I just found this presentation which says a lot of the things I stand for. Passion is the most important ingredient in a startup. With passion and the right connections, you are almost home safe. Of course you have to pick the right thing to be passionate about, but that's another story. 
Thanks Jonas for the tip.
Apply online at http://application.seedcamp.com. The deadline for entries this year is 23:59 on Sunday 10 August.
Make sure that you look at the application guide and answer the questions as short and concise as possible.
Feel free to ask me for help filling out the application.
Ok, this is a little bit late news, but Seedcamp has released the application guide for 2008 applications. The applications are due August 10 and I really encourage anyone with an idea and a great co-founder(s) to apply. Even if you are not interested in applying for the "competition" I think it would be good for everyone with an Internet business to look at the questions and answer them for your own sake. If you ever will be looking for funding, those are the questions you will have to be able to answer.
I think the key is to write really concise answers. Don't write marketing material. Write short answers that your grandma would understand.
Seedcamp's new promotion video interviews a bunch of great entrepreneurs and investors and asks them a couple of very interesting questions. After seeing the video I wanted to give my opinions on the matter from the point of view of being a fairly fresh entrepreneur that won the Seedcamp competition last year with my company Tablefinder. So here it goes:
1: What is an entrepreneur?
To me an entrepreneur is someone that does not consider work a burden. My job is partly doing exactly what I would be doing in my spare time. So thus I work a lot. Another key factor for me is passion. You have to see the sparks flying out of the eyes and ears of the entrepreneur as he or she is trying to solve the problem.
2: What are investors looking for?
This is obviously not the easiest question to answer for be but I will answer from what I've experienced works and what doesn't.
The single most important factor is your 30 second pitch. And the most important part about the pitch is that it doesn't have to describe all of your business. I made the mistake in the beginning because I wanted the investors to understand everything about my idea and why it was/is so great. Those type of conversations tend to be very detailed and long and complicated, and clearly not suitable for an elevator pitch.
Another thing I've learned is that the pitch is not about to create something that sounds nice and really smart gives metaphors on all of the cool functionality your idea will have. It is rather about simplifying everything to just its core. If you cant say your main thing in one sentence, you are not enough focused, or you are trying to explain to much of the idea.
So from my experience investors are looking for a really clear idea that you can express in a few sentences, and that has a big proven market.
All investors talk about that they think the team is the most important thing. And I agree fully, but the point is, if you and your team is really good, you still need to be able to pitch your idea. And if you even get to have a meeting with one of the bigger investors, you probably already have made a pretty good impression as an entrepreneur.
Your team is not always about bragging about all the stuff you have accomplished, but sometimes passion is enough. If really love solving the problem you are working on, and make that rub off on people around you, I believe you have come very far towards what investors are looking for.
3: How do you find investors that are right for me?
This one is very important, but also very tricky. It clearly depends on what stage your company is in. I made a big mistake, but got invaluable pitch-training in the process, by pitching Tablefinder to all of the big investors in London, when we clearly, with hindsight, needed angel funding. The problem for us was that the business had changed directions a couple of times before Seedcamp and the company was more mature than the business idea. In the end it is always important to have investors that share the same vision as you. They should be people that are well connected within your area of operation, and should be willing to help you grow your business.
An investor is going to be a very close partner for quite some time, so it is as important to screen your investors as it is for them to screen you. Unfortunately sometimes or many times we entrepreneurs don't have the luxury of being picky. But when I will do it again, I sure will put my self in a financial situation where I will be able to be picky.
4: What is it like to be an entrepreneur?
Now this one I know. And I can't emphasize this enough: it takes passion and a whole lot of patience. To be an entrepreneur is doing what you love everyday, and not getting tired of working. Many of my friends think I work too much, but is it really work if you love what you do?
I might not love every moment and aspect of my work, especially working without any income what so ever for 6 months is not the best kind of fun. But the rewards of solving a problem and building your business when nobody thought you would make it, that is what I love. The satisfaction of doing something that nobody else could do, and being respected for doing so is unbeatable.
So, in the video they talk about getting through "the first tough months". I don't think that is the toughest part at all. But the big problems come when you try to build your business after you have launched. If the business doesn't start rolling straight away, and you won't get funding until it does. That is when it is tough. But also the most rewarding if you can push through. Seth Godin's book The Dip was a great source of inspiration for me when things looked like we were out of business. We were in the dip, but now I finally feel we are moving past it.
5: What is the biggest mistake you've made?
