Get to know Horizn Studios’ co-founder Jan and learn why Horizn aims to become the smartest travel brand of the 21st century.Â
http://horizn-studios.com/
9 Weeks at Project A - Peeking Through the Keyhole
At times in the process of applying for a job, successfully completing the various interviews and getting ready to sign a contract, often questions arise such as "What should I expect?” or “Will it be the best job I will ever have?” or “Is it really the right decision to sign the contract?” or even “Will I sell my soul and become a zombie that works from 5 am till 11 pm?”.
Some thoughts like this came to my mind when I was applying for a CTO trainee position at Project A. I decided to join the company, but for those of you who may be in a similar situation, this post might help to clarify your decision by reading about the experiences and insights which I have been able to gather within my first nine weeks at Project A.
Life is short and we all have little time, so here is my summary:
I signed a contract as a CTO trainee in the middle of June 2015 and my first day on the job was the first of October. After two weeks at Project A, I became responsible for a team of seven developers, on a project with an eight-week deadline, that was supposed to be built within a framework I had only heard of previously. I worked a lot and had a successful project launch, nine weeks after starting at Project A. I enjoyed the first weeks, but nevertheless I was also happy about getting a breather over Christmas vacation.
Now in a bit more detail:
After my first two days on the job, it became relatively clear, that I was going to be responsible for migrating one of our ventures (Pets Deli) from their old Magento shop to the Spryker framework.
So keep in mind: You might take over a lot of responsibility right from the beginning.
In my case it started somehow "slow", because the first week was mainly filled with setting up some infrastructure and becoming familiar with the SaltStack framework we use for server provisioning. But it also included two days at the SymfonyLive conference, which I hadn't really expected. So I was actually really happy that Project A also had me in mind when they were buying the tickets for the conference.
With the beginning of the 2nd full week, I became responsible for a team of seven developers and started to work on the migration project. This might sound like a jump into the deep end, and in fact it was indeed. Especially, when I realized that half of the whole company also seemed to be working on this project and it had a really high internal priority. But the good thing was that I got fantastic support and backup from all of my colleagues, including every hierarchy level and every department. It´s hard to believe, but there was really no one that was not friendly and open-minded for all the questions that I asked. To be honest, I had personally never experienced anything like that before.
Besides learning to swim, I was also directly invited to support HR by doing phone and face-to-face interviews and also joined management and venture strategy meetings. This sounds like a lot of work and it truly was (and still is).
But, to make a long story short:
I expected all that – the only thing I didn’t expect was how fast things went.
I realized that I was working with a really great team (on both a project level and on a company level), in which each team member shares the same professional mindset, and is really, really good at their job.
Of course, there were also days when I left the office after a lot of working hours and thought "Oh what a day...”, but to be honest, it didn’t happen as often as I expected it would. Nevertheless, there is also time to reduce the insane speed mode and leave the office earlier or at least after the "normal" 8 hours of work.
In conclusion, it feels more like I’ve been with Project A for a year than only for nine weeks. I am fully integrated into the company, have a great working environment and feel extremely comfortable with it. This is, of course, a very subjective view, but it might help you to get an idea of what you could expect from such a job.
About working with Project A in general:
The company is staffed by very professional and very committed colleagues.
The workplace is characterised by a fast moving environment.
You get the chance to learn a lot of things in a really short time and to shape the future of one of the most promising start-ups around.
if you have any questions or doubts that this post did not address.
About the author
Stephan has been part of Project A Ventures as a CTO trainee since October 2015. In the scope of his traineeship, he has the opportunity to develop and strengthen his own skills. He is committed to a highly professional work ethic and scalable infrastructures and is enthusiastic about teamwork and transparency. Before joining Project A, he worked as a senior developer at Silversurfer7, where he led several projects for diverse customers, including HanseMerkur. He studied informatics at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
W cordially invite you to take a look with us on the last year´s highlights. It has been a great year and we are looking forward to 2016.
Merry Christmas and a New Year!
