Startup presentations at #CPHFTW Town Hall #7

Sebastian Wittmann, CEO, LinkFire, Thank you so much for those great insights, Peter. My name is Sebastian and I'm excited to present tonight to you four local startups. And the first one is working on an issue, if you think about all the streaming services we use, all the different streaming services, how we actually link to those. Please give a warm welcome on stage to LinkFire, presenting Ricky. Ricky Mencher, Product Manager, LinkFire, Wow, there sure are quite a few of you guys. My name is Ricky Mencher and I'm the head of product at LinkFire. And for those of you that don't know us, we hope that you do in a year's time. I will make a beer bet on that. We started out about a year and a half ago here in Copenhagen to solve the problem that marketing entertainment content today is very complex. It's been consumed across a lot of different services and platforms and device types and markets. So we wanted to try to solve that problem for the entertainment content marketers out there. So we built an enterprise marketing tool, a platform. We can create intelligent links, LinkFire links. And as you can see here, there are a few of the services that we've integrated with. Our platform integrates with more than 600 music services now. I bet you didn't know that there were actually that many in the world. I sure didn't before I joined LinkFire. So here's an example of how a LinkFire link works. You can see that there's just one link that can service and handle everything. You can see a few different use cases here. And what basically happens is that you can create the LinkFire link in our suite and then you can post it on your different marketing channels. And then when a user presses that, they will go to a landing page, like an intermediate landing page. And there they'll select the service that they prefer or subscribe to. So you can, for instance, pick Spotify. That's what you use. And then we'll set a cookie on your machine or device. And then the next time that you click a LinkFire link, we'll know what you use. And then we can directly link you into your service. Cool. So that's pretty clever. While that happens, we also fire retargeting pixels and we keep track of iTunes affiliate codes, et cetera. And on top of that, there's a very sophisticated insights layer so that the marketing managers can always keep track of the performance of their campaigns created in LinkFire. Yeah. So we have a B2B business model. So our clients are, for now, the biggest rednecks. We have record labels in the world. The music industry is very polarized around a few big players. And we are really hunting them down. And after that, it's on to new pastures. But we are in a kind of unique setup because we also have to have a strong focus on the end client. So B2B and B2C is, for us, pretty tied together. Because if the end users don't have a frictionless experience when going from a LinkFire link into their service, then they won't use us. They don't like us. And then our clients won't either. So that's pretty tied together. Yeah. A few months ago, we closed a funding round. So now we're in the process of scaling up our entire operation. We've been adding a lot of great guys to our team. We've opened an office in Brooklyn in New York, in Williamsburg, where the coffee is great and the fixie bikes are many. Of course, we need to be present in the big hops. Thank you. And we hope to be there for these for entertainment and content like New York is, obviously. Yeah, so we started out in music. But we've just launched the first version of our film, Vertical, which will handle the entire life cycle from theatrical release to home entertainment. So that's great. And after that, we'll be looking to go into, for instance, e-books and other content types as well. Yeah, that's it, more or less. Short and sweet. We're always looking for talent, so if you think that you have that, you can just drop me a line. We are located out in the northeast. We'll also be visiting south by southwest, so just reach out. Thanks. Thank you very much. There are more than 400 million Instagram users out there, and if you're one of those who has more than 10,000 followers, the next guys might be able to help you. Please welcome Philip from Sponsor on stage. Thank you. This is not my slides, though, but I'm just waiting for my slides to get up. It's looking good anyway. Yeah, maybe I should just... Like that? Okay, cool. Hi, my name is Philip, and I am one of the three co-founders of Sponsor. We make it easy for brands to advertise through popular Instagrammers. Advertising through popular Instagrammers is quite clever because these Instagrammers are able to create high-quality content, but they're also able to distribute this content to a wide audience, their followers, so hundreds of thousands of people who are interested in hearing what this Instagrammer has to say. However, there isn't... We have a really good way of setting up collaborations, like, between brands and Instagrammers like these, and that is why we built Sponsor. So Sponsor is an online platform, and our product has three main features, discover, manage, and results. Discover makes sure that our clients find the Instagrammers that is the best match for their brand. So we match them up with... We have a lot of communication, gender, and interest, and stuff like that. Manage allows our clients to set up campaigns with hundreds of Instagrammers at the same time. That's a lot of communication to keep track of, something our product is helping them with. And, of course, results. When you have made a campaign with some Instagrammers, you can keep track of how the campaign is performing. So instantly, as the Instagrammer posts an image for you, you can see it in your results section. You can see the image. You can see how the audience responded to it in terms of likes and comments and so on. But what's really cool is that you can also download this content and reuse on other social media channels. So it's also a very cheap source of social media content. We launched this product in June last year after raising some angel money here in Copenhagen. And today we have around 11,000 Instagrammers signed up with us. They have a combined reach of 450 million people. Which is quite incredible. So I just want to round off with three examples of work that has been made through our platform. This is McDonald's. They launched a new sandwich. And they always struggle to reach a younger audience because they don't watch TV anymore. They have ad bloggers installed and stuff like that. Instagram is a way of reaching them. And that's why they're using Sponsor. DSP, Danish National Rail, they made this year's Christmas campaign through our platform. So instead of hiring a professional agency to shoot the campaign, they worked with Instagrammers. And it turned out really nice. Tense is one of our first clients. They are a sunglasses company. And they do like filtered, Instagram filtered sunglasses. So perfect match. They work with, I think, five Instagrammers. Reached about a million people. The content that was created generated more than 55,000 likes. And if you look at