To show that this method works and create new opportunities for players who haven’t received a chance to prove their abilities on the field, Tonsser created a football team solely based on data from the app. They gathered undiscovered French talents to compete against 15 pro club academies in one of Europe’s most prominent youth tournaments. To watch such tournaments, fans can buy Barcelona football tickets.

The first game they played was against Paris FC, the partner club of the tournament. Arnaud Deffaunt, who is the Market lead at Tonsser in France, reported to Medium and stated;

”Before the first game of the tournament, people were expecting that we would get crushed…”

The team ended up winning 2-1, which Arnaud reported changed everything for the players and for the audience. Suddenly many of the players became scouted and the team finished 11 out of 16 teams in the tournament. To bet on any of those teams, you can head out to sites such as 벳무브.

”These players were selected through data and they created their own chances during the tournament. It was incredible to witness.”

Tonsser has since then also done a special case with Ingolstadt, where they handpicked prominent players in a trial for that club.

Tonsser has now over 600.000 players registered, and is available on most of Europes main languages.

The post Football app uses data to create a world-class team appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“Since the internet, you no longer need to go to Harvard to learn and be educated by the best. You can go to YouTube, masterclasses or see a Ted talk. We believe it should be the same in football where you don’t need to be at the best or most expensive academy to learn and be inspired by the best players and coaches,” co-founder and CEO of Tonsser says to Techcrunch.

Youth soccer players, who might look after growing feet with the right children’s football boots, use Tonsser to build their own online profile and hopefully get discovered by a bigger club. The Copenhagen startup recently raised a new round of funding to be able to expand to the U.K in 2018. According to an article in Techcrunch, the U.K market is a fragmented one, in terms of youth leagues. The app is currently live in France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

The startup has raised €2.5 million in new funding. Backing the round are existing investors Wellington Partners, SEED Capital, Arthur Kosten (Booking.com), and unnamed professional soccer players.

The goal is with Tonsser is:

“To become the de facto platform for the next generation of football,” says the Tonsser CEO to Techcrunch.

Read the full article at Techcrunch.

The post Tonsser in collaboration with Nike appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Currently football industries across Europe have a massive lack of structure and are struggling to track and identify players. Many tallented players end up giving up their dreams of professional football players because they do not get opportunities to get discovered. That’s exactly the problem that Peter Holm and Simon Hjære, two passionate football players and entrepreneurs, have decided to built Tonsser.

By creating a motivational ecosystem for the players, Tonsser have been able to mix crowdsourced and validated data, allowing the football players to own their identity, track their performances week by week and showcase their achievements. With the help of the service, it is possible for the football players to be in charge of their own success, cutting out intermedieries, which leads to changes in the football industry.

Currently Tonsser has over 100.000 players in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Italy and France with user retention rate of about 80%. The app has also already attracted attention of NIKE and some European clubs including Ajax Amsterdam that are interested in using Tonsser’s data to identify young football tallents.

The post Social network for football players Tonsser receives an investment appeared first on Øresund Startups.

The Town Halls – a grassroots movement

As with all other things #chpftw does, it is a ‘by startups, for startups’ initiative, made possible by the foundation that so far over 90 startups have supported. It is impressive how much that is achieved drawing on connections, contacts and volunteers. Not just the Town Halls, but also the VC arrangements, events like AngelNext, and the sharing groups.

As usually, it was an event packed with startup people, both senior entrepreneurs, engineers, angels and VCs, as well as those just exploring ideas. A mixture that enables a lot of knowledge to be shared.

New for this Town Hall was that there was a startup corner, with 6 booths. Exhibiting there were Audiocase, Mono+, Airhelp, Davuud, Usertribe and the Seedcamp Accelerator.

Also new was a job board, where anybody could post a job offer or request, using the analog methods of pen and papper.

Zendesk engineering insights

As with the other Town Halls the program included 2 keynotes, a series of short presentation by startups that have achieved something special recently, and a series of short presentation by community events or places.

The first keynote was by Morten Primdahl, Co-Founder and CTO of Zendesk. He shared a lot of insights into building a tech organisation and developer teams that scale globally, with offices in San Francisco as well as the Copenhagen, Melbourne and Singapore.

“We have built autonomous teams, working after their own goals and objectives”

He also talked about differences with hiring developers in SF compared to Copenhagen:

“You learn that recruiters in the tech scene are more like real estate agents”

– was his remark on the SF scene, continuing:

“In Denmark people actually apply if you but out a job, you don’t have to chase them down.”

He also shared insights into how Zendesk was started and grew. He talked about the milestone, and technical problems, they got from getting Twitter as an early costumer in 2009. And about funding, and how it was impossible to raise money in Denmark back then.

“Funding in Denmark was very dry. For a long time our live was about to get by as good as possible with what we had.”