A couple of weeks ago, Daniel and Benjamin attended this year’s Conversion Summit in Frankfurt. Today, they are happy to share their 5 top take-aways with you.
1.Establish a testing culture
Many companies out there tend to focus on very tactical tests, e.g. A/B testing button sizes and colors. The majority of the speakers at this year’s conversion summit recommended focusing on strategic tests by building up a generic testing framework that could be transferred to other situations, products and companies. The folks at ConversionXL, for example, created a research framework including technical analysis, qualitative surveys, user testing, web analytics, mouse tracking and heuristic analysis to feed your insights.
Another important step towards a testing culture is the creation and enabling of a CO (conversion optimization) team, that frequently and continuously runs tests without going through the lengthy approval process every time. In addition to that, you should avoid HIPPOs (highest paid person’s opinion) in the whole testing process. At the end of the day, the best bosses leave the testing to the product/testing team instead of consulting their spouses.
2. There is no best practice
One of the most important points that almost every company gets wrong is that there is no best practice. Every website is different and interacts with different people in different locations and languages. Websites are highly contextual. Just because your competitor’s website seems to work doesn’t mean it will work for you. And how do you even know their site is working? Maybe they’re testing 20 features at the same time without success or they’re not testing at all. If green checkmarks increased conversion rates on other websites, this doesn’t imply that it’s the best choice for you and your current product. Therefore, always start from scratch and always keep testing! Don’t copy tests but rather create them yourself to make sure they’re adapted to your individual target group, product and context.
3. Psychological user segmentation
Angie Schottmüller (CRO expert) and Gabriel Beck showed very good examples of a psychological approach to understanding your customers and adapting your copy, features and communication accordingly. Angie’s buying modalities, for example, use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to understand different user behavior and needs. She clusters customer groups into four different buying modalities such as competitive (NT), spontaneous (SP), methodical (SJ) and humanistic (NF). Each group values different kinds of content and interacts differently with your product. Whereas the methodical user segment (role model = Sherlock Holmes) is very slow, structured and decides based on logic, the spontaneous user segment (role model = Cpt. Jack Sparrow) acts fast and decides based on feelings and subjective impressions.
A similar approach is the limbic map, which displays the emotional facets of humans. It allows you both to “categorize” your current customer base and to compare it to the values your brand and product should communicate.
4. Copywriting
Michael Aagaard talked about the WYSIATI principle. What You See Is All There Is describes the fact that users judge a website/product instantly based on the information they see in the first seconds of their visit (although there might be much more information hidden somewhere else). This could lead to a situation where your users are totally misled by the information they see in the first couple of seconds. As simple as it sounds: optimize your product/website using your customers’ vocabulary. Just because it makes sense to you doesn’t mean it makes sense to your customers.
5. Adapt your product to your customer
Most of the products out there don’t adapt to the individual user. Imagine someone would ask you to get married and you would say no (= no conversion), would you say yes the next day if nothing had changed? Probably not.
The same holds true for users that access the same page again and again but don’t convert because the page doesn’t change. A very interesting approach by Karl Kratz is to build multiple variants of landing pages to test the customer’s uncertainty in different ways. Maybe the user needs some social proof to convert, so why not add some customer reviews or testimonials? Or maybe some users don’t understand the product completely? In that case,  go ahead and add a product teaser or a clear description the next time.
Final Statement: Think before you do
All in all, the Conversion Summit was a great source of knowledge and gave lots of insights into today’s trends in conversion optimization. At the end, Scott Stratten (author of the books “Unbounce” and “Unmarketing”) summarized the most important message in one statement: Think before you do. Many companies develop products or marketing campaigns without really thinking it through. This leads to QR codes on highway posters or next to “mobile forbidden” signs. Too often decisions are made without talking to all stakeholders first.
