Month: February 2020

#SixtySecondStartup

In this week’s #SixtySecondStartup, we spoke to Will Ross who is the Founder of Tendo, a skills passport for frontline workers. Will started Tendo to make frontline work more secure for employees and to make it easier for companies to hire, retain and train their workforce.

Our interview with Will:

What does your company do?

Tendo allows frontline workers to generate workplace credentials while they do their jobs, building a verified, portable history of skills and hours at the end of each week.

Why did you set up this company?

We started Tendo to make frontline work more certain. For the worker, this means improving their long-term economic security. For the business, certainty comes through having a loyal, dependable workforce and an ability to encourage employees to learn new skills.

What is your business model?

We bill businesses on a per user basis. This monthly charge is a way to offset the cost of workforce churn.

We think that there’s growth in this sector because: 

Frontline workers remain offline. By bringing them online, visibility of supply provides a major step forwards. We also consider this workforce to contain a massive amount of untapped operational and creative potential – we aim to empower.

How did you get your first customer?

By building a feature that removed an administrative overhead for a training provider.

We knew we were onto something when:

When employees indicated that they would be motivated by having a trusted way to generate and retain a record of their work reputation.

Our most effective marketing channel has been: 

Going to events where we can speak directly with decision makers.

The biggest mistake that I’ve made is: 

Spending time marketing to cities where Tendo can’t have a repeatable physical presence.

What we look for when recruiting: 

A willingness to experiment and an inclination to speak more in terms of immediate actions than long-term plans.

We worked with AIN because:

Angel Investment Network provide a clear way to signal company type to a list of investors, ensuring that angels can search for early stage companies where they can significantly influence growth.

Get started today and view pitches from a huge range of entrepreneurs around the world.

Behind the Raise

Welcome to the first of our Behind the Raise blog series! We know how difficult fundraising can be, so these interviews offer some tips, advice and insight into what has worked for different entrepreneurs.

For our inaugural interview, we are delighted to be speaking to Andrea Armanni, Co-founder of Mammalo. Mammalo is transforming the service industry by making it easy and quick for people to book the services they need. Through Mammalo, people are paired up with local professionals, making it hassle free to get the boiler repaired, hire a photographer or source a makeup artist.

Tell us about Mammalo:

Mammalo is a marketplace for on-demand local services delivered at home, where people can find and book anything they need from a painter to a hairdresser. With over 3 million people moving to cities every week, finding trustworthy experts in large urban areas has become much harder and very time consuming. Mammalo’s mission is to connect those in need with the right people that can help, and is set to become the go-to website where people can find any service they need, delivered to their door.

Why did you decide to raise investment?

Without funding the vast majority of startups will die. A startup usually means a company that is built to grow fast, and fast growing startups usually need to burn cash to sustain their growth prior to reaching profitability. In our case, we raised a friends and family round in the beginning of 2018 which allowed us to launch our first MVP in November 2018 and work towards finding the right product market fit. In less than 3 months, we managed to gain over 1500 users. We needed more liquidity to invest in marketing and tech development, so we decided to start working towards our first seed round.

What is your top tip for anyone raising investment for the first time?

It may sound obvious now, but one thing that we learnt whilst raising our first seed round is to be “Investment ready”. For some founders it’s enough to have a story and a reputation to raise funds, but for most it requires much more. Angels invest when they believe in the idea they hear, in the founders’ ability to realise its vision and in the market opportunity. When, as a founder, you are ready to tell this story, and bring some proof of customer adoption, you are ready to raise money.

What attracted investors to your company?

I believe what really helped us was getting the right launch strategy in place and the first 400 users within our first month. Then, a solid data vault with a detailed business plan, financial forecast and investment deck.

Andrea, Co-founder of Mammalo

My biggest fundraising mistake was…

Our biggest fundraising mistake was undoubtedly underestimating the amount of time and effort that was going to go into the fundraise process. Since we started working on it, we spent nearly 6 months on the fundraise trail before completing all the legals and receiving the investment.

Why did you choose to use Angel Investment Network?

We came across Angel Investment Network through a friend of ours at Y Combinator SUS as we were about to launch our crowdfunding campaign. As for every business looking to raise their first seed round, finding the right angel investors can be challenging and time consuming. Angel Investment Network was a great opportunity to gain exposure from the largest angel investment community in the world. Our pitch was posted to over 200,000 investors and remained live over a 2 month period in which we had a chance to talk to multiple investors and present them our vision and future objectives.

To find more fundraising tips, visit our learn section.

#SixtySecondStartup

Our latest #sixtysecondstartup interview is with Greg Geny, Co-founder and CEO of BeRightBack (BRB). Fed up of spending so much time planning weekend breaks, he decided to create the world’s first travel subscription service to make booking short trips easy. Through BRB, customers get 3 trips every year to surprise European destinations, making travel fun and stress free.

Our interview with Greg:

What does your company do?

BRB is the world’s first travel subscription service. We offer customers 3 trips per year to surprise European destinations for a fixed monthly fee.

Why did you set up this company?

BRB came from very personal pain points. I did a lot of travelling in my 20s and early 30s and a few years back I realised that I was spending more and more time researching and booking my weekend breaks. The root cause of this comes from the fact that the onus is still on the customer to do all the heavy lifting and as the market has become more and more fragmented, this research process is now taking on average 10 hours and is spread across 4-8 weeks. So not only do customers need to spend hours researching their next break, but by the time they are ready to book, flight and hotel prices have gone up. This did not feel like a very customer-centric approach to travel. 

What is your business model?

We are a subscription based model delivering 3 trips per year to surprise European destinations, for a fixed monthly fee. We leverage data to tailor the breaks to the exact preferences of our customers. Customers can also purchase additional services.

How did you get your first customer?

We ran Facebook and Instagram ads and got 3 customers on our first day. Whilst social media advertising remains a strong channel for us, we are now building our brand across a range of channels – from social, SEM and content creators to large partnerships. The latter will allow us to leverage synergies between BRB and established audiences in other verticals such as financial services, telcos, travel or media. 

We think that there’s growth in this sector because: 

The market has grown 29% since 2012 and is set to grow further over the next 5 years. At the same time, Millennials and Gen Z have very different expectations from previous generations. They love travelling (particularly city breaks), they value convenience and they want a personalised service. BRB meets the needs of this new generation by turning travel into a lifestyle. 

We knew we were onto something when:

We got picked up by major media publications – the Telegraph, the Guardian, Lonely Planet, SKIFT, CNBC and more and started seeing the traction behind the business. We’re grown 350% this year alone. 

The biggest mistake that I’ve made is: 

Not starting the business sooner, although I believe that timing is everything and now is the perfect time for BRB to disrupt the industry.

We worked with AIN because:

We wanted to tap into an existing network of investors to support our fundraising efforts.

Get started today and view pitches from a huge range of entrepreneurs around the world.