Winning startups: Where are they now?

Most of the projects of technological entrepreneurs are united by one detail - they need money (well, or their founders believe they are needed): for development, product improvement, hiring new people, paying for hosting in AWS, etc. More or less promising startups at an early stage, money, in general, offer almost at every turn all sorts of well-wishers: investors, incubators, accelerators, banks with special credit programs and others. Well, FFF has not been canceled.

Another option to get at least small, but useful money is to participate in startups contests. Here, in addition to money, you can get increased attention from the same investors, the media and potential customers, the business for small is to take a prize.

However, the average visitor to conferences, where competitions among startups are often held, usually forgets about the winners within a month or two, except for cases when such visitor becomes a client of one of the startups. And it is completely in vain: sometimes it makes sense to ask how are the projects that have won prizes in competitions in recent years.
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I talked to the winners of IDCEE 2010–2012 (whom I managed to reach) and asked how they actually had business and how their start-ups had a victory in competitions.

QuoteRoller, second place at IDCEE 2011

This startup, originally from Belarus, is engaged in such an ungrateful work as electronic document management, or rather, the formation of commercial proposals through an online interface. Two years ago, the team took second place in the IDCEE competition, and just a few months ago, it raised the round by $ 655 thousand to promote business in the United States.

Nikita Mikado, the founder of QuoteRoller, spoke briefly and succinctly about the significance of competition in a startup’s life and what is happening with the company now:

“IDCEE really helped our team - we just started to work, the product was shit, but recognition helped justify all the nerves, sweat and blood spent on development.

1. We went self-sustaining in January, raised $ 655,000 and moved marketing and sales to San Francisco.

2. We (almost) launched a new product, PandaDoc.

3. We grow and hire new people! ”

Kuznech, IDCEE 2012 winner

Last year, the Russian Kuznech won the start-up competition (it's a shame, but a fact: in the three years of the Kiev conference, only one Ukrainian project, ThickButtons, won a prize). Its product is an image indexing technology that allows for very fast search by them. It was planned to use it, for example, to search for similar products in online stores.

Last year, I spoke with the head of the company, Mikhail Pogrebnyak, when preparing an article for The Next Web , so I can quote him here. According to Pogrebnyak, “participation in such events and competitions is a good school for making presentations and selling companies to potential customers.” Pogrebnyak also noted that “about 20 venture funds requested our company profile and other documents” and “about 100-150 new users registered demo accounts within a few days after the conference”.

However, the CEO of the startup Kuznech did not forget to remind that contests are not the main thing:

“Winning the competition is important as part of a success story. This conference is well known, and winning it increases the company's fame on the Internet. However, from a business point of view, this does not matter. In addition, the victory attracts investors and journalists. "

RealPad, third place at IDCEE 2012

This Czech startup has taken away € 5,000 from last year’s conference for the development of an iPad application for agents and real estate agencies (I haven’t seen agents with iPads yet, but apparently they exist). It allows, in particular, to conduct virtual presentations of apartments for clients, to broadcast video from the construction site, to create photo galleries and all that jazz.

The word CEO of this startup Marian Shkvarek:

“Participation in IDCEE has changed a lot for us. Thanks to the information gathered and new acquaintances, we have expanded our activities to a new market for us - Ukraine. ”

A year after the conference, the company is thriving - in any case, Shkvarek says:

“We started working in April 2012 in the Czech Republic. After a year and a half, our team of eight people has dozens of licenses sold and several corporate clients. In addition, we are self-sufficient in both the Czech Republic and Ukraine. We recently introduced a new product, and next year we plan to enter new markets. ”

Flocktory, second place at IDCEE 2012

The idea of ​​a startup Flocktory is a referral marketing service for companies, with the help of which they can communicate with users via social networks and motivate the latter to share company experiences with friends.

Simon Project, one of the founders of Flocktory, told what the company had been doing during the last year:

“Flocktory is growing rapidly, after last year’s IDCEE, we went through several significant milestones in development. First, we raised $ 1.5 million in a round of A-series financing from Digital Venture Partners, thanks to which we expanded our team and invested money in product development. In addition, we have entered into agreements with the largest brands in Russia; Our customers include Groupon, Lamoda, S7, Utkonos, Svyaznoy, Home Credit Bank and more than 500 other companies. ”

Winning the start-up competition at the conference was "a turning point in the history of the development of Flocktory," said the Project:

“Thanks to participation and winning the competition, we were able to raise investments of $ 1.5 million. In addition, at IDCEE we were able to hone the company's presentation and get recognition of the value of the product.”

MixGar, IDCEE 2011 Winner

Hungarian service that generates music playlists in public places, focusing on the preferences of visitors, received € 6,000 two years ago and all that is attached to the victory in such a competition.

From the letter of the CEO of the startup Gerzhon Khuzhar:

“Winning IDCEE 2011 not only gave us useful feedback, but also helped attract investments and start a real business.”

In 2012, Phoenix Investment Group invested € 65,000 in MixGar, which apparently inspired the team. Plans for the future, as usual, hulk:

“After winning IDCEE, we focused on the main thing - on the product. Now we offer a service that has the same capabilities as the competitors, but surpasses them in everything related to sociality, interactivity and voting. In addition, we offer small utilities such as cross-fading, loudness normalization, and manual song selection.

MixGar is firmly on its feet in Hungary. Among our clients are the largest representatives of such segments as restaurants, bars, cafes and even shops.

Now we are adding an “iron” part to our product in order to negotiate with large corporations and ensure faster sales growth. We believe that with our proposal we are ready to enter the United States and such major European cities as London and Amsterdam. ”

Zingaya, first place at IDCEE 2010

The “oldest” winner in this review is Zingaya, which made a service for websites, allowing their users to contact customer support in one click. Leader and one of the founders of Zingaya, Aleksey Ailarov, says that this victory “helped us to believe in what we are doing, even more than before,” and adds that “at that moment the prize was also very relevant.”

A year after the conference, Esther Dyson and a group of private investors from Russia invested $ 1.15 million in the project (for comparison, the prize winner at the conference in 2010 was € 6,000). Today, the company is working hard in several directions, says Aylarov:

“The company is doing well, we already have more than 650 customers, and their number is constantly increasing. In addition, we recently launched a new project - VoxImplant. This is a platform for developing applications for real-time communication. Zingaya growth rates suit us, we are working to gain fame in the US market and gain a foothold there. "

Not a single victory

Summarizing everything that the founders and leaders of start-ups-winners told, we can say that participation in competitions definitely helps young companies: the attention of media, investors and users is not expensive, the same goes for money. It is clear that to win you need to seriously sweat (at least on the same presentation), and this in any case eats away the time at work on the product.

Another conclusion is that, contrary to popular belief, start-up contests rarely win dummy projects and party-goers who eat up grants and investor money.

As a postscript, I note that even among past-year IDCEE projects that did not receive prizes in competitions, there are fairly successful invested companies. Among them, for example, participants in 2010 are yaM Labs ($ 500 thousand from Foresight Ventures) and Omyconf ($ 350 thousand from business angels), as well as more “fresh” contestants Attendify ($ 200 thousand from TMT Investments), Endorphine.me ($ 250 thousand from Untitled VC), Penxy ($ 500 thousand from Prostor Capital) and many others.

In general, there is every reason to assume that the winners of this year will soon turn out to be heroes of industry news.