On November 8-10, we had the pleasure of holding the 4th Seedhack – our biggest and most successful Seedhack ever. This year’s theme was ‘remixing content’ and attracted 100 hackers to join us for a weekend full of pizza, Redbull and hacking. Some of the brightest talents of the startup community from 17 countries showed up to take on the Seedhack 4.0 challenge, culminating in 16 hacks presented at the final demo day.
Using APIs provided by our partners for the event; BBC News Labs, EyeEm, Imagga, Facebook, Getty Images, Google, HarperCollins, Nokia, Thomson Reuters and Stupeflix – hackers were challenged to produce innovative products, all to be presented on stage only 60 hours later.
Located at Google Campus, the event kicked off Friday evening with inspiring talks by a number of corporates and startups. Gareth Capon, Product Development Manager at BSkyB, Ramzi Rizk, Co-Founder of EyeEm, Vinay Solanki, Strategy & Business Development Director, EMEA of Getty Images and Matt Shearer Innovation Manager at BBC News Labs shared their views on the challenging opportunities in the world of content. In another format, Nick Perrett, Group Director, Strategy and Digital from HarperCollins brought two authors (James Smythes and John Rogers) on stage with him and showed innovative ways of remixing their content. API presentations by the partners rounded off the formal presentations for the evening.
Over stacks of pizza, beer and Mari wine (good stuff), hackers mingled and exchanged ideas. After the Dominos-sponsored pizza fest, hackers pitched their ideas and quickly formed teams. And then, the real work could begin!
After a long night of hacking, teams kicked off day two bright and early with a gourmet breakfast – fuel for the long day of hacking ahead. In the afternoon, we invited mentors from Google, Twitter, Facebook, BSkyB, and others, as well as business angels to join and help the teams with their ideas. Throughout the day our various API partners were also present to support the hackers with API integrations.
Teams worked day and night to finalize their projects. Highlights of Saturday were a lottery, beer pong and the magic hands of Simon the Shiatsu Massager, who took care of the hackers. After a Bitcoin mining mafia attack, an electricity blackout and loud german techno music, the teams worked all night to finish their hacks in time.
On Sunday, teams presented their hacks to a crowd of over 100 people, a high calibre jury, and 160 viewers on the Seedhack livestream! The results were impressive. Fueled by endless cups of coffee, a fridge full of Redbull, and tasty catering throughout the entire weekend, the hackers turned 60 hours into 16 impressive new startups. The winners received Star Trek Enterprise Pizza cutter, a Playstation 4 sponsored by Getty Images and phones sponsored by Nokia UK. HACK YEAH!
Our team was truly impressed by the energy of the teams and would like to thank everybody who was involved over the weekend. We would also like to thank our sponsors who made the event possible: BSkyB, Domain.me, Facebook, Getty Images, Rackspace. We would also like to thank HarperCollins for sponsoring the drinks on Friday and Uber London for driving our hackers home safely and Twilio for their credits.
Here you’ll find the winners and awesome projects that came out of the weekend:
Judges choice:
Seedhack Winner: Oppozeit
OppoZeit – shows two sides of a news story
Team: Rob Finean, Florian Ratgeber, Thura Z. Maung, Thomas Lim, Ben Miles, Henry YP Ho
Find out more about their hack here.
Literatrip – Connecting people and places to their books
Team: Guy Nesher, Ilya Venger, Julian Kuntorov
Find out more here.
Runners up:
Last man standing: Triber
Triber – Visualizes and quantifies relationships between people and their followers using Twitter API
Team: Klaus Bravenboer, Edward Woodcock
Getty Images Hack: Picit
Picit – attach pictures easily from the web to your Google Mail via drag and drop
Team: David Duckworth and team
Watch their video here and get the app in the store here.
