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£10,000 Award for Under 30 Entrepreneur of The Year
Shell’s social investment programme LiveWIRE is taking applications for “Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2010″. The winner of the £10,000 award will be announced during the Shell LiveWIRE LIVE! event in London on 13th October where various speakers will be talking about entrepreneurship, including Sir Tom Farmer and Mark Prisk MP.
The panel includes entrepreneurs, experts and investors, with 5 women out of the 10 judges deciding who takes the prize home (or to the Bank):
- Emma Jones (Enterprise nation)
- Professor Sarah Carter (Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship)
- Josie Emberton (UnLtd)
- Melanie Lane (UK Retail at Shell)
- Hermione Way (Newspepper/Techfluff.TV).
If you are or know young entrepreneurs aged 16 to 30 that have been running a start-up for up to 18 months, do not forget to apply before the deadline on 6th September 2010.
You can also apply to Shell LiveWIRE’s monthly “Grand Ideas Award” for a prize of £1,000 and extended visibility and support.
Founder Interview – Building an Online Network of 3 Million Users
Tell us about yourself – your background and education. How did you get involved in the web space?
I’m an advertising person by training, a journalist almost by chance and an entrepreneur by temperament… For six years I was the editor of UOL’s homepage. UOL is the leading Internet portal in Brazil. In 2006, together with three partners and an investor, I founded Brancaleone, a communication and technology start-up.
When I started working at UOL I was an advertising professional and a novice in electronic media and felt like a black sheep on a team of online journalists. It was the year 2000 and the Internet was beginning to break out of the early adopters’ niche here in Brazil.
“I felt like my role was to act as an interpreter for people who were new to the Internet, a kind of guide to the virtual world for the average user who was just beginning to explore the Internet.”
It was a major challenge since UOL was the main reference point for Brazilian online content at that time.
How would you say the web has evolved in Brazil from when you were the editor in chief for UOL in 2000 to now? How do you see it evolving in the next 5 years?
“Many things have changed since then. Web portals are still relevant, but Internet users have taken an active role in the hierarchy of content.”
Orkut (google’s version of Facebook launched in 2004) was also an important turning point on the Internet here in Brazil. This social network arrived in Brazil when lower middle class people were beginning to buy computers and, even more importantly, when Lan-Houses (internet cafes without coffee) were sprouting up all over the country. Orkut brought a feeling of active involvement and visibility that allowed Internet users to see themselves for the first time in this new medium. Creating self-content had a significant differentiating aspect for this audience, it allowed them to recognise their own identity by profiling and expressing themselves next to their peers.
I see this way of interacting on the Internet becoming more sophisticated over the next five years. It can clearly be seen that younger Internet users (children, pre-adolescents) are much more critical of content and features, and also much more involved in collaborative projects. So I look at the future with optimism, as a tendency to move from passivity – a maturing process – taking even greater advantage of the possibilities to participate, interact, criticise and build collaboratively.
How did Migux come to life – how did you come up with the idea, and what has it become? How did it grow to over 3M users?
Female Founders Pitch at Mini-Seedcamp London
Every year we attend start-up events and start-up pitch competitions, from GeeknRolla to LeWeb, and yet we hardly ever see more than a couple of Women pitch. It was a very pleasant surprise to see 5 out of the 20 start-up pitches be led by women Founders at this year’s Mini Seedcamp in London, which took place on Tuesday the 27th of July.
Not only were there 5 women-led pitching startups among the finalists, but one of them was only 21. Jessica Ratcliffe impressed the audience of over 70 web experts, investors and successful entrepreneurs while pitching her business GaBoom, an online swap platform for gamers already live in beta and getting traction, alongside her business partner James King.
The Women-Led finalists were:
- EDITD - The Bloomberg for apparel retailers and brands that forecasts fashion trends – Founded by Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts – One of the 5 Seedcamp Winners
- GABOOM - An online marketplace to swap and sell video games – Founded by Jessica Ratcliffe and James King
- MATCHIK - The first Crowd Sourcing Platform for Home Design – Founded by Joana Picq, COO of The NextWomen
- SCRAMBLR - A SaaS application that enables creative teams to have their own online studio – Founded by Jane Young and Andrew Webb
- SWEEBLE - A web-based self-publishing tool designed to help schools and groups raise funds – Founded by Sue Greenwood and Greg Finney
All other finalists also had very impressive teams and compelling concepts; there was an interesting range of startups, from very early stage/pre-launch to more established and even profitable companies looking for advice and investment. Returning mentors thought this year’s finalists were especially good teams, and all teams were impressed with the quality of the advice given by the mentors at hand – Reshma Sohoni, Philipp Moehring & the Seedcamp team attracted a very interesting crowd to this event, which made it a success.
