Time is running out to apply for Seedcamp, so finish your applications and spread the word.
There are only 52 hours left before the application deadline of midnight GMT on Sunday Aug 12th.
We’re thrilled with the amazing response from all over the world with applications from Uruguay to Ukraine, but we want to encourage you all for one final push to try and be one of the 20 companies selected to join us and a killer group of entrepreneurs, investors, product & market gurus in London from September 3rd to 7th.
Good luck — and if you don’t make it this year, were looking to seeing you next year at Seedcamp.
Follow up guest post from Joel Selvadurai:
It’s been almost a month since I posted my plea for potential co-founders to contact me.
I made posts on Facebook and also sifted through LinkedIn, but in fact, looking at my list of existing contacts proved more useful. After many coffee’s and Skype calls later I have found a fantastic co-founder, Jackson Tan. Jackson is a ruby on rails and general whizz kid with previous works including newscri.be . Working with him over the last few weeks has already seen our idea Messagr evolve and change and I’m starting to see the immense the value of working with other (very bright) people. It was also interesting to note that I first met Jackson at OpenCoffee in London.
Generally, I think it’s hard to find a co-founder in London, but certainly not impossible. It is hard to find a person who is talented, personable and willing to give up their (stable) job to join a (risky) startup. Taking the leap and founding a startup is not as culturally accepted in Europe as it is in the US especially at such a young age. But hey, there have to be some people who start to change the culture!
Below is another great guest blog from Jane Hatton Finette of Elektronauten. I have also included her background at the end of the blogpost.
Expanding an Internet business further into Europe can reap huge rewards – 680 million potential customers, a secure and stable business infrastructure and some of the richest nations of the world are all arguments, which make the ‘International’ step a very rewarding one. But expanding a business geographically also poses some significant risks and can be a daunting undertaking.
Spending time on these 5 essential topics before expanding your business can significantly reduce the risk and costs; as well as increase the success rate of your internationalization plans:
1. Define the exact reason for expanding your business into Europe As obvious as it seems often businesses do not fully define and articulate the reason for expanding abroad. This can prove to be a fatal mistake: it is a fundamentally different undertaking if your reason for expansion is to serve your already existing international customer base better; or stagnating growth in your home market. Be very specific not only where and how you want to expand, but also be clear about the underlying reasoning. This will help you to develop a tailored market entry strategy and helps to set the right expectations to company stake-holders.
2. Define a realistic budget – costs, resources and time needed Defining a realistic budget can be one of the most complicated tasks – as you often need to navigate through literally hundreds of unknown variables. Usually companies grossly under-estimate the necessary resources (and therefore the drain on the core operations) and time needed. To get a better grip on this topic ask yourself what it would mean for your expansion plans if you would overrun your assigned budget by 50% and also 100%. If you find yourself in a position where these scenarios put too much stress on your operations try to redefine your goals and plans to shed costs and resources. Don’t forget to account for fluctuating exchange rates and different business taxes country by country.
3. Research the target market thoroughly Reduce the risk of any nasty surprises coming up once you entered a new geography by conducting thorough market research. Often expanding companies are surprised by competitors who suddenly evolve from areas not foreseen, or local requirements that could have easily been known beforehand. Consider not only researching the companies you see as direct competition, but also the companies which those competitors would also see as rivals. Understand the needs and requirements of your customers before you expand into their market. Make sure you fundamentally understand the legal and business framework in your target market to minimize the risk of costly surprises.
4. Understand the local culture and it’s implications on your business We might be a global economy these days, but people do ‘local’ business. People prefer to interact in their own language, conduct transactions through their local payment services, receive support during their normal business hours and work with products, which serve local business requirements. Look at your business from all of these angels and understand what it means for you and your expansion plans. Do you have all the pieces in place to fulfill local needs? Speak to your potential customers and try to understand their culture – how do they like to do business, what makes them buy your product, what they love and hate about the existing local solutions.
5. One step at a time Internationalizing companies generally fail out of two reasons: 1) Poor preparation and/or 2) weak execution. Time and time again companies try to do everything at once – often inspired by the pressure from the marketplace to be fast. As important as it is to be quick to market, it proves to be even more important to do things right and in the right order. You will not win any sustainable business if your international operations grow through excellent marketing & sales, while your new customers don’t receive adequate support in their own language and time zone. Take one step at a time, allow your organization to grow at a pace, which it can absorb and you too will soon be one of the many international companies who enjoy success on multiple continents.
Some other great resources to check out are www.ukinvest.gov.uk, businesslink.gov.uk, www.invest-in-germany.de/en/
Jane’s past has been firmly based in building and expanding companies; mainly focused in the online/IT/Software arena. She has held many interesting senior positions such as German Country Manager for Marketworks, Business Unit Manager at eBay UK and International Director Marketing, PR for the Multi-channel ecommerce provider – ChannelAdvisor. Jane has worked as a consultant for many years advising businesses on how to expand their presence internationally.
Becoming an entrepreneur for the first time requires conditioning yourself to a set of attitudes, skills and knowledge you’ve never encountered anywhere else before. You’ve got to be prepared to learn faster than any time in your life. However, being prepared for this ‘knowledge hit’ hinders many young entrepreneurs in taking their $bn ambitions to actually realizing them.
For those of you that are starting your entrepreneurial careers, you’ll find this list inspiring, immersive and essential reading, even providing comfort for those inevitable moments where everyone tells you that you can’t succeed. Here are 30 books I’ve read, which i think you should too.
Attitude These books will help you to get inspired, think big and refuse to back down when people say you can’t succeed.
1. The Google Story
8. Against the Odds: An Autobiography (Business Icons)
12. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity
The only way to success is to know how to fail. This book gives you enough fodder to never fail again.
21. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
22. The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand
29. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers
So what books do you think should in here? Reply in the comments.
Guest post from Tony Lucas of XCalibre Communications
Excuse the pun of yet another ‘2.0’ expression, but it does actually fit quite well in with the overall point of this post.
Over the past weeks/months, I’ve had conversations with more Web Application developers than I can count and time and time again, the same problem has crept up. Most of these developers have pretty well formed ideas on how to scale their application from an internal coding point of view, but vary from having some plans about scaling their application involving large hardware expenses, to getting grey hairs from not knowing how to solve the problem.
The problem really comes down to the fact, that many ‘Web 2.0’ developers are exactly that, developers not system administrators or datacentre technicians or network admins and with the cost base for building web apps becoming leaner and leaner as the market gets more competitive (with barriers to entry being lowered), this is not something people can usually afford to have onboard, until their application becomes a success (or is funded!).
This is where utility computing comes in, by having a pay as you go platform for hosting your web application, this then enables you to completely forget about scalability concerns, building the platform out, coping with sudden growth, expected or otherwise, and dealing with peak demand.
It also increases redundancy and high availability, as you are hosted using fully redundant systems, but at a very cost effective price, compared to the current solution of buying the cheapest systems that you can, without any redundancy.
Utility Computing is still in its relative infancy, but there is already a handful of companies offering a range of services, in both the UK (Flexiscale) and the US (Amazon EC2 & S3), and is a market that is going to grow rapidly in the coming years, with fast growing business expected to gain the most from it.
It also has a nice side benefit that a typical Utility Computing based application has between 50-80% less Carbon output than a typical hosting solution (based on our own internal analysis).
I’d be very interested to hear other people’s opinions on this.
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