BBC Hack (Trippiest use of BBC content award): 3D Visualization News Content
3D Visualization News Content – shows pictures of News content in a 3D model
Team: William Rood
Facebook Hack (most useful app for after a hackathon): Afterhours
Afterhours – iOS app that shows you where to drink a beer after 11pm
Team: Oyvind Henriksen, Jun Seki
All teams that presented on Sunday (in the order they presented):
1. Quicklearner – learning languages with pictures
2. Afterhours – shows you where the next bar is that is still open
3. Literatip – connecting people and places to their books
4. Moodmusic – play music to your mood
5. Sokrates – memory game for kids with audio and visuals
6. Braintrainer – brain trainer app that connects sport images with music
7. Tunez – music discovery app that combines user generated videos with 20s audio tracks you to share and discover music
8. destionationopen.com – curated travel search with open destinations
9. Picit – easily attach pictures out of the web to your mail in a browser
10. OFDB – platform for aggregated soccer content
11. OppoZeit – shows two sides of a news story
12. Appp – helps users engage with content using various APIs (Facebook, Getty etc.)
13. Crowdmash – mixing content of an event to brands
14. Triber – visualizes and quantifies relationships between people and their follower using Twitter API
15. 3D Model of BBC Content by William – shows pictures of news content in a 3D model
16. Model Equity Calculator for Founders with Option Pool Expansion – helps founders to value their company and calculate equity
More here.
Judges
Bo Oloffson, BSkyB
Matt Jones, Facebook
Check out some photos:
We are getting closer to our next big hackathon and we want to share some exciting news with you. Seedhack 4.0 will be hosted in Central Working at Google Campus in the heart of East London’s Tech City. This hackathon will run through the weekend from November 8-10th and is dedicated to Remixing Content.
We are happy to confirm that we’re bringing together many big and innovative players from different industries to speak, mentor and provide their APIs, and help you hone ideas to jumpstart your projects.
We have some great API presenters who will be showcasing their technologies, including:
…just to name a few and more to come.
We also have some great mentors coming to help the teams on their ideas including experienced folks from the Seedcamp network and from companies such as BBC News Labs, BSkyB, Facebook, Getty Images, Harper Collins, Nokia UK and Twitter and Seedcamp teams such as BRANDiD, Crowdprocess, Saberr, Stamplay, Stupeflix and Poq Studio. Our gratitude goes to the Seedhack sponsors who are making the whole event possible: BSkyB, domain.me, Facebook, Getty Images, Nokia UK, Harper Collins, Rackspace and Google.
We also would like to thank Nokia UK, Getty Images and Moo for sponsoring prices. More will follow for sure! A big thank you also to Redbull for providing us with energy and to the young startup Mari for their delicious wine mix. And of course to Dominos UK for providing us with yummy slices and tons of Pizza. We would also like to thank Harper Collins who will be providing the drinks on Thursday evening and UK Hackathons and Jams for helping us promote our event.
It looks like nothing can stop us remixing content!
We are super happy with the number of sign-ups and all the feedback from you guys towards the entire event. We still have a number of spots available (especially for like-minded hackers!), so if you are interested in building a startups in a weekend, fill in this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
Seedhack at a glance
The idea behind Seedhack is to create new companies. As such, we are looking for people to come up with ideas over the weekend, rather than pitching an existing company’s idea. All roles are needed to build a successful company so we’re not just looking for developers but also for designers, marketers, product managers and biz dev folks to enable the startups to be formed.
The whole event is free and open to anyone interested in remixing all kind of content. We do however need to make sure that we have the correct ratio of skills so you can complete this form to express your interest. We’d love to have everyone attend but unfortunately space is limited so sign ups will be accommodated on a first-come-first-served basis. If we can’t accommodate you, we’ll let you know over email as we approach the date.
Practical details on the event
Seedhack will kick of with informal drinks on Thursday the 7th (free drinks!) and run officially from the evening of Friday the 8th until Sunday the 10th of November at Google Campus in London and will be a whirlwind weekend of brainstorming, hacking, product creation of course fun. The schedule of events will be further clarified at a later date, however the rough outline is as follows:
Thursday, 7th of November: in the evening we will have a casual, social get together for participants to meet before the event and start brainstorming ideas. location tba. drinks are on the house!
