Innovation at VRT : Appiness “Spott” keeps growing
Last week I was invited by the innovation division of VRT (Belgium’s Dutch-speaking public television) for their creative circle III. It consisted in a series of presentations and testing from startups incubated in VRT’s “sandbox” department. Presentations and demos were given by 5 startups : Fisheye, Limecraft, Moovly, Appiness, Kiswe. Buy what you see on TV with the Spott mobile app The demo which very much impressed me was given by...
Fatal errors for startups growth
Fellow betacoworker Toon Vanagt made an impression when presenting on startups growth at Techstartup 2016. The least you can say is that Toon as vast experience in the field of startups (check his latest baby data.be) and a solid sense of humor. He was not afraid to tell the audience about his failures and I found one of them especially interesting : Casius.be. Toon explained how he burned 4m€ of VC cash to build a … 1.8m€ business....
Sharing economy : revenues to be taxed in France
The good thing with the sharing economy is that it has empowered individuals to make money. The bad thing is that governments haven’t been able to take much advantage of those new business models. In France the sharing economy represents a turnover of €2.5bn and a workforce estimated to 13000. Needless to say, it was more than enough to get the attention of governments in desperate need of money since the financial crisis has begun in...
Highlights of one more year of blogging
It’s now been 6 years I’ve regularly posted articles on this blog (some 2100 articles in 3 languages). The design and technical changes we made in 2014 and 2015 were fruitful. The audience increases regularly and since we fixed a cache problem this summer, the French version of the blog is hitting almost systematically the 100k unique users mark on annual basis. The Dutch version of the blog is not doing so good ; despite all my...
The paradox of entrepreneurship : whom do you create your startup for?
Why are there so many startups failing in the first 3 to 5 years ? One of the recurrent explanation is that entrepreneurs don’t understand their market well. Some may suffer from the knowledge corridor, and what is sure is that market research may have helped to avoid failure. My point today is a more philosophical one. We’ll all agree that market research can indeed help find the right strategy and marketing approach. But why is it...
A new way to finance the growth of startups : bonds ! (Part 2)
In part 1, Jean Carvajal explained the various types of crowdfunding available to companies seeking financing, including issuing stocks, bonds and taking out conventional loans. In his opinion, bond financing is a great method as it provides funding flexibility and customisable repayment options without diluting shares. He then explained what unique factors Investbook’s risk committee considers when selecting projects for its...
A new way to finance the growth of startups : bonds ! (Part 1)
The topic of financing startups’ growth is a recurrent one on this blog; simply because it’s a problem that many entrepreneurs are faced with and that they don’t always solve. Today we’re interviewing Jean Carvajal, President and Creator of Investbook. Investbook is the first crowdfunding platform approved by the AMF (French regulatory body) for bonds investments. IntoTheMinds : Banks are cautious. This...
TUZZit : 8 great online tools for your startup
Many would-be entrepreneurs we meet strive to either look for or even make up the visual and creative collaborative tools that will ease their team thinking process. This difficulty further increases when those teams are decentralized. Business model canvas, 5 forces of Porter, Important / Urgent matrix … TUZZit offers a collection of visual models to work with creativity online. Initiated by a Belgian startup, TUZZit...
3D printing : the story of the Moimee 3D figurines
3D printing is one of the trends that we follow very carefully. It may be a new revolution and some applications are just amazing. We published a couple of weeks ago a post on the market of 3D printed figurines and visited one of the companies that invested in that segment : Moimee. The technology used by Moimee is pretty much the same as the one used by Twinkind. They use 48 digital cameras to take 48 different views of the subject...
Financing Startups : the emerging role of crowdfunding
We were very pleased to learn that our long beloved startup “Brussels Beer Project” got funded … by a bank! It was –at least for us- a very nice surprise to learn this good news. We were very critical of banks last year: we explained how difficult it was to get a loan, the criteria used by banks to give or refuse a loan, the consequences of this money drain for startups, discussed the role of crowdfunding and we also gave published...