Startup presentations: Bitcoins, Motorcycles, Football and more

After Mortens talk, 5 startups got 5 minutes each on stage. These were:

Tonsser – A social network for football, especially youth clubs, founded in 2014. Peter took the stage and talked about how they have grown to over 10 000 users, with a 10-20 % average weekly user growth, and a great 50 % active weekly users. He also mentioned that they already cover 90 % of all Danish football teams for 14 – 19 year olds, and that the next step is internationalisation.

Coinify – talked about bitcoin and how Coinify handles bitcoin transaction and exchanges. They announced they had just closed a new deal with a credit card service provider, to be able to provide bitcoin services. And also that the team has been expanded to 15 people at the startup now.

Nordic Power Converters – A startup that just won the Danish Tech Challenge, with it’s technology that enables a large improvement in power converters. They are focusing on the LED market, and can make LED lamps lighter, cheaper, and increase their lifetime. A great innovation, with a huge market, that can save both a lot of costs as well as energy. They announced they are currently 15 at the startup, and are looking for raising a $ 2 millions round.

Be My Eyes – The app that helps blind people see and has gotten a huge deal of media attention. Christian Erfurt talked about how they have grown to 200 000 users in 50+ countries. That they got so much media attention that they have held over 100 different interviews since launch, and the plans for the future.

Future Electric – Probably the talk that left the biggest impression. Jesper Vind talked about his startup, which aims to be the Tesla of motorcycles! He talked about his racing background, and the huge advantages electric motorcycles had over regular ones when it comes to torque, speed and handling. He said they have created a motorcycle without liquids or vibrations, with a top speed over 300 km/h and insane acceleration. He also announced that they had just secured and angel round, with one of the Podio co-founders investing in the company!

The best impression was of course the live demo of the motorcycle that they had brought to the stage. By far the most popular object for pictures during the evening.

Community

After the startup presentations, and some beer (with Zendesk’s employees handling the bar), 5 community initiatives from the region where presented as well. This included Creative Morning, Mindpark (transparency – I, Karsten Deppert, am the owner of Mindpark), Thinkubator and Design Thinking Copenhagen. All gave short presentations on how they are relevant or of use for the startup scene.
The Nordic Next event was also presented, by Michael Hoy. As the Nordic Next is an invite only event for investors, he gave it an appropriate introduction:

“I am the asshole standing on stage talking about an event most of you will not be invited to…”

Michaels remarks that the event will be held in ‘Malmö, the Brooklyn of Copenhagen’ also drew a lot of cheers.

Jens Karstoft

Final keynote was Jens Karstoft, who talked about his journey with Zmags, and about starting a venture and making an exit.

He shared 3 main lessons learned: How to become a market leading solution, how to get into the U.S. and how to exit the business. About how the grew and expanded to the U.S., he mentioned that it was not as hard as they believed:

“The U.S. is not rocket science.”

– Jens said, before continuing:

“We did it before we raised any money.”

Other insights to building a great SaaS startup was to

“A relentless focus on execution”

He ended his talks with insights from being acquired, and how there is a big difference if you make an exit to a private equity company or to one of the tech giants, such as Facebook or Google.

A great event

Overall, it was another great Town Hall meet-up. We look forward to the next one already, planned to be in June!

The post The fifth #cphftw town hall – Zendesk, football & electric motorcycles appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Kasper Hulthin is co-founder of the collaborative work platform Podio and Phil Chambers is CTO in Podio. With the involvement those two, Tonsser does not only get investment, but also an international experienced advisors with close connections both in the Copenhagen- and the international startup community. This is a strong addition to Tonsser’s already close connections in the world of football due to the involvement of Jeppe Curth, who is both a professional football player and a co- founder of Tonsser together with Peter Holm and Simon Hjære.

“Tonsser is like a real-life version of the classical manager game with you and your teammates in the middle.” says co-founder Jeppe Curth

Tonsser was founded early February 2013 with the ambition to make a global football platform uniting real players, coaches and clubs with real statistics and results in order to make football more professional.
Currently, there is no place for players, coaches or clubs to save and keep track of their own performances and history.

”We want to empower football players around the world to control their own football identity. I’ve been playing hundreds of football matches in my career and there is no online profile that conveniently merges my own history of former clubs, tournaments, statistics from previous matches and seasons. This is the reality for both professional as for amateur footballers.” says Jeppe

“Tonsser is challenging a lot of the assumptions or conventional wisdom people have had in the football industry so far. If looking at the music industry the back catalogue of music will be extremely valuable in the future and the same thing goes for the sport of football. We believe that statistics will be a currency of great value to clubs, coaches and players in the future.” says co-founder Simon Hjære

Tonsser plans to remain invitation-only while developing their product. Currently, you can request an invite on their website.

The post Football platform Tonsser gets angel investment appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Simon Hjære is co-founder of Tonsser, a new startup with online team management software, for networks of football players, coaches, teams and clubs. Johan Frederik Schjødt, is co-founder and CEO of AutoUncle, presenting used car information, an aggregation service and deal finder. And Simon Stubben is co-founder of BillyTracker, to help you track your kids using an app and GPS sensor.