About the Authors
After evaluating business ideas as a New Business Analyst at Project A, Benjamin joined the product team where he supports new and established ventures to understand their customers, build high retention and UX-focused products. He studied at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), founded and supported several entrepreneurship initiatives, successfully failed with his own startup and worked for several digital businesses before. He is an ambitious photographer, outdoor person and part-time nerd. Follow Benjamin on Twitter: @benjaminbolland or his private blog: bobolland.com
Daniel is the SEO and CRO Manager at Project A, supporting our ventures as Interim Manager in these areas. Before he joined Project A, Daniel worked in Online Marketing at Pro7Sat1 for MyVideo. He studied Media Management in the Netherlands and is now doing his Master’s degree in Leadership in Digital Communication at Berlin University of the Arts and University St Gallen.
On October 15th and 16th, we welcomed our portfolio companies, (co)-investors, partners and friends for the third time to the Project A Portfolio Days. Â
With this two-day conference, we’re on one side aiming to provide our portfolio companies a platform for not only exchanging experiences and learnings, but also to gain new insights through various workshops by our experienced speakers.
On the other side, we’re presenting our diverse portfolio companies to our investors, co-investors, partners and friends, giving them insights in our  and connecting them with our founders. Â
We were very honored about the 140 participants who attended our event and had two great days with insightful talks and inspiring conversation.Â
Thanks to everyone participating and making this event so special!
Three of the four Project A founders: Florian, Uwe and Christian
Opening speech by our Partner Olivier Raussin from our office in Brazil
Insightful workshops
Tim Wegner (Minodes), Manuel Hinz (CrossEngage), Paul Wulff and Martin Mittermeier (both Kyto)
“UX Excellence”: Tamer (Head of Productmanagement) and Luis (Senior Productmanager Mobile) about how to set the right environment and what to do to establish a great UX.
“How to become a data-driven company”: Marco Jansen (Founder & CTO Catawiki) and Evgeniya (Senior BI Manager Project A) presenting the success story of CatatwikiÂ
“Best Practices in CRM”:  Aaron  (Head of CRM) about  Best Practices in CRMÂ
“Brand Creation”: Stefan (Director Brand Management) explaining how brand building in the 21st century works.
“IPO Readiness”: David Dreyfuß, Partner at Lilja & Co about the complexities of an IPO process and what are the most important things to consider.
We’re proud that we had the chance to present our portfolio to the Project A investors
Dr. Hillebrand and Dr. Otto from OTTO Group  Â
 Dr. Wiele (on the left) from Axel Springer SE
Despite the full timetable, there  was a lot of time for networking, exchanging and having fun
 Â
An impressing highlight was our external speaker “Sir Vival” Rüdiger Nehberg who talked about his life, motivation and his achievement with his organization TARGET.
More impressions of our Portfolio Days 2015 can be found on our website.
Part 1: Using data aggregation in your DWH to improve your marketing strategy
In the first part of this two-part blog post, our Director Perfomance Marketing Dorothee shares insights on customer segmentation and how using data aggregation in a Data Warehouse can improve your marketing strategy.
Every recently launched startup with a transactional business model needs to overcome a certain threshold regarding its customer base in order to be profitable. This means acquiring new customers and converting users as well as retaining repeat customers. The latter in particular is becoming more and more important in light of today’s advertising landscape. Cleverly orchestrated customer relationship management (CRM) decreases marketing costs, supports the sustainability of your business and even enables differentiation and thus a competitive advantage. We support our ventures in integrating a professional CRM process into their marketing strategy right from the start and help them to establish suitable customer segmentation in advance. An important factor is to create personas and specify target groups in order to define your business goals beforehand. This lays the groundwork for the subsequent customer segmentation, which is essential for any properly executed CRM.
The quality and sophistication of CRM measures mainly depends on two factors: first, the available data at your disposal and, second, the underlying models which determine how to utilize this data.
To avoid shortcomings and to prevent redundant aggregation of data, it is important to assess beforehand, or at least at a very early stage in the process, which data you will need later on. There is no bigger pain than having your data warehouse (DWH) crammed with customer data you cannot use at later stages. The same goes for data you do not save but end up needing in the future.
 Before any data gets aggregated, your budget and setup of marketing channels need to be defined in accordance with relevant target groups. This process is managed fairly by KPIs like Cost per Acquisition (CPA), Cost per Lead (CPL), or Customer Revenue Relation (CRR).
