Alexander from Facecontact, another Seedcamp 2007 participant, did some interesting traffic analysis on the Seedcamp 20. Below are his findings and takeaways. I would urge caution in overanalysing the results because several companies have yet to launch their products, 1 does not have a website yet, 2 are not consumer sites, and several others are revamping their companies post Seedcamp.
Four months have passed since the great Seedcamp event in September 2007. So we decided to make a comparison of the traffic data for the Seedcamp finalists to answer several questions: how they are doing today and what Seedcamp gave them in terms of traffic. We have used Alexa and Compete for that purpose.
Main results:
* Ten out of twenty Seedcamp finalists are in top 100,000 sites according to Alexa by the beginning of February 2008. Here they are sorted by current Alexa weekly traffic rank (Artflock , FaceContact, Buildersite, Tickex, Debatewise, Zemanta, Kublax, Tablefinder, RentMineOnline, Avenue7). The ranking above heavily depends on methodology, so please see more details for each company below to get better understanding and do your own analysis. Other Seedcamp finalists didn’t passed the “top 100,000″ barrier, however some of them have better Alexa rating than those who passed, but there are no more additional details for those sites.
* So far, there are no substantial differences between Seedcamp finalists and Seedcamp winners. Moreover, the two top positions are hold by companies, who were not selected as Seedcamp winners (Artflock and FaceContact ).
* We can see substantial spike of traffiс during Seedcamp event. Traffic surged around the time of the Seedcamp, but dropped back off to pre-Seedcamp levels. Seedcamp effect was at least 4-5 times less than Techcrunch 40 effect. 4 months later only 4 companies were able to reach comparable levels (Artflock , Buildersite , Tickex ) or even exceed them (FaceContact ).
* Through the geographical analysis of users we can separate those leaders in three groups:
o UK-focused companies: Artflock (UK – 49%, Germany – 17%, US – 8%), Buildersite (UK – 90%, Germany – 6%), Debatewise (UK – 96%, US – 6%).
o International-focused companies with leading US presence: FaceContact (US – 27%, UK – 13%, Spain – 9%), Kublax (US – 46%, UK – 17%, Singapore – 8%), RentMineOnline (US – 26%, UK – 21%, Spain – 13%).
o International-focused companies with leading European presence: Tickex (Romania – 37%, US – 28%, UK – 25%), Zemanta (Slovenia – 27%, UK – 18%, Germany – 15%), Tablefinder (Sweden – 32% , US – 22%, UK – 20%).
See detailed analysis for each company and more detailed tables on slides below
Below is a recap of the last few months from Mark Sorsa-Leslie, one of the Seedcamp participants in September 2007. I think he captures the spirit of Seedcamp, which is to find great entrepreneurs. He is working on Reavia and also taking his experience and knowledge to further another good business.
Seedcamp was such a great experience for me. I think the chance to meet so many great people and get an education money cannot buy was brilliant. I learned some vital things about how to build the business, position and promote a service to a target market. There are some things that will stay with me, such as Martin Varsavsky saying “I never wanted to save. I just wanted to make money faster than I could spend it” or Scott Gallacher from BSkyB saying “Marketing is the thing you do when you cannot have a conversation.”
Most of all I realised that having a product that you like is not enough…it has to connect with other people immediately…and finding a way to connect is part luck, part design and part sheer determination – it is tough to make that connection. If you can’t get others excited about what you do, you need to do something different.
So what has been happening in the land of a thousand lakes for Team Reavia? Well, we have completed a couple of sales and are busy delivering for our new customers. The sales cycle has been a little longer than we hoped, but the customers are really happy with the product – so I guess thats what counts. I think that Seedcamp helped us (Wole and myself) to understand that we had slightly different ideas about how the business should develop…for now it seems that Wole was right…so I eat humble pie and keep smiling 🙂
However, there has been a change of role for me. Shortly after Seedcamp I got talking with the Chairman of HammerKit in Helsinki, Finland. We used HammerKit to build Reavia, and I guess I started using my Seedcamp education to paint a picture of what (IMHO) HammerKit could be doing. He was impressed enough to ask me to join them as Managing Director, so I moved in November to lead this small company of 5 people that specialise in fast web application creation! The technology is amazing and it lets you do things in hours and minutes…and you do not need to be a rock-star programmer to make it happen. Just click components together – pretty easy!
I have now set about positioning HammerKit to grow and that means sharing the potential of this business with some of our mentors and beginning to move out from Finland. I met with Reshma in London and got talking about the idea that HammerKit could help to build prototypes for potential Seedcampers…after all you need to have something to show and why should great ideas be killed for lack of a prototype? It sounds like something we could help with…
Also, we just built a really cool service for a client called Eyezer. Its a mobile-to-mobile content distribution network (mobcasting network) that automatically optimises the content and delivers it to any mobile phone…and I mean any mobile phone. It is YouTube meets Flickr for mobiles.
If any of you out there want to hook up and talk about what we are doing then just contact me at mark@hammerkit.com. It was great to hear from Reshma that so many teams are really powering ahead.
Thanks again to Seedcamp…it has been a life-changing experience…and together with becoming a dad for the first time on 14th December (baby boy, Sakari, 3.7kg and 56cm) 2007 was the best year of my life!
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