“Logistics is costly for online retailers. About 8-15% of the revenue goes to cover logistics cost. Secondly, logistics is key to the customer experience and key reason for shopping offline. Yet the logistics industry (the largest industry in the world) remain as one of the most conservative, in-transparent and in-effective services from a customer viewpoint.” Kenneth says.

So there obviously was a market, and every e-commerce company had the problem, as well as ned users. On top of that, the team had experience from startups, and Kenneth had himself worked with Rocket Internet and launched e-commerce stores for them on the other side of the world. Sounds like a perfect team and a sweet spot for building a company! However, it was turned out it wasn’t. Kenneth has just made a post-mortem blogpost about what went wrong. You can read it here. In it are reasons why the startup failed:

“We expected resistance from the carriers, but it took us more than a year to get a shipping agreement with PostNord [largest carrier in DK]. Even then and throughout the lifetime of Shipbeat, PostNord tried to prevent Shipbeat from re-selling their services. This was unexpected as PostNord paradoxically is required by law to sell some of their key services to anyone.”

Kenneth writes in the post, before continuing:

“Our plan was to build internally a broker/marketplace business for logistics. That required hiring entrepreneurial minded people with logistics experience and network to build relations at C-level with the carriers. That proved virtually impossible to find. “

He also writes about strategic decisions they took, and what led to the final decision, so close the company.

“Our best option was to get a shipping broker or similar on board as investor or acquirer. One who could provide a competitive logistics setup that we could power up with the Shipbeat software. That could have led leap-frogging the competition and ultimately deliver on our value proposition widely. After a good process with meaningful dialogues, but with no deal reasonably insight we [founders, board, and investors] could not justify taking more money into the company.”

The startup had raised a little over € 1 million in funding and loans. If you are interesting in the challenges of building a startup, and how it can go wrong even if almost everything is aligned, you should read the entire blogpost.

We wish the team and entrepreneurs all the best in their next venture!

The post Shipbeat files for bankruptcy appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Drawing on experience from Just-Eat

When Creandum in 2014 invested in Planday, they kept the part of the investment open to the right co-investor. Now it has been announced that Klaus Nyengaard takes that role. Klaus past with building and internationalising Just-Eat will be a great asset for the Planday team.

“Klaus Nyengaard has a great insight in working with software-as-a-service and to scale an organisation. His experiences will therefore benefit Planday considerably.” says Christian Brøndum, CEO at Planday.

Klaus will not take an active position at the company or it’s board. Instead, he will act as a sounding board for Christian and the other directors.

“We are well on the way to internationalise our business and expect to roll out to three to five new markets this year. Klaus Nyengaard has made this journey with Just-Eat with great success.”

Making employee scheduling easy, world-wide

The company’s slack bots makes it easy for companies to manage employees schedules, HR and payroll. The vast majority of small and medium-sized companies are still doing this manually, either with physical boards or using excel or simple spreadsheets. It is time consuming and error-prone, and the smallest mistake can quickly become costly for companies, often operating on low margins. Here Planday found its niche via a web-based solution that can also be accessed by mobile. Thus, employees can easily swap shifts with each other and the smooth processes provides competitive advantages.

“We find that there is a very large and unmet demand among small and medium-sized businesses for a better way to organise their working hours. Our goal is to become a global leader in this time-management segment and we go for an annual growth of 100%.”

Planday currently has 53 employees, and aims to grow by at least 25 more this year. They are currently helping over 50 000 users, including companies such as Best Western, Falck and Novo Nordisk.

An opportunity not to pass on

After the sale of Just-Eat, Klaus went back to Denmark and devoted part of his time to invest in promising tech startups, including GenieBelt, Shipbeat and Tradono. Common to these startups is that they deal with workflow and online marketplaces, something that is true for Planday as well.

“When I invest in a company, it must have at least the potential to become leading in Europe. In addition, the team must be competent and the chemistry between them right. And finally, they need to operate in an industry I understand. A few simple criterias, but they are important. Planday is an exciting company that has all possible conditions for becoming the predominant player in global time-management. It was an opportunity I would not let go.” says Klaus Nyengaard.

The sum of the investment has not been disclosed. Creandum invested € 3.5 M in Planday in 2014.

The post Klaus Nyengaard joins Creandum as investor in Planday appeared first on Øresund Startups.

A goal and more structure

The first half of the event was focused on giving the participants a chance to speak out and an update on the structure of the initiative.
It was presented that Jasenko Hadzic and Lærke Ullerup will form the operational team, with Jasenko being the official Managing Director. Jasenko is, as previsouly stated, known in the community, and Lærke has a past at TEDxCPH and has been involved in the #cphftw initiative since its initial phase.