The main purpose of aggregating customer data is to gain actionable insights that lead to a higher conversion or repeat purchase rate. The more granular the marketing measures, the better you can react to specific customer profiles. But before you are able to personalize your ads, you need to segment your customer base. The level of granularity needs to be assessed with respect to the composition of your customer base, your product offering and the costs. The segmentation of customers requires a counterpart in your marketing strategy that in turns depends on the products you have to offer. There is little sense in having a fine-grained customer segmentation without having the means to personalize your ads for each segment. This would unnecessarily increase the costs without providing you with any additional advantages. It is all about finding the right balance.
What kind of data and corresponding segments are we actually talking about? In general, any data helping you to differentiate your customer base could be relevant. But which data turns out to be useful depends on your specific business model and customer needs. Data that could be aggregated includes:
Behavioral data (data from customer journey: interest, buying intent, purchases, repeat purchase rate)
Analyzing your customers’ interaction throughout the customer journey enables you to learn something about your customers and thereby improve your marketing opportunities. Dividing customers into different groups of specific interest, age, gender or spending habit will provide you with a more effective way to utilize your marketing resources. And this does not only apply to B2C models. B2B businesses can also profit from customer segmentation and personalized ads, even though CRM processes work a little differently in this case. Often they are more complex, since decisions are not made by individuals but by several decision makers instead.
Our venture Contorion, an online store for industrial and trade supply with a B2B business model, is an interesting example here. Classical marketing measures are only part of the strategy in this case, because customers are older and therefore have less affinity with the internet. This is why they in general prefer traditional marketing channels such as phone, fax or catalogues. Since they are very loyal customers with a high customer lifetime value (CLV), even more expensive CRM measures are economically profitable.
No matter which business model is involved, there are always various possibilities regarding customer segmentation. It is not always obvious which segmentation will perform best. Establishing user cubes for cohort analyses helps to identify how each group is performing. Depending on the defined cube, the way you interact with users might change, e.g. regarding dimensions like channel, content, time, frequency and budget worth spending.
So much for now! In part two of this series I will provide you with selected examples on how to utilize user data in your marketing efforts.Â
About the Author
As our Director Performance Marketing, Dorothee leads the online marketing team at Project A and decisively influences the marketing of our ventures, acting either as a sparring partner or interim CMO. Dorothee can build on ten years of experience in online marketing, during which she helped to grow the business at Zalando from almost the beginning and was previously responsible for the sales team at Zanox, leading the T-I-M-E-S department. Â
Meet our experts and some of our ventures at the following events this fall:
#ProjectAonTour
October 2015
code.week
Thursday, October 01
Mark Scherer (Spryker Systems): “Live Coding mit Spryker” (10:00 - 14:00 Schanzenhöfe-Verkostungsraum von Ratsherrn)
Digital Customer Connection Day
Check out the full program here.
Wednesday, October 07
Alexander Köth (minodes): “Bridging online and offline: Intelligent online advertising - enabled by retail analytics” (15:10 - 15:30)
NEOCOM
Check out the full program here.
Thursday, October 08
Dr. Frederick Roehder (Contorion): “Wie unterschiedlich ist E-Commerce für B2B und B2C wirklich? Erfahrungen am Beispiel Contorion” (12:15 Session 2)
OMCap
Check out the full program here.
Thursday, October 08
Dr. Florian Heinemann (Project A Ventures): “Wesentliche Entwicklungen, Herausforderungen und Lösungsansätze an der Schnittstelle zwischen Marketing und BI – Ein Überblick” (09:45 - 10:30 SEMrush Track)
September 2015
K5 Konferenz
Check out the full program here.