the money they put into this campaign, they paid 0.1 US dollar per impression or per engagement. Which in this industry is a very good price. What else? Okay. That's it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Well that's it. HR. Let's see. Anyhoo, the basic assumption is that every aspect of managing a company has significantly changed over the last five, eight years. Managing your marketing, your customers, your sales, your customer service, your finances is now all done in pretty awesome consumer-like software. It's all done in real time, and it's all done based on pretty advanced data analytics. Or at least everything except for the most important part of your business, the people, which is still run based on anecdotes, crappy annual surveys, and whatever have you. So essentially what we are trying to do is to take the guesswork out of managing a team. And we are still in beta, at least for a couple of days. So I just wanted to quickly introduce the team. Maybe some of you have heard a bit. About us before. But just so you know what is or who is behind Picon. So I'm pretty lucky to be standing here co-founding Picon together with Christian, Dan, and Phil, who I've been working with for the last five, six years building Podio. So essentially this is a problem we've seen. Building these teams, managing these teams. Podio, Gumtree, Quive, Songkick, GoToMeeting. Whatever. And we are now 14 people in total. 15 I think of today. Sitting out here just on the other side of the rails in the old DSB warehouses. And basically one of the things here obviously to Peter's point, hired a lot of good people in the beginning. Data team, obviously development, everything. So we can really start kicking this off. We were lucky enough to get a bit of funding just as we started. Kind of a friends and family round. And even more lucky, my friends are a lot richer now than when I started my first company 10 years ago. So Morten, Alex, Bernardo, Tommy, Doc, Ali, whatever they're called, is luckily behind us as well. In terms of Picon, here's one sneak peek. Basically this is the dashboard for Picon. And this is the dashboard for the management of a company to see this engagement of the employees in real time. Understand the priorities that is based on our data analytics engine. And see kind of the sentiment of the company. We launched it in private beta in August. And mainly for like larger companies. Or at least companies that start to feel the problem of managing people. And I guess the big news today is that, we will no longer be secret from Tuesday on. So while you know, mostly it's for a bit bigger companies, I hope that some of you at least will help us spread the news on Tuesday next week. And coming up, like everybody else, Peter talked about scaling. I think we're gonna try and do that as well. We are expanding our London office. We're building out the sales organization. And hopefully we will expand that. And we will expand the team of the best people in town. So if you want, come talk to us. And thank you. Thank you very much. Three pretty awesome startups already. And the last company is also very interesting. I think everybody loves wine. But my impression is investors like it maybe even a little more. Please welcome Thijs from Wiener to tell us all about it. Thank you. Hey everybody. Yeah, spending other people's money. That's fun. All right. So I hope most of you know Vivino. But I want to tell you about this. This is a question that we spend a lot of time on in Vivino thinking about. What happens when consumers know all about wine? Well, what happens is that you create transparency. Where there used to be no transparency. And you take the consumer who used to be the dumb part of the chain. And you make her the smartest part of the chain. And you put her in the driver's seat. And this completely transforms the entire industry that used to thrive on you not knowing shit. And when you're the platform where this happens, you become the friend of wine consumers all over the world. And essentially you are taking the demand side of a $300 billion industry by the hand and helping that demand spread throughout the industry. And we think that's a pretty damn interesting proposition. And that's why we're working on Vivino. Now, Christopher asked if we could maybe give something back in these presentations. And so the thing is what I just gave you, let's say the vision of Vivino, actually works with a formula. And I guess my challenge to you all today, or at least the ones who are working on a startup idea or are in a startup, that you take this challenge and you try to use this formula on your own startup. And it's a pretty simple thing. I call it the what happens when pitch. And what you do is you imagine. You start out with a question where you imagine a world. You imagine a world where your product is perfect. It's not just launched. It's not the first version. It's perfect. It's what you want it to be. And it's been embraced by the world. You're kind of done. What happens then? And the answer, that's then the tricky part you have to come up with. You have to come up with some compelling story that engages your audience and makes them excited that they think this is a better world. This is a world they want to get to. And they want to help you get there. It's very hard to pitch a vision because you tend to get bogged down in details when you start on a startup. But this is a structure that I find really well. A few things happen when you do it this way. Here I just want to highlight one. And that is that smart people love a riddle. So when you ask a question to someone, they will, even if they don't want to, even if they know it's a rhetorical question and you're going to give them the answer, they'll stop thinking. They'll try to come up with the answer. Which means they open up their minds. That's what happens when you look for an answer. And right when they open up their minds, you wait a minute. You let the question linger a bit. Then you give them the punch. Then you give them your perfectly well-crafted response to this question. And what happens then if you're successful is they'll spend the rest of the meeting trying to figure out how they can help you instead of shooting you down. So this is one of the things that happens when you do this kind of pitch. There are other things as well. So actually today I put out a Medium post on it. You can go find it on Medium. I apologize for my stupid username. It comes with the territory when you're an early adopter and you don't know if the service is going to take off or not. And you just pick whatever username. But if you're interested, go there and read more I have to say on this type of pitching, the what happens when pitch. Like Peter said in his keynote, this is the most important part. This is the why of your business. You're going to be spending seven to ten years on this. If you don't come up with a compelling answer of why you're doing it, you're not just not going to raise any money. You're also going to bore yourself to death after a few years when you've fizzed out of energy. So this is super important. Anyway, go read. That's it. Thank you so much.