I've made so many during the last 2 years, but the one I think stands out the most is that I wanted to do too much. I wanted everyone to have our solution because "everyone who eats could use our service", which is true but not really a healthy customer definition for the business. I also wanted everyone to have the best features already there once we launched. This ended up delaying our launch with many months. And now with hindsight, I would like to say as Paul Graham of Y Combinator says:
"If sitting down for a couple of hours to come up with a company motto delays your launch by a couple of hours, it is probably not worth it"
So when I do this again, I will launch as quickly as possible with one solid problem solving feature and nothing more. Additional features can always be added afterwards.
One thing I learned at Seedcamp was to think of "outcomes" rather than "features". What does the user really want to accomplish? And are we producing that outcome? To me it has worked in the simplification process, not only for features, but also for the pitch.
6: Lessons I've learned along the way?
When you are running with your startup in 200 km/h in one direction you are picking up a lot of experience along the way. The problem is that if you don't stop to think, you won't be able to apply what you've learned until you've run past your objective.
Having gone through a really tough period where I had to focus on bringing in money just to pay the bills, it was like a took a step back, slowed down, and everything became clear to me. Almost a euphoric moment when you get a weight lifted of your shoulders because "It can't get any worse" and that there is no pressure for you to produce results because people have stopped believing.
I never stopped believing and I feel I've been rewarded already. Everything I learned at Seedcamp and through all of my pitches I've made, good and bad, I can now apply, and start to pick up speed once again to get even more experience. Hopefully next time I will settle down to understand what I've learned it will be for better reasons.
I've already mentioned above many of the lessons learned for me. But I think one that I haven't talked about is trust your instincts.
I think one of my largest mistakes was when winning Seedcamp, I thought that everyone around me knew better about my business than me, because of their experience in other fields. And I thought it was all done now since the people around me would "make it happen". Nobody but you make it happen!
Meeting great entrepreneurs and investors has been invaluable for me and I wish everyone could do that, but never think that they know exactly what is right for you, and never expect that they should make any decisions for you. You are the one that knows most about your business, so try to take in the advice, even though it is hard when running 200 km/h, but trust your gut feeling about your decisions and stick with them.
7: Europe or the valley?
As I've never been in the valley I can't really say much about it, but I must say I'm envious of the entrepreneurial environment. As Michal Arrington at Techcrunch say in the video, starting a business in the US gives social credit, but in Europe, many people would look at you and think you were crazy for quitting your government job for starting a business.
This mentality is exactly what Seedcamp is about, which is also something I strongly believe in. We need to utilize and recycle entrepreneurial experience in Europe, and help each other succeed. This reason alone is why I took the initiative to start OpenCoffee in Gothenburg as there are not many places for entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs.
8: What are the classic mistakes start-ups make time and again?
For us, one of the main problems has been focus. As Saul Klein said on Demo day:
Find your mountain!
Meaning that you have to pick one peak to climb, and not take on all at once. This is very difficult, but from what I understand now, a good measurement of how focused your idea is, is if you can define it with just one short, clear, and understandable sentence.
Another problem on the same theme is trying to pinpoint your core customer. I mentioned this above, but the answer to the question "Who is you customer?" is not "Anybody can use this service!" but rather a specified demographic which you know a lot of details about.
On the May 8, STING's Innovation & Technology Award will be given to the top technology companies that apply to the competition. The winners will get a nice 150,000 SEK (€16,000) in pricemoney, but more importantly the winner will be direct qualified to the final of this years Seedcamp. Last year I was lucky to be among the winners, and I have nothing but good things to say about the experience.
When working in a venture capital financed company and trying to get stuff going really fast really early, the most important thing to have is a good network of contacts. Once you know the right person at the right company, things get way easier. Seedcamp is about giving you the opportunity to create such a network, whether you win or not.
So if you are a Swedish company I strongly recommend applying to both STING's competition, but also to Seedcamp directly.
As I have posted on before, the mobile social networking space is starting to take off. Now there is a new player who launched at the mobile world congress in Barcelona: GyPSii. They, as well as Tuurf and Zkout (two Swedish startups), are focusing on GPS-based social networking softwares for mobile devices. I'm still not convinced that I would use this, and the videocast of GyPSii below doesn't convince me either.
Google launched yesterday an API for their index of current relationships that exists on the internet today, ie social graphs. The great move here by Google is that instead of just giving access to other social networks, they actually index the open standards that already exist today such as XHML Friends Network (XFN) and Friend of a Friend (FOAF). These standards are based on simple XHML markup that as microformats are integrated in the site as meta information which I think really is how the future will look. It will probably take pretty long before this hits big but it is definitely the right step towards Social Graph freedom and also a step towards the Semantic Web. See the video below of Brad Fitzpatrick explaining it all.