On top of the quality advice given by mentors, startups also had the opportunity to hear an interesting panel discussion with former VCs turned entrepreneurs about the challenges of fundraising, led by Saul Klein (Chairman of Seedcamp).
Here are some of the insights given by each panelist:
- Avid Larizadeh – now founder of Boticca
“Angels are often the best alternative to early stage startups as they can be more active and give valuable advice. It’s very important to choose the right investor, and not just any investor.”
- Greg Marsh – now Founder of OneFineStay
“I would start looking for early stage funding with friends and family, and look for the good VCs with seed funds.”
And when asked by the audience on what is ‘a little investment’:
“It depends where you are. You can find many people in the streets of Palo Alto who will think $1M is a ‘little bit of money’ – unfortunately they’re very hard to find in Europe. In the UK a “little seed investment” will often be of around £250K. “
- Max Niederhofer – now Founder of Qwerly
“Fundraising is like dating – don’t tell investors you are looking for money, try and pretend you don’t need it.”
“Don’t create unnecessary overhead in your company so early in time – avoid VCs even with seed funds.”
Mini Seedcamp London 2010 has proven to be a very worthwhile event, especially for startups, as it brought some of the most experienced and creative web experts together to provide constructive feedback and advice to early stage businesses trying to break through. We’ll be sending announcements when the next Seedcamp event opens for applications.
Founder Interview: How the Recession Forced us to Change our Business Model
Bettina Hein is Founder & CEO of Pixability, a startup based in Cambridge, Massachutes, close to MIT of which she is a graduate. It aims to help people make professional videos in a real simple way.
“Our biggest challenge was finding a market segment that had a) a strong need for our services and b) willing to pay for them. We started the company to serve families but quickly discovered that our customers loved the service but it was ‘nice to have’.
We launched our service in October 2008 and luckily the recession quickly showed us that we were on the wrong track. I also founded my last company in a recession and I’ve learned that a tough economic climate magnifies the weak points in your business model and forces you to iterate faster.”
When the company started it targeted the consumer market, but recently it has changed its business model to target the business-to-business market.
“Our goal is to create 1 million videos with over a billion views.”
Time for The NextWomen Founder Interview:
How did you come up with the idea of your start-up? Were you always an entrepreneur by nature?
I come from a family of entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals. Pixability is my second startup. I came up with the first iteration of the idea as I was graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My previous startup SVOX, a speech software company based in Switzerland was a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
How did you form your team? Do you have a mentor or coach?
I formed my team by asking people in my trusted network to work for me or recommend capable people to me. I’ve never had a formal coach but I’ve been lucky to have very good mentors. I’ve also learned a lot from my co-founders and entrepreneurial peers.
How did you fund it, with how much money, and what is the business model? I understand you went form B2C to B2B, do you think you will go back to B2C at one point? Read more
The Growth of E-Commerce Inspires Many Entrepreneurs to Set Up an Online Business
It seems that every entrepreneur wants to start the next Ebay of….. And so we have seen a rise of online shops, which may be due to the rapid expansion of the web and technology industry, the easy implementation of online payment systems and the availability of low interest credit cards. As a consequence, not only is the number of online consumers increasing, but also the number of many successful and growing online retail businesses.
The future of e-commerce looks very promising. Eurostat/nVision predicts that it will only take a few years before the European population buying online increases by 70%.
“E-commerce penetration is currently around 5%, expected to get to north 15% – 30 to 40% for the most bullish of the group.” Investor Fred Destin
As online payment is now so common, many entrepreneurs set up the next online marketplaces and shops, inspired by the success of online luxury fashion retailer Net-a-Porter celebrating its 10th anniversary, and just sold for 350 million pounds and a creative publishing platform Blurb, which grew under Astia’s wings to a turnover of 45 million dollars.
The growing industry of e-commerce gives plenty of room for innovative creations, we name a few of the e-commerce entrepreneurs and their businesses:
Mama Tea is a webshop founded by female entrepreneur Anna Louise 
Simpson. As she struggled to find a tea flavour she liked during her pregnancy, she decided to create her own range of tea flavours which are now for sale on the website.