Friday, 8th of November: late afternoon Seedhack will start with talks, API presentations and then team formation. After team formation, the hacking can begin!
Saturday, 9th of November: hacking from early in the morning until late at night, mentors will be around to answer business and API related questions and provide feedback and guidance to your projects.
Sunday, 10th of November: will be our presentation event where all new companies will showcase their efforts.
Start thinking about cool ideas, tell your friends about the event and don’t forget to apply!
Any existing companies interested in being involved as mentors, sponsors or providing their API can get in touch via felix@seedcamp.com
We are happy to announce that on the 30th October we not only hosting our first ever Mini Seedcamp Vienna but it’s also taking place main stage at Pioneers Festival.
This is a unique opportunity for 10 selected startups to present their companies in front of an huge crowd made up of serial entrepreneurs, product/bizdev experts, VC’s, angels and startups.
The aim here is to accelerate local startup businesses through mind-blowing talks, a bunch of networking and immediate feedback. You only have to apply here to be part of a great event and take this unique opportunity to get big exposure for your startup. Deadline for applications is midnight 14th of October. The only question now is – are you ready to get roasted and take the challenge of presenting on the big stage? At Mini Seedcamp Vienna we’ll be joined by Dave McClure, founder of 500Startups who’ll be moderating the session together with Philipp Moehring.
As always at Seedcamp, we’re on the lookout for hugely ambitious founders who think BIG and whose aim is to disrupt the status quo with their cutting edge technologies and business ideas.
Local winners will have the opportunity to participate in Seedcamp Week Berlin taking place in November. Here you will spend 4 days in Berlin with the Seedcamp Team and meet over 150 of our mentors. At Seedcamp Week Berlin the next members to join the Seedcamp Family will be decided. From our side, Philipp will be in town to answer all the questions you have about Seedcamp, our process, and how to get involved.
In November we are hosting the 4th version of Seedhack at our headquarter Campus in the heart of London’s Tech City. Our past Seedhacks have focused on Fintech, and Fashion and ecommerce. This hackathon will run through the whole weekend from November 8-10th and is dedicated to remixing content.
Seedhack vers. 4.0 is focusing on how disruption could be caused in the space of user generated content. With an increasing amount of music uploaded, photos shared, videos watched and checkins made, problems and constraints are often found when remixing content. We are seeking to tackle this problem!
For everyone who has not attended one of our hackathons before, we are offering all participants help on creating hacks by providing a load of APIs, mentors and inspiring talks throughout the event. We would like to invite you to be part of an exciting weekend where we are planning to create outside the box hacks, disruptive ideas, innovations, cool and fun products.
If you already have an idea – great! If you don’t – not to worry, you will meet many inspiring and talented people that will get your imagination going, and the ‘what if?’ questions flowing. We are looking for developers, however people with UX design, marketers, biz dev, and creative minds to get involved.
On the API front we are planning to have numerous partners and we are open to bring in APIs varying from music to photo. Keep an eye on the Seedhack Twitter account for more API announcements, including a few big names that we think you may have heard of! Updates will follow.
At the end of an exhausting weekend full of coding, pizza and energy drinks you’ve got the chance to present your hacks on stage and get feedback from our high class judges (TBA soon). The winning teams will get not only fame but fun awards. Stay tuned!
In order to get the optimal ratio of skills to form good and strong teams, we ask you to fill out this form, and express your interest in the topic. We would love to have everyone, however we do have limited space, so please make sure you stand out in the application form to get a space! We will let you know by the 25th October if you are one of the participants in Seedhack November 2013.
Interested in getting involved on an API or sponsor level, please give us a shout!
The importance of feedback can at times be worth more to an entrepreneur than actual funding. Getting advice, mentoring and in-the-flesh experience from presenting your business to an audience made up of founders, developers, and investors is vital feedback for any entrepreneur. This is – partly – what Seedcamp Week is about.
Anirvan from InsightSplash has written about his experience at Seedcamp Week London in September 2013. Anirvan shares some very valuable ‘do’s and don’ts’ about his team’s experience – all very valuable to teams contemplating applying for Seedcamp Week London 2014.
