at as an important day for the Copenhagen and Denmarks startup community.

The day was filled with great advice and stories. Here is a summary of some of the things that where said and wisdom that was shared.

Opening and part 1: new startups

Opening keynote by Morten Lund, the famous investor. Morten opened with a personal and charismatic keynote. His biggest advice – “find profiten” – focus on where the money is found!

After the opening Lars Buch from Startupbootcamp MobilityXL presented 8 different up-and-coming startups: Click-a-taxi, Iconfinder, Vivino, Rushfiles, Atosho, Graduateland, Queue-it and Autouncle.
They all got 10 minutes to talk about their business, their funding and their challenges. Very interesting and fast-paced. There could be done individual blogposts for each of the presentations, but suffice to say – all of these startups are definitly worth keeping an eye on!

Part 2: startups

This part was opened by minister Morten Østergaard, who talked about the innovationstrategy. He emphasised that we have among the highest money spent on R&D in Denmark, but are mediocre at creating jobs from it. He realized the need for this to change.

After this was a long but inspiring session with alot of established startups on stage, most of whom where in an internationallization phase. Alot of great advice where given and stories told. I is not possible to get everything in one post, but here are some highlights:

Peter Mühlmann from Trustpilot talked about his rating-startup, it’s ambitions and struggles, as well as the experience of opening an New York office. Best quote:

“Starting a startup is like playing WoW – you kill monsters and collect gold”

Jens Karstoft from zmags, who also talked about their US expansion, and that moving the HQ to the US when you already had 25 employess in your HQ in Denmark was something he would not recommend others to do. Either move it when you are still alot smaller, or set up an regional office in the US instead of HQ, was his lessons to the crowd. He also talked their tougher period 2011-2012, when they hired and american CEO and raised alot of money, but i did not have the desired effect on the revenue or growth. The CEO had to go after 9 month – an expensive lesson he said.
Key points from Jens:

– “get it right” vs “grow it fast”
– don’t take chances if hiring a CEO
– the right team is everything. Focus on values!
– it’s never easy – remember to have fun

Henrik Lottrup from LanguageWire talked about their grows since they started in 2000 to todays turnover of 142 Mdkk (€19M), and their expansion to worldwide costumers and offices all over Europe.

Bengt Sundstrøm founder of Lauritz went on stage after that, talking about his journey and their marked segment. His main poits was – if you are online, focus on mobile! A whooping 42% of their bids where now placed from mobile devices!

Ditlev Bredahl from OnApp, who told his story of starting a hosting company, in times when Amazon Cloud Services grows at an anual rate of 70%. But he has managed an ambitious journey since the start of OnApp in 2011, already having 135 employees and recieved $20M in VC funding. He talked about his past at UK2group which he sold in 2011.
What we all will remember his talk for is however the unique touch of only using LEGO Star Wars pictures in the presentations – something that also made his main point quite clear: Amazon = the dark side

Thorvald Stigsen from Momondo was the last one in this session. He talked about how they have become a big player in a crowded field – travel recommendations and bookings. He talked about the start as founder in 2006 until he sold it in 2011. Main points where branding and how to position yourself as an underdog, with words of wisdom:

“Rebel is the new mainstream”

The final part: successful entrepreneurs

Mikkel Svane from Zendesk talked (via video) about their journey. He mentioned an important tip: It is difficult for US investors to do background check on foreign entrepreneurs (visit sites like https://www.sterlingcheck.co.uk/ for additional guidance). This is problematic, as investors want to make sure they know you before investing. His lesson was that is it important to build and show a good track record in order to get investments from the US.

Lars Nielsen from Sitecore presented, as the only one doing it in english, about their journey from a tool (CMS) to solving their costumers problems.
He also shared two of his greatest wisdoms:

1. people are key. When companies grow they tend to hire bosses who hire people they can control. Don’t do that. Higher people that are smarter then you, that themselves hire people who are smarter then them. Even if that turns you into the company fool
2. stick to core values (in their case – be cool, have fun )

Klaus Nyengaard from JustEat, shared amongst other things his thoughts on scaling – how to go from a small local startup to 1000+ employees and being the worlds largest direct food delivery company. A remarkable feat, especially considering that this marked segment is alot harder to scale then a software service. He also talked about his concept of entreprofessionals – the best kind of employees. As one of the main sponsors with the event he also pleased the crowd by announcing that their will be a Tech BBQ in 2014 as well!

The closing keynote was from Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, from Podio, who wrapped up by an inspiring speech about how we should get this regions startup community kick-started. A perfect ending for an inspiring day.