Founded by Matt Rutledge, Woot blends e-commerce and community and is centered on the different item for sale online each day. Although similar to Groupon and other daily deals sites, the success of Woot is translated into its partnership with Yahoo!Shopping and acquisition by Amazon. Read more
Founder Interview: How I am Building A Brand Online and Offline
Launching a product involves a lot of planning. Galia Orme, founder of CHOC Chick methodically plans for setting up her business, launching her product and building the brand online and offline. She tells The NextWomen how she does it. Her tagline: Love Chocolate? Make Chocolate!
Learning about the retail buying process has been a huge learning curb for me. Getting a meeting with buyers and getting them to commit to ordering our Kits has been my biggest challenge.
How did you plan your Business Set up and Why ‘Raw Chocolate’? Aren’t their easier products to market?
I started working on CHOC Chick in April 2008 after leaving my job as Business Development Manager for an internet marketing agency in Brighton. I spent three months researching the product, sourcing the importers in the UK and making and developing raw chocolate recipes. As my background was in internet marketing, my first aim was to simply set up an online business.
I then spend 6 weeks doing market research, looking at what there was on the market at the time and analysing who was buying and who would be interested in buying raw chocolate products. It soon became clear that there was no raw chocolate making kit available that was accessible to the mainstream market.
Raw chocolate products were mainly sold online and in a number of health food and organic shops and was very specifically marketed as a vegetarian/vegan product.It was considered a rare and expensive product and the market for it was indeed quite limited. My aim became to make this product accessible to all and not limited to a specific raw food market.
How did you position your brand?
I enlisted the help of a fantastic branding expert and we identified how we could differentiate our product and developed a brand that we felt was authentic and would appeal to our main target market of women aged 30-55. This guided the development of our packaging, logos, straplines and ultimately our website/online shop which went live in September 2008.
I felt that the way to market our raw chocolate making kits was to position our chocolate making kits as an accessible, fun and new way of enjoying chocolate. We stress not only the healthy properties of unprocessed cacao but also the creative aspect of making and discovering new raw chocolate recipes.
As a completely new product on the market, it is potentially more difficult to promote and market raw chocolate making kits, however the chocolate and confectionary market is saturated with chocolatiers and new ready-made chocolate products so the fact that there is currently nothing like our product available has proved to be an advantage.
We seem to have entered this competitive market at a time where more and more people are into home baking and making their own food so an easy to make chocolate making kit that is also good for you seems to tick all the boxes.
Our main challenge is raising awareness of a completely new product and I’ve attended many food fairs, trade shows and retail outlets to demonstrate raw chocolate making. The good thing that we found is that once people see how easy it is to make raw chocolate and taste the chocolates made, they generally buy a CHOC Chick Kit for themselves or as a gift idea and spread our brand by word of mouth.
How did you form your team?
In the first year of business I did everything myself. By year two, I moved to a small shared warehouse and had part-time help to pack up the Kits and help out during food fairs. In year three, I outsourced all the packing and distribution to a dedicated company in Gatwick that deals with all my online and retail orders. Read more
Michelle Dewberry finds Business Partner to Grow Chiconomise
Female Internet Hero and The NextWomen Mentor Michelle Dewberry, along with her new business partner and co-founder Vicky Zadeh, has re-launched Chiconomise, the one-stop shop to save women money on all things fashion, beauty, lifestyle and home.
Set up earlier as a newsletter in the format as the very successful Daily Candy, Chiconomise is now more focused on its website and has its own Daily Chic, which gives you the very best deal in your area if chiconomistas are quick, as those deals last only 24hrs.
With the new growth phase for the website, Michelle expanded the co-founding team with long term friend Vicky Zadeh, who is responsible for the financial side of the business.
Idea behind the relaunch is that with so many sample sales, high street sales, daily sales, online sales and private shopping clubs, the web can be a confusing place and finding the best deals can be a full time job.
Michelle and Vicky are doing that work for you: they check 101 different sites, visit the private fashion shopping clubs and read thousands of different emails and then pull all the information together to bookmark, shop or share with friends. Read more
Startup Interview: From MIT and London Business School to Founders of Glo Wedding Cards
The NextWomen Start-up Interview series looks at women that are founding and leading online businesses across a number of technological markets. We showcase the businesses of diverse female innovators, making them notable and quotable. Today, Taryn Westberg, a MIT graduate in ocean engineering and a LBS MBA graduate, and now startup entrepreneur and co-founder of Glö.
1) How did you come up with the idea of your start-up?
