MindTrek Launchpad Competition: Creating the next Black Swan?
Applifier is indeed on fire - they came out as the winners of the main prize (20 010€) of the MindTrek’s Launchpad competition. Press jury’s award worth 4000€ was given to Hitlantis and Intoloop took home 1000€ prize from the audience vote. General opinion among MindTrek audience and judges was that all pitches were of higher quality than in previous years.
Applifier
Jussi Laakkonen from Applifier entered the competition with a very strong case. Their cross-promotion platform helps Facebook games attract more users faster and cheaper. Applifier’s rapid expansion has awed a lot of onlookers: their userbase grew from zero to 55 million in less than 10 months (updated) 100 days and Jussi confidently claimed that the company has not stopped growing yet. The pitch was full of energy, can-do attitude and quite a bit of arrogance, all of which are definitely encouraged in any entrepreneur. Though in an earlier interview with ArcticStartup Jussi politely avoided disclosing how much revenue they are making, he made it clear that it is quite substantial. There is some scepticism around Applifier’s business model as it is easy to copy and replicate so should a different company enter the market with cheaper prices Applifier would be in trouble. Nevertheless, congratulations for winning the main prize - it sure is a sweet reward for the company’s mind-boggling success.
Hitlantis
Petri Kotro from Hitlantis claimed their service ‘brings together music lovers and great new music’ with an innovative user-interface described as an ‘ocean of bubbles that gives a joyful experience’ (the technology is reminiscent of Hans Rosling’s data presenting model). Nevertheless, their product is ready and is allegedly generating revenue from music sales. Hitlantis is in a tough business where a lot of companies have already become household names. One can only hope that the innovative content exploration would bring the company a whole ocean of paying users. Congratulations for getting the press award!
Starduck Studios - Intoloop
Petri Hiissa from Intoloop set the expectations quite high when he announced their service to be ‘the most awesome kids’ journal on the web’. We covered the company in September but few details were disclosed then. Yesterday’s pitch revealed that Intoloop is a social network built around children and their digitally-savvy parents and relatives. The company closed 250k round in January and acquired their first test users in August but the service is still in closed beta. The idea looks very similar to the revamped facebook groups that offer a plethora of features and have enhanced privacy policy. However, Petri explained that Intoloop’s critical difference is the timeline feature that makes it easy to follow and navigate all the steps in kids’ childhood. It remains to be seen whether that feature proves to be a deal-maker or simply a nice-to-have twist. Congratulations on getting the audiences vote!
Other companies in the competition were:
GigsWiz
Kai Lemmetty from GigsWiz enter the competition with confidence and swagger. The company is trying to bring innovation into the old-fashioned ticketing business starting with live music industry. Guys launched the service earlier this year, closed 100k funding round last June and are right now looking for a new round to help them fully enter the UK market.
Renderfarm.fi
Julius Tuomisto from Renderfarm described the company as a free and open platform for doing distributed rendering (turning 3D models into full images) online. Renderfarm relies to a large extent on volunteers who donate spare process power of their computers to other users of the system. Curiously enough, Julius said he does not want to sell the company at any point because his real ambition for Renderfarm is to create a new rendering engine. While the pitch was well-presented, it is not clear how they would attract the volunteers to donate their process’s power or sell enough subscriptions.
Savalanche Webstore Platform
Jani Lehtinen from Savalanche Webstore Platform seeks to bring webstores into social media, for now only to facebook to be more precise. Savalanche secured undisclosed amount of funding from Tekes earlier in the year and the guys are now planning to raise €0,5-1 million. With the service being still in closed beta and the first pilot users coming on board just a couple of weeks ago, it looks rather surprising that the team is aiming for such a big sum. Plus their concept is not new and there are in fact many competing services from US that already have thousands of users.
Time only would tell if any of the competing companies would become the next Black Swans but we can surely speculate in the comments below!
Photo by east_lothian_museums
great conference, great competition! Thanks Mindtrek. Congrats Applifier, Hitlantis and Intoloop!
Hmmm...
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22discover+new+music
MindTrek was fun - nice crowd & congrats to all winners (including Ympyra too)!
It seems that there are several teams, ideas, groups, businesses in Finland that could really become something - our "startup scene" is moving forward with a good attitude.
I am especially glad to see so many of the 'old-skool' ICT people becoming more and more involved in the development process of our cluster.
I hope that this trend continues, because in order to succeed we do need all knowledge (+ lots more) and experience we have in this country.
BUT I feel that there is one sector in this "ecosystem" that apparently lacks all interest in reinventing itself and wanting to become world-class - and it's the Finnish VCs.
We need you, our own Finnish VC guys! Please, wake up and start developing yourselves.
VCs have the problem that there's nothing really new and interesting for investments.
@Aape
Agreed! VCs - embrace the risk in risk capital and focus on carry interest instead of management fees. Midday golf and long lunches are over! We just might start to flag you on your behavior. Beware!
For those already pushing it we'd love the hear from you. For those thinking about it, there's a big potential growing on your back yard.
To take examples from the very recent past, Inventure seems to be on the right track with their investment in Thinglink. Even though its very early on with the new concept since the Thinglink pivot am really happy see Inventure having what it takes to believe in a new promising product.
It's great to be recognized by our peers and the jury!
A couple of corrections to the article:
- The 55 million users is the Applifier network's total reach of monthly active users (i.e. sum of all MAU from all participating apps)
- We reached that number in less than 100 days (not 10 months).
Congrats to Applifier. Awesome.
I thought the quality of the teams this year was fantastic. A real tribute to the energy that has been put into creating the next generation of successful entrepreneurs by initiatives like Startup Launchpad, ArcticStartup, Slush and the Venture Garage. Lets keep creating more great companies.
Mindtrek was sooo much fun as always. I love this conference.