Also, it’s goals of #cphftw were presented. These are:

• To make Denmark the most attractive startup hub in Europe
• To increase relations amongst community leaders and entrepreneurs in the ecosystem
• To to increase international exposure, benefiting the Denmark and the Danish economy

How to do it

But it is not just about what the goals are, even more important are how to do it. Here some concrete actions were announced:

Connecting the ecosystem

A couple of initiatives were presented about how to move things forward. Amongst other through dedicated meet ups for C-level employees at startups. People who often have a huge experience and can share information with others. But also with founders dinners and a mailing list for entrepreneurs.

Making the ecosystem visible

This mainly through an online platform, over at cphftw.dk, which should make it easy to get an overview of what happens, and also highlight interesting stories. Also, making the eco-system visible to media to a larger extend.

Connecting Copenhagen to the world

8 exclusive investors dinners with all major Nothern European VCs. Also, actively working with other hubs such as Stockholm, Helsinki and Berlin to drive learning across borders.

Also, all founding startups were announced as well, having pledged over 500 000 DKK to the initiative so far – it should be noted that at the event it was mentioned that the number was 400.000 DKK, but the sign-ups have been flying in ever since the evening.

It was also mentioned that the all startups have the chance of becoming founding members of #cphftw, were the goal is to get 80+ on board until end the week. If you want your startup to join in and forever be known as one of the founding members, reach out to Jasenko directly.

What is happening in Copenhagen

Besides those great news about the initiative itself, the second part was all about startups and events happening in Copenhagen.

It was set up as quick series of mini-presentations. A chance for all assembled to know about some impress startups or happenings. here were a lot of quick presentations and announcement. 6 startups were presented, as well as over 10 different initiatives from the community.

For outsiders, one of the most interesting parts were all the different initiatives that are going on.

Community initiatives and events

Here multiple places, initiatives and events were presented. All very interesting in their own, but too much to cover in depth. Amongst them were:

• Jacob Bøtter told the story about Prototype, and it’s strange mixture of co-working and coffeeshop
• Michael Tiberg talked about Foo Café, how he managed to host over 300 tech events last year in Malmö, and about opening a Foo Café in Copenhagen.
• CIID, the Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design – Alie Rose, talked about bringing together people from all over the world to work on interaction and development projects. A great pool for talent.
• Lars Buch from StartupBootcamp came and brought a lot of energy – enforcing that we need to celebrate the people who are doing this.
• Lean Startup Circle was presented, and that they will host multiple events in the fall, using their 950+ strong meet-up group to bring great minds together, and above all focus on actual learnings and testing.
• Michael Reibel Boesen presented Elevate, which is kind of a job fair for getting students exposed to startups. A great initiative.
• Camilla Ley Valentin from Queue-it talked about her involvement with the danish goverment in the enklereregler.dk initiative – making regulations easier. She highlighted that everyone should send in their growth barriers before the October 3rd, and she would present them to the government.
• Henrik Føhns from Harddisken, the program from Danish Public Radio 1, was on stage and talked about his job of distributing the future more evenly – using one hour of public radio a week for interviews and the tech scene.
• Morten Elk from SimpleSite presented his initiative: Nordic Growth Hackers meet-ups. The events will focus in real learnings – 6 cases with growth hacking will be presented. The first meet-up is in october at Founders House.

Startup presentations

6 startups got 3 minutes each. The startups were from different levels – from really successful ones to smaller ones that recently have had successes.

Sitecore

“Before Sitecore I started multiple non-profits. Although I never intended them to be non-profit…”

Was one of the quotes from Lars Fløe Nielsen who presented his company. A company that might be the ‘biggest unknown startup’ in Copenhagen. Having had organic growth to over 800 employees and hundreds of millions in revenue, it surely is a very impressive company he has build.

Shipbeat

“A startup is about a team”

Was one of the widsoms Kenneth Svenningsen from Shipbeat shared. The logistics as a service startup has recently closed an impressive seed-round.

“I didn’t want to do this. But my past experience from Rocket Internet in Sydney and Miinto I realisted there was no good solution for this”

Kenneth said about his startup idea.

Crowdcurity

Jacob Hansen from Crowdcurity talked about how they are solving security problems for companies.

“We are Backed by 1000 of security researchers world wide. “

Apart from their journey so far with boost.vc and 500 startups, he also mentioned current progress:

“The bitcoin marked is currently one of our focus areas, we get a lot of interest from companies active there.”

