The walk starts at Wakoopa , the company that tour guide Robert Gaal started himself together with partner Wouter Broekhof. Robert has since left the company and Piet Hein van Dam (who previously worked for Motivaction, among others) has taken over the management. Wakoopa's experience is that sometimes your start-up ends up differently than you had anticipated. The company started as a social network for exchanging software tips for consumers, but now provides B2B services, such as insights into consumer search behavior for large research agencies such as TNS NIPO and Synovate.
New service = new market
Wakoopa has learned that the startup is not just about the technology. If you set up a completely new service, you also have to develop the market yourself and teach your customers what they can do with your service. For example, how do you ensure insightful reporting for the billions of impressions that you can measure with Wakoopa? Making the company's rapidly growing infrastructure manageable is also a nice challenge.
Weigh your investments carefully
Typical for the company is the drive to grow and invest: “You invest every belarus phone number list bit of cash flow directly in your company, for example to hire a developer for six months who can build an extra functionality for your service”. Wakoopa has now completed 2 investment rounds. A lesson for starters is that you should not blindly focus on the money you raise in an investment round, but that you should carefully weigh up the money you receive and the say you give away over your company. In addition, you should carefully consider what knowledge and experience an investor can bring, as this can greatly accelerate the success of your service. Think, for example, of legal knowledge, or the network with which your investor can put you in touch again.
An important success factor to interest investors, appears not so much the idea or the product, but especially the team behind the service. For example, at Wakoopa, this was that the 2 initiators were also able to build the service themselves. Estimating growth and turnover is always a gamble, but if you show investors that you have thought carefully about that gamble with different scenarios or calculations, this will significantly increase your chance of success.