Tekes And The Companies That Don't Make It: The Floobs Story
Clearly not every start-up makes it, and in this sponsored series for Tekes we thought it would be good to also look at a "failure story" of a company that was previously on Tekes financing. We got the chance to speak with Kai Lemmetty, previously from Floobs, about his experiences with Tekes funding.
Floobs was a live video streaming service for sports clubs and bands, allowing users to record and stream video from mobile phones and supported video cameras. The company was started in 2007 before mobile live-streaming was even on the radar, and could be somewhat compared to what Bambuser is today.
The Tekes Bureaucracy: Is It Overstated?
Editor's Note: This series of posts is sponsored by Tekes and produced in co-operation with ArcticStartup to share experiences from startups about their funding experiences.
From offhand comments in forum comments, hackathons, and local tech events, I'm sure many first-time Finnish entrepreneurs have some pre-formed negative-leaning opinion about how the Tekes bureaucracy works. Without getting into a discussion on how society should support entrepreneurship, realistically there has to be some sort of balance between bureaucracy and free government money. With too much bureaucracy, the system can kill entrepreneurs time and crush innovation. But if the system is too loose, you then have "entrepreneurs" buying fishing boats for their summer cabin.
Where is Tekes on this scale and how should you mangage it? To get to the bottom of the bureaucracy, we talked to Joonas Pekkanen, who's been part of a few Tekes projects. He's currently the CFO of Flockified, who are gearing up to release a full-fledged version of their group buying service. Their teaser page proudly states, "WE'RE BUILDING THE BEST DAMN GROUP PLANNING AND GROUP DECISION MAKING TOOL EVER," which we'll cover more on later in the post, but first, here's our interview with him:
Flockified's Ticket Purchase Service Lets You Work Out The Details With Your Group
Right now, event planning services like Eventbright and Ticketmaster are providing a decent way to buy and receive tickets, but not much more. A new Helsinki-based player called Flockified noticed that if a ticket service had a "organize this with your friends" feature instead of the current "I'm coming or nothing" approach, they could provide a service to both venues and users.
GigsWiz Ltd., the company behind Flockified, have based their entry into the ticketing market on some data. Analysis of the ticket purchase landing page data and doing further consumer research they found that 90% of customers exit the purchase funnel after the initial event discovery phase on standard ticketing pages.