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In early 2013, we decided to set about building the Google Analytics of hotel operations auditing and quality management. At the heart of our vision was the conviction that if you can reengineer the feedback loop to make it frictionless, the volume & quality of guest feedback you can generate can approach clickstream data (used in A/B testing) in its depth, breadth and potency.
To test that belief, in July this year, my co-founder and I flew to Johannesburg to launch our first pilot with the Crowne Plaza. Until this point, entrepreneurial bravado aside, we had a fundamental fear: what if low friction did not drive exponentially higher response throughput? What if we were fundamentally, foolishly wrong?10 days into the pilot and we knew that we were not wrong. We were generating response rates of 70% per week and outperforming the incumbent feedback system by 1000% – this with a first cut, unoptimised, unincentivised version of our feedback tool. Armed with this data, we applied to Seedcamp and in a week we had our answer. We had made it to the final!
We did not win though, so the rest of this blog is a reflection on our failed attempt. Read in that light.
(Note: It is written for the benefit of other, future applicants who presumably would want as much detail as possible (we did). If you are looking for a quick read, this may not be for you.)
To prepare for the event, we did three things. One, we created a business case (spreadsheet numbers), two, we created the pitch deck and three, we created a longer, leave-behind deck. We also looked at a number of great instructional videos on the art of pitching.
If we had to do it again…
With the benefit of hindsight (& purely keeping Seedcamp week in mind), we could have spared ourselves a lot of this work:
What we didn’t do but should have done: spent far more time preparing for the Q&A.
Before Seedcamp, the Q&A ‘threat’ we had in mind was the Curveball – i.e. a fundamental weakness we had failed to spot and had no real answer to. We were both fearful and hopeful about landing a curveball – fearful because we didn’t want to look stupid but hopeful that if a curveball did land, the insight would be well worth any embarrassment and dramatically improve our odds of success.
It turned out, this was the wrong mental frame. No curveballs manifested but there were plenty of bread and butter questions about entry barriers, scalability, team vs. problem fit, etc. that we did not do full justice to.
In theory these should have been simple and some of them were. But when you breathe a startup 24/7, you accumulate a body of arguments and counter arguments and counter counter arguments as to the pros and cons of your startup. To distill that into concise, compressed logic under pressure can be hard if you haven’t pre-framed your answers. The problem is not that you don’t have an answer but rather that you often have more than one – selecting the right one can be hard.
A better mental frame would have been to treat the Q&A as a behavioural competency interview. If you have been through one, you will know that the trick to preparing for these is to mine your CV in advance to pick up one example for each anticipated question. We should have done this and we didn’t.
During the Seedcamp week, we pitched 5 times in total, each pitch lasting 3 minutes. Here is what we discovered along the way
1. Do Tell A Story But Choose The Right Story To Tell: InsightSplash is a 2-sided concept; we make it easier for hotel guests to provide feedback and we then mine that feedback for insight. Our pitch told the story of how we take away the pain for those guests. Went down like a lead balloon. We were told that we were harping on the obvious. In the next iteration, we took away the story element altogether and that landed even flatter – people told us without a story, it was hard to stay interested in our pitch. We got it right on the third iteration when we figured that we had to tell a story but from the POV of the hotel (who would pay us) not the customer.
The lesson here is that you should tell a story from the perspective of the entity to whom you add the most value. In our case, no hotel guest complains that she can’t give as much feedback as she would like whereas hotels would love to receive far more feedback than they can generate. So even though our customer engagement metrics are pretty incredible, it makes sense to tell the story from the hotel’s perspective, not the hotel guest’s. It is kind of obvious in hindsight but it really wasn’t at the time.
2. It is not the investor’s job to place herself in your shoes: 70% response rate is unheard of. Generating tens of thousands of data points per hotel is unheard of. We were convinced that those metrics alone would lead to an Aha! moment. They didn’t. They were relevant of course but they proved nowhere as conclusive as we expected them to be. With hindsight, this was almost certainly because we were drawing on context that the investors lacked. There was also an element of egotism on our side – these metrics were the crown jewels of our journey so far. How could they not be the centrepiece of our pitch? How could they not resonate with other people?
