Brandnew: “Our experience at Open Coffee Athens CIII”
We are BrandNew and our team consists of three, members: George, Voula, and Anna. On this semester of ADandPRlab, we are going to work on a new lab: The #StartUplab. This year’s Start-Up lab, we are going to corporate on the project: “The Big Music Bet” with Antenna Music Partners and explore the music innovation field. At the end of this journey, we are going to create as a team something that will take music one step further. We are about to deliver our final startup service, but at this point, we went as a team at an Open coffee session in order to take feedback for our idea from people that have already create a successful startup and understand how they worked. Open Coffee has been established as the meeting point of the startup community. Once a month, people who create, work, or simply care about technology and business renew their appointment in order to get to know each other, share experiences and contacts, eventually collaborate in their next attempt. .In 24th of May of 2019 we attended at the last Open Coffee event of the year, that was hosted at the Benaki Museum, as usual. We were able to meet with the creators of three startup companies and their stories and tips on how to create your own successful startup. The startup is
1. Ferryhopper, 2. Novoville and 3. RadioJar.
“We make ferry travel easy and enjoyable”
Ferryhopper is a search and booking engine for getting your ferry tickets for the Greek Islands and the Mediterranean. They combine routes and issue tickets for 36 ferry companies and more than 160 destinations in Greece, Italy, and Turkey. The company focuses on giving its customers a solid overview of the available itineraries and let them buy their tickets at the company price with no extra costs. And they are doing this for the customer in order to help him save money, time and effort.
Christos Spatharakis co-creator and CEO of Ferryhopper, via his presentation at the Open Coffee, took us through his journey for the creation of the startup. The journey started in 2017: “For many years we have been traveling around the Greek islands by ferry and each year we faced the challenge to find the best route to make our dream vacations come true. Before Ferryhopper this usually took us a day or two to search & find all the available ferry options for our trip. In most cases, we were looking for islands that were not directly connected, and this would force us to analyze several pages of itineraries (even in print) to find a correspondence that worked for us.” The initial idea came up when Christos and his friend group, the rest startup members, where vacation on Astypalea and wanted to visit Anafi, but there wasn’t a direct organized connection between these two islands. Then the idea was born.
As Mr. Spatharakis told us the startup team wasn’t a team of experts. The initial team members were an electrician, a physician, and an environmental engineer. They came up with the idea and because they were passionate about it, even though they weren’t experts they became. He shared with us that when you start your business you need to be careful especially when you want to “Swim in a pool full of sharks”, such as ferry tickets. The competition is huge, so you need to find something that makes you stand out. In the Greek market, there are more than 34.000.000 ferry ticket sales per year and about 25% online sales. In order to promote Ferryhopper, they had to think outside of the box, so they used the Facebook message for affiliations, they asked for friends to write content for their social media and they made forum accounts in order to promote even more Ferryhopper.
In 2017 Ferryhopper booked 10.000 tickets and in 2018 they reached 150.000 tickets and this number is still growing. The next step for Ferryhopper is to expand. They want to be the ferry-experts not only in Greece but globally.
Novoville was founded in 2016 in response to the growing need for more participatory, accountable, transparent, efficient and inclusive local governance. It is a tech startup with a unique mission to transform the public services we all use and improve tomorrow`s government policies, making them citizen-centric. They believe that the collective intelligence that people have about the places they live in should be the starting point for any policy design. Over 45 cities around Europe are currently using Novoville. As a company, they are big enough to deliver on our promises and small enough to care about our customers and users. By providing a range of digital services, Novoville helps dozens of local authorities across Europe to modernize their communication with their citizens, and has received a total of 1.6 million euros.
At the Open Coffee event Fotis Talantzis, co-founder of the startup, presented Novoville. As Mr. Talantzis explained to us he and his team created Novoville out of a genuine passion for changing the world — starting locally. What is more local that municipality?
For Novoville two tips that made their startup platform successful were first, educate people to use services, and second make people co-responsible because this leads to less complains and higher rate scores for your platform.
But was is coming next for Novoville? In the next 12 months, Novoville is going to hire more engineers in Athens and also aims to establish her presence in the UK. Moreover, they want to run more projects and raise more funding in order to expand the startup. The biggest goal is for Novoville to become more of a “Citizen-first” platform and create more content and consultation.
3.Radiojar
Radiojar was launched in 2013 with the vision of empowering radio stations to progress into the internet cloud era. Radiojar project idea conceived in 2011 and started from a team with exceptional engineering skills. Through continued iterations and RnD, the team proudly presented a programmable platform which can deliver solutions both out of the box and customizable even for the most demanding cases. Using audio computing and distributed architecture the company offers cloud first solutions with infinite scalability. It focuses on two major technology fields, cloud play-out, and digital audio delivery.
Statist Koutsogeorgos is the founder and CEO of Radiojar, the creator of the popular software for Internet radio. Radiojar was recently acquired by iHeartMedia, the leading information and entertainment company with 250 million subscribers in America. Mr. Koutsogeorgos shared with us- for the first time after the takeover — the eight-year route of the company up until today, as well as its next steps.
According to Mr. Koutsogeorgos when he and his team started with this idea,2010, it wants easy to find correspondence, because their vision and goal was something very different at the time especially in terms of technology. Basically, the idea has to do with audio-computing and audio distribution via Cloud. The most important obstacle that the team had was that they couldn’t explain or convey their idea with words. As a result, they decided to create a platform, which was a software that allowed to run an online radio, without any equipment. The next step was to contact with people and companies that were audio contributors and had a lot of technological challenges to face and explain to them that Radiojar was the answers to those challenges. This led to Radiojar’s first clients.
This last Open Coffee event help understand the basic needs in order to create a startup and keep it on track. It is really important for new entrepreneurs, those who are new to the market field and university students, who need real-time advice. A good idea is not enough. It’s just the beginning.
This journey is ready to make his final twist. Stay tuned for more.