This was a great event, that really got some of the most important players together. Even if it was noticeble that it was the first time the event was held, the keynotes and presenters are what made the day great. Good work being done by Trendsonline and Daniel Laursen.

As a final note we would like to end with Navid Ostadian Binai‘s Tweet, which is the only real thing that we definitly would like to see improved for next years Tech BBQ:

Great start to #TechBBQ, but a shame it’s in Danish. Hope it’ll be in English next year so we can attract a much more international crowd.

— Navid Ostadian-Binai (@navidob) May 7, 2013

Something that was also echoed by both Lars Buch and Lars Nielsen on stage.

Full list of startups and entrepreneurs presenting where:

1. The first part was new startups

• Click a Taxi, Søren Halskov Nissen
• Iconfinder, Martin LeBlanc
• Vivino, Heine Zachariassen
• Rushfiles, Morten Klank
• Atosho, Anders Ibsen
• Graduateland – Patrick Lund
• Queue-it – Camilla Ley Valentin
• AutoUncle – Johan Frederik Schjødt

2. Startups that have gotten a good amount of investements and some traction internationally

• TrustPilot – Peter Mühlmann
• Zmags – Jens Karstoft
• LanguageWire – Henrik Lottrup
• Lauritz.com – Bengt Sundstrøm
• OnApp – Ditlev Bredahl
• Momondo – Thorvald Stigsen

3. Success stories and veteran entrepreneurs, who told their stories and their advice to the younger people in the crowd.

• Sitecore – Lars Nielsen<
• Just-Eat – Klaus Nyengaard
• Podio – Thomas Madsen-Mygdal

If you want to read more, trendsonline has an extensive reporting on the event:

• Velkommen til Tech BBQ 2013
• Tech BBQ – del 2: Startups
• Tech BBQ – del 3: Keynote og vækstvirksomheder
• Tech BBQ: En god eksponering
• Tech BBQ: Minister vil i dialog med de danske iværksættere

The post Tech BBQ – a great day for the startup scene appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Iconfinder Marketplace allows designers to sell icons to buyers. Iconfinder takes a 30% cut on the deal, and the rest is for the designer. This platform allows designers to capitalize on their creative work in an easy and effective way which is unique in this market. Not all designers can submit icons, the artists are hand picked by Iconfinder to ensure quality: a way for Iconfinder to target the professional end of the market.

“The marketplace is a big step for us. Users will be able to buy high quality vectors directly from the search results. It would be the easiest way to find and buy icons online. This will make it possible for talented icon designers to get paid for their work,” said Martin LeBlanc (source: trendsonline.dk).

Balancing the need for free icons with the demand for paid icons will be of key importance to the future successes they envision.

We want IconFinder to be ‘the number one bookmark’ for people in the design industry,” says Martin. “Until now, resources and tools have been fragmented. 5 years ago, designers had thousands of icons on their computer, now it is only necessary to go to one place. Iconfinders goal is to make the design on the screen better.” says founder of 500 Startups and investor Dave McClure. (source: trendsonline.dk)

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In the best newcomer category (operating less than 12 months) we find the Swedish startup Applika, the Danish Admazely and The Eye Tribe

The Danish Click a Taxi, Riidr, IconFinder and the Swedish Flattr are nominated as best funded startup. This group represents firms which have received professional funding from a VC or professional angel.

In the international category (must have started operations in the Nordics) we find Endomondo, Zendesk and Tradeshift, Zaplox and Kvittar.

Only one startup from our region is nominated as bootstrapper of the year Splitter (received no professional funding), and also the peoples choice award is only represented by Tunaspot, a firm which plays into new developments in the music industry by providing a location based music platform.

Most honorably, Podio and Miinto were nominated for the prestigious Startup of the Year award!

Founders House, Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship and The Copenhagen Nokia Bridge Incubator are nominated as the best service provider, well deserving the recognition for their help and services to the startup industry. YEoS is also nominated, an organisation for young entrepreneurs which has a strong presence on the Swedish side.

Join the final event on December 7th in Copenhagen to hear the winner announcement, network and to see that the Nordic scene is a leading centre for innovation.

Update 4 nov 10:28 – We missed some companies! Updated with the new information!

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The 500 start-ups accelerator program is a hybrid between an incubator and a seed fund and has the aim of making internet start-ups succeed in the in the real world. By participating in this program IconFinder can receive up to 250K of funding, help from experienced mentors, a creative workspace and lots more.

Since 500 start-ups took off, more than 300 companies have been in the seed incubator program, including Markerly, myGengo, Visual.ly, E la Carte and many others. With a re-designed website and new members to their team, IconFinder sounds like a good ambassador of the Oresund start-up scene.

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