private vs. comany live and more, interview with flimmit, part 2

this is part 2 of the interview with the austrian film search and download portal flimmit. if you missed part 1, it´s worth checking out. read on how setting up a company affects the private life of founders and what the flimmit founders karin, walter and ulrich would recommend to founders of new startups.

how to handle private life vs. work? 

work is private life and private life is work for a start. there is no real private life when realising your dream. the business is with you at all times, after the office, in the evening, at night, during sport, when seeing the family – always. our secret is not to see it as a burden but as a thing one loves to do.

see an animation from the beginning of flimmit:



what does pitching mean for your company?

pitching is a chance to move on. it is the thing to get the message across. karin haager: “i hated it in the beginning, but i really love doing it now. it demands constant practice, practice, practice - the more the better. the most difficult for me was to do a pitch for training reasons in front of my own company colleagues, but it’s one of the best ways to get settled for the real thing.”

you have already left some tracks in your personal careers, e.g. karin and ulrich, you have been film producers for six years, working on 20 projects. walter is a helicopter pilot. now you are start.up founders. what`s next?


we have a bucket list of things we still want to realise in our lives. however, now it’s all about movies! and we are aiming to keep it that way for a while.

how do you handle working with those „big“ film industry guys which try to stay in business by suing their customers?


no fear from the “big guys”. if you got something good, take a chance. and flimmit’s offer is a good alternative and a chance even for the “big guys”. plus we don’t criminalise our customers.



what are the three most important things to gain visitors on your site?

billy wilder once said: “a good movie needs three things: a good book, a good book and a good book.” the thing flimmit needs is permanent seo, seo and seo (editors note: search engine optimization). on top of that strategic cooperations with websites and word of mouth and our site gets rolling.



anything else you would like to talk recommend new start.ups for the beginning?

gang on in there and believe in your dreams. find good friends that you can work with. and always keep your eyes and ears open and take other people’s advice. finally react quickly (editors note to market and costomer feedback) and just do it! 


interview with flimmit - the austrian film search and download startup

legal film downloads in europe are a mess. therefore film search is broken too. the austrian startup flimmit is out to fix that. not having one legal framework like in the u.s., the european "rights" marked for film is hyperfragmented. first steps for a common legal framework are only in their beginnings. therefore just to google a film one wants to watch is nearly pointless. because finding the film of choice on a u.k. video download portal will lead to nowhere, as they will not have the distribution rights for austria.

find another search example in the demo video from flimmit:




flimmit searches and finds, lets mention "legal" again, content. so does it work? searching for "lord of the rings" there is a full-size feedback. download and buying possibilities, best prices, reviews, trailers and more. same goes for more recent productions, like avatar. just the recommendations leave room for improvement.

what drives the three founders of flimmit, karin haager (cfo), walter huber (cto) and ulrich müller-uri (ceo) to fix the broken film search and download business? (founders photos © flimmit 2009, photographs by lisi navajas)

i tried to find that out in a recent interview with them. as with the interviews with andraz tori from zemanta or christoper clay from soup, it is split up in two parts. read on the find out more on the startup in this part 1, on how to gain traffic and more in the upcoming part 2. so lets jump right into the interview:

tell me about the (three) most exiting things about starting up your company?

starting a new business is all about making your own ideas come to life. an innovation that first pops up in your head and then materialises into ones own company is a great for oneself and the self esteem. to inspire people with your idea and see the results when finally the thing gets going is important as well. 
 


what about the (three) most unfortunate things about starting up?
 

constant worries about financing and a possible lack of money are tough on the way to success. that leads to sleepless nights. what really got us up in sheer shock was the up and then arising fear that the innovation we have brought to the market is not unique anymore – that someone else has just done the same thing.


what are your lessons learned until now about tech/people/market/sales (choose what you prefer)?


people: it takes ages to find the right people to work with and it is a tough task to have them stay with you, above all due to lack of funds in the start up phase.
market: we have learned that customers / users never do anything because of good will. they want a benefit when using your product or service.
sales: the most important lesson learned for us: never trust sales forecasts!


when you hear the words "exit" and "shut down", what comes to your mind?


the term “exit” mostly appears in a conversation with possible financers. we do not yet think about an “exit” so far but we can talk about that in a few years time.
shut down means disaster, a sheer horror scenario. on the other hand when founding your own business you always have to calculate with a possible shut down. but isn’t that the essence of a start up: to always have the motivation to go that one step further?

to find out how the founders handle private vs. company life and more, read on in the upcoming part 2 of the interview.

estc2009 & leweb: do startup competitions bring visibility?

what do have collibra, flimmit & gnowsis and stribe, tigerlily & cloudsplit have in common? they are all young startups. they all hard won prices at two recent international startups competitions. and they need to be seen by potential customers & investors.

startups face many challenges, one of them is visibility. a way to address challenge, is to compete at startup competitions, like at estc and le web.

the third european semantic technology conference (estc) startup competition had 16 invited startups from 12 countries competing. at seven minutes per pitch only the well prepared teams

could bring their message across. many forgot to talks about how to make money though - or did at least not have the courage to present a „freemium“ model. see here for the video coverage.

at le web, being more internet-minded, the 16 startups as a majority looked to earn money with premium services, based on users gained by free basic services.

as business angels and venture capital money is currently scare in europe and probaply will be for 2010, sticking out of the crowd and gaining attention is a key. so how did the winners perform?

stribe already competed before. making it into the techcrunch50 in 2009 was the first attempt. leweb was the next, this time finishing in 1st place.

but does it really bring attention? does winning competitions bring the wanted visibility? gaeol delalleu, cto of stribes, thinks so. at leweb, he was approached by five venture capitalists.

looking at a streamgraph of the corresponding twitter activity, visibility seemed to get a strong push around leweb as well.

the profile of stribes is in the twitterworld strongly associated related with leweb is obviously strongly correlated with the startup competition.

illustrations thanks to http://www.neoformix.com.

collibra took a different approach to get visible on the fist hand. they made it into a price waterhouse coopers report and won the scientipole initiative award before gaining the first place at estc. if they got approached by vc is not know until they will start to leverage the prize when they start pitching for money in the next year. to know more on collibra listen to this interview.

based on the shere size differential (1:10) between estc and leweb as well as the fact that the semantic world is just about (!) to discover the use of tools like twitter, the results are less meaningful and the streamgraph did not reveal the option to change the timeframe according to the event.

a smaller, more focused event like the estc can significantly boost visibility, as investors attending the estc are already focused on semantic technologies.

what both, stribe and collbra, have in common is, that they have no immediate need for investment. however both are powering up for next rounds in 2010. the visibility is already gained.