Komfo

Michael talked about Komfo and how they are now competing against Adobe social, Meltwater and a lot of the same competitors as Lars from Sitecore mentioned previously. Komfo and Sitecore also have a long relationship already.

“We wanted an organic growth, and took Sitecore as a strategic investor instead of venture capital.”

Realm (former tightDB)

Brian Munkholm presented his startup. They are currently 16 employees, half of them in Silicon Valley.
Their service: a very fast database tool. He mentioned that they are proud that it was released one month ago, already 1700 stars on GitHub.

Conferize

Jesper Vestergaard introduced the startup, and their ambition to make conferences more digital and forming a community around them. They have just released their new product.

“We 12 people working at conferize right now. Looking for more”

Jesper he hinted. He also made a pledge: If you have a free event in Copenhagen you can use the Conferize without any costs.

Podio

The last one is not a startup anymore, since their exit to Citrix in 2012. However, Kasper Hulthin talked about their journey 2009-2012. But also talked about how they have worked to get Citrix to make the Podio office a hub for their development, and getting the company to make it’s presence in the region stronger. An effort that was applauded to!

The presentations were all quick, and gave a sense of some of the interesting startups in Copenhagen. They also showed a clear trend – it’s the b2b sector startups that this region rocks at building.

Conclusions

Apart from all this there were even more short presentations and speeches. It was, in total, a really packed event with a lot of information shared. After all the presentations the bar, staffed by employees from the startup 23, was open and a lot of new connections made. A lot of suggestions and ideas also spread thru twitter on the #cphftw hashtag, were already new plans for sharing more knowledge were taking shape.

The post #Cphftw Town Hall #3 – packed with people and announcements appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Shipbeat was founded in early 2014 to develop an API which aggregates the services of leading parcel delivery companies.

“Shipping is a key driver of conversion and retention in ecommerce. Consumers want choice and convenience. The lack of delivery options explain 20-70% of shopping cart abandonment,” said Kenneth Svenningsen, co-founder and CEO.

“Once you’ve found an ecommerce retailer that nails the delivery and returns experience, you’re much more likely to stick with them and order again and again.” he continues

Kenneth is scratching his own itch: as CTO of Miinto, a Nordic online fashion retailer, he found integrating logistics carriers incredibly frustrating:

“I’ve dealt with the same problems in Europe and in Asia. The carrier systems you work with are outdated and take forever to set up. Shipbeat enables all ecommerce merchants to compete with the likes of Amazon by on shipping options. Merchants are not developing their own payment gateways – there’s no reason they should be doing their own logistics integrations either.”

Ecommerce shipments continue to grow at a rapid pace, with over 16 billion parcels delivered to consumers per year around the world. In Europe alone, ecommerce merchants annually ship goods worth 225 billion Euros to consumers. The steep growth in parcels from online shopping has partially compensated traditional mail carriers, like Royal Mail and Deutsche Post, for the rapid decline in letters due to email. There remains, however, a cultural and engineering disconnect between these traditional firms and fast-moving ecommerce retailers.

How the API works – Logistics as a Service

“Our solution is easy to get started with. You can automate shipping by providing basic info on what you need to ship, where to and from where via our API. We return the lowest possible rate for the shipment along with label, track’n’trace as well as booking pickup if necessary. Simple as that.” says Kenneth

More importantly you can use the API to real-time check and offer applicable delivery options from across all carriers for any shopping cart to satisfy your customers demand for convenience.

“Our API standardizes all carrier services, so you don’t have to worry about carrier products or problems when switching carrier; while still being able to offer specific services such as same-day, next-day, evening delivery or offering an optional delivery point at the lowest possible rate automatically and real-time.” he continues.

Investors join the board of directors

Helle Uth, Investment Manager at SEED Capital, and Max Niederhofer, General Partner at Sunstone Capital, are joining Shipbeat’s board of directors.

“As investors in ecommerce businesses, we know how important it is to nail logistics. Your customer likes your selection, your prices and has decided to buy. It’s absolutely crucial to offer her the convenience of same day, next day, evening or free delivery, including free returns. And it’s incredibly hard to do that with one or two carrier integrations – particularly internationally.” Says Helle Uth

Shipbeat’s “Logistics as a Service” API is in live beta in Denmark and will launch internationally in 2015.

The post Shipbeat raises €1.2 M seed round, launches “Logistics as a Service” API appeared first on Øresund Startups.