OPEN COFFEE EVENT
Ever wondered how coffee machines, problem solving for businesses and e-learning can be connected ? We figured it out at the Open Coffee Athens CII last Friday, April 5th at Benakis Museum, where is the established monthly meeting point of the startup community. During the meeting we had given the chance to network with people from the startup world and learn from speeches given from the creators of three remarkably successful startups; BibeCoffee, Geekbot, TalentLMS.
The talk began with the creators of Bibe Coffee named Vasilis Apostolopoulos and Panos Vrettos. They had been working for 2 and a half years on their project that concerns an electronic device for coffee machines. We could basically call it an IoT solution that vivifies a professional coffee machine. But let’s start from the bottom. MR Vasilis Apostolopoulos explained us the “why” and “what” of the coffee market. In fact, a lot of money is being spent in order to improve coffee quality. On the other hand, customers search for the best taste in a coffee by choosing and preferring a certain coffee shop. On behalf of the market, enterprises investigate from the bottom to the top and they want to meet the customers’ expectations. But is the served coffee the one that enterprises and customers dreamed of? The biggest problem is that a coffee brand company makes a deal with an enterprise or a coffee shop that is supposed to sell only one coffee brand and this company provides a coffee machine to this enterprise or coffee shop. By having this deal emerges a failure of quality, brand name and income because of the unawareness of information such as what the machine produces , how we can preserve the machine, how we can be proactive etc.
At this point the BibeCoffee provides the solution by collecting data and analyzing them to find out the way that coffee machines work and to give the best result. It is like a chip that can process information. In Europe exist aproximately 4.000.000 coffee machines without this data analyzer chip. Coffee distributers, coffee enterprises and local individual coffee shops need this mini device. Panos Vrettos explained us clearly the way this device actually works and described how it is integrated into coffee machines and vivifies them by processing and transfering the data. After that they can read elements such us the quality, the formulation, the commissioning, the sales etc.
After their speech they answered certain questions concerning the benefits of this mini device, as well as the challenges that it might raise. In regard to the benefits, the key phrase is the “value for money”. The customer gains more money than the money he spends, in fact he doubles them. As for the challenges, many of them might be faced, as when you have to work with an electronic device the risk is immense. But at the same time, the competition is getting bigger and many startups start to work on this project too.
One of the speakers who talked to us about his start-up idea, was Nikos Papanotas who is the developer of “Geekbot”. Before this platform was born, as mr.Papanotas told us, there were many failures. For example, he mentioned “Social Whale”, which was an attempt of a platform that would unite all the social media platforms in one. Although “Social Whale” had some success at first, after a while it closed down completely. What he was taught from this case was, as he mentioned, the fact that “it is all about the team”, meaning the people you work and co-operate with. In general, there was a lot of failure in the beginning, but he explained that we should never forget that it takes time to get to where you aim to go. So with a few failures on the background and a lot of lessons learned, the time came when a brand new and successful idea was born! “Geekbot”, is a chat interface which was made for businesses to use it in order to solve problems and obstacles that they may have in a more easy, structured, and direct way. This platform gives the possibility of broadcasts, API calls (where the customer can give their solutions for the product) etc. Customer support is basically a big feature of the product. “Geekbot” was sold from the beginning more expensive (x3$ up) than the competitors would sell similar products. Why was that? Because the purpose was to attract users that were really interested in investing to a good service, and by attracting such users, the product itself would get better chances to be built bigger and better! Currently “geekbot” has almost 1500 customers worldwide.
Last but not least, the Open Coffee’s Last speech was by Thanos Papaggelis who talked about his scaleup called Epignosis. He started from the clarification that Epignosis is not a startup but rather a scaleup whose revenue overcomes the amount of 1.000.000 dollars per month and has the goal of overcoming the amount of 20.000.000 dollars until 2020. The customers of the company are 5.000 worldwide and only 5 here in Greece. Mr. Thanos Papaggelis and his team started without funding for many years till 2017, where they made the second biggest financial deal in Greece wich was a crow funding by Insight Venture Partners, having completed two rounds of crow fund. Now the company consists of 67 associates and their main project is to make software for training employees in companies. Epignosis produce sas products. The products are; eFront that concerns big companies, TalentLMS that concerns small companies and is based on the self service, and finally TalentCards, which is an individual startup that provides a solution for mobile training. Mr. Thanos Papaggelis concluded to that the criticism that they received was enough. Many have argued that there is no marketing talent in Greece and that there is a lot of competition, but the key is to try to compete with yourself and become better, as he suggested. Neither did they have experience nor talent in marketing but with open source they promoted their work and they became accepted and successful. The key is to be profitable, he stated. At the begging you need young people who want to investigate time and money for the best result. After the success you need to adapt new players with budget.
This way it all evolved overnight. An event full of interest, talented people and pioneering ideas has ended leaving a glimpse of optimism for the younger generation in entrepreneurship.
Feel the pulse…!
You can do it.
Big thanks to Betty Tsakarestou!
Team: The Challengers
Violetta Ioanna Makri Angelika Bega Evelina Karatziou Kyriaki Kyriakoggona