I just came across these players in the mobile social networking sphere which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Nic at The Equity kicker linked to above has a good list on some of the issues that these players face and what they will need to succeed:
- Vastly superior functionality - and they are looking strong here - the web players don’t seem to be working hard to leverage the phone’s uniqueness - e.g. address book
- Easy to implement and use - getting over the java download issue - maybe that problem is disappearing, or they will have to use WAP (my understanding is that Flirtomatic are now pushing their WAP service ahead of the java app)
- Zero marginal cost distribution - each new user costs virtually nothing to acquire. Essential when monetisation per user is uncertain. This is what has made the web players work well and has been difficult so far on mobile. I think mobile to mobile virality and sign up could be very powerful, although my instinct is text and mobile web rather than bluetooth.
- Minimal dependence on the operators, in the early days at least. Once there is scale the operators will rush to get on the bandwagon, but you will almost certainly need to find a way to get to that point without them.
- A co-existence strategy for the web based social networks
Without knowing much on the exact technology challenges that are there, I think that the one that will make a seamless integration between the social network usage through a mobile web browser and the contacts in the address book will have a very strong position. Zyb has come a long way, but not quite seamless yet. Ultimately these players should be the key to solving the problem of people owning their own social graphs.
Some people think that the next step of social networking is going to be mobile social networking. I don't necessarily agree and here is why.
Social networking is basically your social graph. The power is in the social graph, but not the graph it self, rather what you can do with it. Facebook really just showed a little bit what could be done. And that was in a walled garden environment. What really needs to happen, and what the DataPortability workgroup (or at least I hope) are working for, is that people get control of their own social graphs. My network is mine to own, and I don't want to spend another month or two adding all my friends from scratch!
The next thing that is going to happen with social networks is that your portable social graph should be a plugin to new services on the internet. Think Facebook Beacon, but instead of e-commerce sites publishing information about your friends latest buys in your facebook feed, you would rather get recommendations by friends in your social graph, when visiting e-commerce websites.
One of the most important things to recognize here is that the Social Graph is not the only graph that could be of interest being portable. For instance, another graph is that one you have on Last.fm. why should it be their right to own my music listening history. That's my music graph! Or make a list of all movies you have seen, rate them, and interconnect all movies with similar genres, actors, settings, themes, music etc etc... and you have yourself your movie graph. Now if you would be able to apply it to a music store for instance, you could get a list of all Soundtracks that you might be interested in. Services that will allow users to input their graphs will succeed in the future.
The problems the DataPortability workgroup are facing is how and where people should host/own their graphs. Well going back to the mobile social networking. What would be a better place to store your graphs than on your mobile phone? Your social graph is already there through your address book. The rest of your graphs should be easy to collect somehow.
Any takers?
Last week something odd happened. Or how often would you say that two of your friends start the same business idea - separately - without them knowing about each other. One was started in Sweden, and the other in San Fransisco. I think we have ourself a match.
The two companies are Tuurf.com and Zkout.com. I don't know any details of the business ideas, but I do know that both are operating in the mobile social networks market. They are not alone, and reports keep coming in that the mobile social network market is going to be huge.
What is really interesting here is that the two companies have taken two completely different approaches to creating their businesses - one silicon valley style, and one European style. During Seedcamp we discussed that European startups are usually to humble in their approaches to solving a problem. That Europeans do not aim big enough, and on the other hand, US startups go super big with sometimes very crazy ideas. But crazy ideas are only crazy and funny if they are done with bad timing.
Tuurf has not yet taken any funding, and that is not because they can't but due to strategy. Zkout has on the other hand taken an angel round and are hiring at least 10 people from what I've heard. Tuurf does not yet have any full time employees and it is treated as a project as the founders all have other jobs or are still in school.
So what is the best strategy in this situation. Either you go full speed and work in the market and closely follow all developments in user trends, burn though a lot of cash fast to try and get an early piece out of a growing market? Or do you watch this market grow from a distance, and try and get a trend line on the direction of the market without following all ups and downs, and let others do the dirty work of breaking in the market?
As I'm all for the "go big, or don't go at all" kind of mentality my first thought would be to go for the more aggressive Zkout. But then again, I think this market is still a bit too immature for even early adopters to use these types of services. So, if Zkout are to come out a winner in this fight, their pockets better be deep, or they will run out of cash before the market is ready.
On the flipside, Tuurf might miss out on some key trends by not being focused enough, and might not have the manpower to scale up in time when the market is ready. Going too slow might be a problem, and is probably as hard to fix as going too fast.
I'm not that passionate about the mobile market, so for me I might not even be an early adopter for these types of products. But looking at this match in terms of business strategy, I would not want to miss a minute of the action to come.
Tablefinder