Here are some of their answers based on their experiences with the concept. Check out the article for the full interview and all their insightful responses from their experiences (there is too much to capture or summarise here in this translation).

How do you understand Lean Startup?

‘Zoomed out… it’s the most direct way to develop a product or business model that works. But in everyday life, it’s very few new features or ideas that work as expected – nine out of ten things just do not work…..so, it is probably the fastest way to fail. And the more times you can reach to fail, the greater the likelihood that one reaches to hit something that works. ” Johan F. Schjødt, AutoUncle

‘….Startups try very hard to survive and navigate the chaos. For me, it’s about LEARNING to build products as efficiently as possible by responding to change…. you can stick to the old plan and walk the last 10 rounds out before you realize that you have failed. In a startup you have a lot of assumptions that ultimately prove to be incorrect. Why not learn from the mistakes as quickly as possible?’ Simon Hjære, Tonsser

‘In short, get certified business with as few resources (time and money) as possible.’ Simon Stubben, Billy Tracker

Doing ‘Lean Startup’ doesn’t mean you’re calling it that, but for some it’s part of the approach regardless.

How to use the Lean Startup in practice?

‘We have used Lean Startup to clarify everything from key strategic issues such as which groups we should focus on fine-tuning and optimization of products. But most of all, we use it to figure out how to prioritize what new features to be sacrificed blood, sweat and tears. …. for us, it is to be taken back to the state where you can suddenly see the product with a user’s eyes. I think that most can recognize the experience where you sit next to a user and to explain or show something, and suddenly realizing details, everything from typos to the illogical flows, you had been blind to.’ Johan F. Schjødt, AutoUncle

‘I would not say that we at Tonsser use Lean Startup directly…. but I can see that we still indirectly are very “lean” in our approach. In Tonsser we are very conscious about working with tight deadlines and test our solutions with users as early in the development process as possible… feedback boosts our motivation enormously when we experience feedback from dedicated users..’ Simon Hjære, Tonsser

‘In Billy Tracker, we use Lean Startup with our users helping to create the product, we collect their immediate reactions to the features of our app. …. In my opinion, we have not used the Lean Startup method from the beginning we first subsequently became aware of it. We, however, were great supporters of the method…. we will as far as possible get all processes “lean”, that also means that we need to get better at measuring what works and does not work.’ Simon Stubben, Billy Tracker

The concept: building an MVP (minimum viable product) validated learning and testing, meeting customer needs, and practical steps for a lean approach.

Do you have any advice on the use of the Lean Startup?

‘…test properly and do not shoot blanks! We have previously made mistakes in our tests, and it is like a reed blowing in the wind – imprecise and therefore unusable. One has to know what you want. Otherwise, the test goes in all possible directions. The truth is somewhere in between you as the expert and the user. ‘ Johan F. Schjødt, AutoUncle

‘I seem to see a hazard if one might be led to blindly abide by its users’ feedback. I agree with the importance of that one should listen to its users and it can often be invaluable. But it does not necessarily mean that you MUST abide by your users want. ……We also built an MVP that users have tested, which gave us some valuable information. However, it is a balance. I am of the opinion that ….. we should not be concerned that all is not perfect in the first place. But on the other hand, we also have an obligation to our users, which motivates us to push ourselves ….’ Simon Hjære, Tonsser

‘The qualitative aspect of Lean Startup is hard to handle. That the opinions of people who surveyed or interviewed, must often be critical…. make sure to ask plenty of questions. If you have plans to sell a physical product, Lean Startup may also be difficult to perform, since you may not have the product yet, or if the same customer groups live far away or have a situational use by our customers.’ Simon Stubben, Billy Tracker

What have you learned from Lean Startup?

‘Think big, but focus on solving one basic problem at a time ‘ Simon Hjære, Tonsser

‘…you do not have to spend a lot of money on development and production to the business proposition validated. Validation can be done by setting up hypotheses on its business proposition and have them validated, for example using an MVP. The good thing is thinking about the development of a product / service with customers, making it from their needs.’ Simon Stubben, Billy Tracker

Other literature you can recommend?

‘Switch, written by the Heath brothers. It is a much less academic approach to how to create motivation and commitment, which is a prerequisite for pursuing an idea, decision or change in practice. Especially when it involves other people that you depend on in the same direction’ Johan F. Schjødt, AutoUncle

‘ … [writings by] Steve Blank, who in his time inspired Eric Ries to write the book Lean Startup’ Simon Hjære, Tonsser

‘Startupdigest.com with all sorts of good articles about startups! And “Lean Analytics” which is based on developing KPIs.’ Simon Stubben, BillyTracker

The post The Lean Startup – thoughts from 3 Danish Entrepreneurs appeared first on Øresund Startups.