Glö was born out of a need that we had when we were planning our own wedding in 2007. Our guests lived around the globe, and we were planning numerous activities in Italy (from the UK), so the thought of collecting everyone’s snail mail addresses, sorting out postage, and collecting all the RSVP information almost did my head in. In this day and age, we just didn’t see why we couldn’t send invites and collect RSVPs online.
We looked and looked for a solution that combined beautiful email wedding invitations along with a wedding website and online RSVPs, but we couldn’t find anything that offered the functionality we needed, plus felt sophisticated enough for a wedding. My brother (who is a web developer) ended up creating a system for us to use and the response from our guests and friends of our guests was so tremendous that we decided to start Glö.
2) How did you form your team?
The core team is me and my husband Enrico – My background is in customer-centric business strategy (after a degree in ocean engineering from MIT and an MBA from London Business School) and Enrico’s is in finance and venture capital. I like getting my hands dirty and making decisions based on intuition, and Enrico likes to be an advisor and analyze everything, so there is a healthy ‘checks-and-balance’ to the way we approach the business.
Although we’re both technically-minded, neither of us has a web or software development background, so we hired an initial team of designers and developers to create the software and front end user interface (website) for Glö. After that, we transitioned to a global team of partners to maintain and advance the site and continue to build the business.
We found our team by asking everyone in our network for referrals and then going through an extensive interview process and reference checks. It is important to us to choose team members who demonstrate passion and enthusiasm about our business, plus come highly recommended by those they’ve worked with on previous occasions.
We also have very good lawyers and accountants that advise us and kept us out of trouble.
3) How did you fund it, with how much money, and what is the business model? Read more
Launch of WeddingNotebook: a Thinking Tool for Your Wedding Ideas
Nikki Clarke has just launched WeddingNotebook, her first venture in which her background in design and her most recent PR and Marketing jobs for ethical retail brands People Tree and EcoCentric, came in handy.
I created Wedding Notebook as a response to the lack of independent options available when planning my own wedding and having to juggle four small manual gift lists with different providers to match our personal style and ethics.
WeddingNotebook is the first site where couples can plan their entire wedding and gift list online. Free to register, couples will have their own ‘notebook’ area with access to a number of planning tools to allow them to explore ideas, plan and communicate their big day to their guests.
Nikki adds: “I think that every couple planning to get married should use it because it combines all these things wich you would otherwise keep seperately: A to-do list, a budget calculator, you can set a budget and stick to it, keeping track of payments with a handy tool, there is an interactive table plan, of course the guest list and you can keep a ‘little white book’ online with all suppliers’ details, payment deadlines…
With the interactive mood board, you can drag in favourite images from across the web to see your wedding style develop. And you can create a gift list from anywhere; online, high-street, charity giving..” Read more
Squid London: From Students to Female Founders of a Globally Recognized Innovative Brand.
The NextWomen Start-up Interview series looks at women that are founding and leading online businesses across a number of technological markets. We showcase the businesses of diverse female innovators, making them notable and quotable.
Whilst Emma-Jayne and Viviane Jaeger worked on a joint project at The London College of Fashion, they were inspired by the artist Jackson Pollock. It became the basis for their startup Squid London, of which they are co-founders and directors; their main product is a Magic umbrella. In only a year they managed to sell thousands of them worldwide. Tate Britain keeps coming back to Squid London for orders.
What’s next? – To grow into a globally recognized innovative brand.
The NextWomen talks with the female entrepreneurs about their entrepreneurial journey so far, the funding process, how to get a foot in the door, and the mentors along the way.
“SquidLondon is a creative think-tank. The cauldron of ideas is simmering! The goal is bringing industries together: fashion, science and marketing.”
1. Magic Umbrellas… How did you come up with the idea of your start-up?
Imagine it starts to rains and your ordinary black umbrella changes colour into a walking piece of art….
We thought: “How cool would it be, if you walked down the street, its starts to rain and your clothes changed colour”. So they got to work: researching, developing, liaising, sourcing and designing!
2. From Design Student to Female Entrepreneur and Co-founders? Tell us how you work?
We met at The London College of Fashion whilst studying their BA (Hons) in Product Design and Development. Our first project as a team we designed the costumes for the London Olympics Handover Ceremony in Beijing. With this experience of studying together we consider ourselves an excellent team to manage all areas of our startup.
And we believe that two heads are better than one.
With the two of us we are managing: Design, Research and Development, IP, Website, Marketing/PR, Blog/SEO, Production. Accountancy, Quotes, Sales. Its a lot, but that’s what a startup is all about.
3. How did you fund it, with how much money, and what is the business model? Read more
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