The lesson I would draw is do not assume that proof points that resonate with you will automatically resonate with investors. Try out your proof points in advance before you work them into your pitch.
3. Practice Your Pitch 50 times Like They Tell You To? Yes. And then some. And then some more.
We found these incredibly valuable and scarcely believable that we should have got this for free (thank you, Seedcamp). Things we learned:
1. Control your sales instinct By default you will want to convince people how wonderful you are and that is OK up to a point, especially if you are talking to a mentor with relevant experience who could be a source of sales leads. Just make sure you ask enough questions to learn from these sessions, not just sell.
2. But do be alert to sales opportunities Seedcamp generated 5 high quality sales leads that converted into ongoing sales conversations for us. More actually if you count sales leads that proved to be dead ends (for now). When I say high quality, I absolutely mean high quality; the kind of leads that on our own would have taken us months to crack. Especially if you are a B2B startup, you have to know that Seedcamp can do this for you and seek out the mentors with the right industry background so you can drive this pro-actively.
3. There is negative feedback and there is negative feedback There are two kinds. There is negative feedback that picks up on issues you are already aware of and are actively working on. And there is negative feedback that is based on issues you were not aware of. You need to be open to both but handle them differently.
For the first, watch out for nuances that are incremental to your understanding of the problem space but be aware that the bulk of the criticism may be based on an inadequate understanding of the journey you have been travelling on. E.g. if a mentor says X is incredibly hard to achieve, it is pause-worthy if you thought it was only moderately hard or easy. But if you were fully aware that it is incredibly hard and were actively innovating to deal with the hardness of X then that hardness is a positive, not a negative and you should not let a mentor convince you otherwise.
As for the second, when you find a mentor who after barely – say 15 minutes – of reflection about your start up can identify something unique that you have failed to spot, well grab that mentor and never let her go. Seriously, mentors and mentoring moments like these are what made Seedcamp so special for us.
With the exception of Monday and Tuesday, there were after-session parties on all the other days. Keeping in mind that attending these parties has an opportunity cost when you are sleepless and running on fumes, this is what we realised.
1. Evening Party On Founder’s Day Very high signal to noise ratio. Attend and attend till late. Every third person you meet will be a founder that you can learn from so utterly worth the return on effort.
2. Evening Party On Product Day Poor Signal To Noise Ratio. The event had a mixed attendance with many people who were neither founders nor investors and it is too much work to figure out who is who. If you are sleep deprived, this would be an easy event to miss. I walked out after 30 minutes.
3. Evening Party On Investor’s Day Final event in the Seedcamp week so absolutely worth attending. Lots of investors around plus first real chance in the week to let down your hair and fraternise with your co-applicants
Fantastic experience that we absolutely loved. It is a bummer that we didn’t win but then again we got so much out of the week itself that it is hard to look back at the week as anything but time well spent. If you are a startup considering whether to apply, don’t hesitate. Just do it.
Mini Seedcamp Lisbon has historically displayed great and talented teams, that have joined the Seedcamp family: Hole 19, CrowdProcess, Qamine, and SimpleTax. We are looking very much forward to partnering with Beta-i to host Mini Seedcamp Lisbon 2013.
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Guess what? Seedcamp has already chosen the 12 startup participants of the Mini Seedcamp Lisbon at the Beta-I headquarters.
These 12 lucky ones are going to be accelerated up through master classes, networking and immediate feedback to their pitches from the Seedcamp team and international investors on September 26th at Central Station. This is going to be huge!
Find out more about the top 12:
Beta-i, a non-profit organization promoting entrepreneurship and innovation, plays a key role on bringing Seedcamp to Lisbon. Beta-i is organizing Explorers Festival where the brightest founders, artists, designers, astronauts, social entrepreneurs, big wave surfers and the most amazing explorers will meet in Lisbon, November 2013. Check it out Explores Festival!
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