Thursday, September 10
Alexander Graf (Spryker, Kassenzone): “Q&A-Session: Amazon — Fluch oder Segen für Markenhersteller?” (15:20 Raum Auditorium)
Alexander Graf (Spryker, Kassenzone): “Brand-Session: Marken und Hersteller in einer Amazon-Welt” (16:30 Raum Ammersee)
Friday, September 11
Dr. Florian Heinemann (Project A Ventures): “Einführung: Wesentliche Entwicklungen und Herausforderungen an der Schnittstelle von Marketing und BI — Ein Überblick” (11:45 Raum Auditorium)
Tim Wegner (minodes): “Offline und digitale Customer Journey miteinander verbinden” (Raum Auditorium)
Alexander Graf (Spryker, Kassenzone) and others: “Tech-Panel: Die neuen Shopsysteme: Wo geht es hin, und was bedeutet das für den E-Commerce von morgen?”
Digital Signage Summit Europe
Friday, September 11
Alexander Köth (minodes): Panel: “DooH Metrics and Measurements: Establishing international standards for DooH – on the search for the multiscreen cookie” (16:15 - 16:45 Room: Munich 2)
dmexco
Check out the full program here.
Tuesday, September 15
 Pre-demexco event by Eyeota:Â
Florian Heinemann (Project A Ventures): Keynote: “Bridging the worlds between online and offline”Â
Kevin Tan ( CEO Eyeota): “The process behind bringing offline data to online media buying platforms and how this helps advertisers”
Sign up here.
Wednesday, September 16
Kevin Tan, James Woods (Eyeota): “Audience data takes off: Airline boosts ticket sales by using audience data” (15:00 - 15:45 Seminar 3)
Kasper Skou (Semasio): “Vertrauen ist gut, Gewissheit ist besser — das Treuhand-Prinzip als neues Modell für datengetriebenes Marketing” (17:00 - 17:45 Seminar 4)
inCOMMERCE
Check out the full program here.
Tuesday, September 22
Florian Heinemann (Project A Ventures)
code.talks
Check out the full program here.
Tuesday, September 29
Stefan Judis (Loopline Systems): “Building desktop applications with web technologies — Electron the easy way” (14:00 - 14:45 Saal 6)
Wednesday, September 30
Fabian Wesner (Spryker Systems): “ Spryker (e)commerce framework als Alternative zu traditioneller Shop-Software” (11:00 - 11:45 Saal 1)
Bringing ventures up to speed with our generic marketing plan (Part 1)
In a mini-series spanning two blog posts, our Director Performance Marketing Dorothee Seedorf and Venture Development Manager Philipp Werner explain why we work with a generic marketing plan and how we adapt it to the particularities of every individual venture.
Successful marketing requires creativity – this is certainly true for both branding and performance. However, having worked with numerous ventures we see that a lot of the steps involved in setting up ambitious online marketing activities are recurring and are clearly even similar among startups with different business models. This applies to infrastructural topics such as the chosen marketing tools, account structures or seamless tracking implementation, but it is far from being limited to these.
Due to our tight collaboration with our portfolio ventures, we are very aware of the challenges they encounter, the points in time at which they tend to arise and how the teams deal with them. Over time, we have recognized certain patterns, kept track of them and eventually aggregated them in what we refer to as our generic marketing plan. As such, it is embedded in our general venture creation framework, which covers all functional areas which are vital for building a successful company.
No matter whether the collaboration is about acceleration or incubation, when launching a new venture we adapt this general plan to the company’s specific requirements, ensuring that, while particular needs are met, the founders still benefit from the methodological know how we’ve gained through our experience with other ventures. Â
What channels suit the business model best to drive customer acquisition? How do we reduce churn and achieve customer loyalty? What should the initial structure of the marketing team look like? How do we deal with interdependencies between channels that we’ve experienced in a similar model? Which KPIs apply, how do we best share the budget across channels and in relation to KPIs, and what steps are necessary in order to reach which goals? Is the budget even still the right measure or have we reached a point where CAC vs. CLV orientation is key?
We dissect these questions down to the most granular level and then translate them into actionable items, define the corresponding accountable persons and add durations and interdependencies. The result is a venture-specific marketing roadmap with a sound degree of detail. Not only does this structure the work of the team but it also creates transparency about dependencies and thereby increases communication between the channels.
The approach of having such a generic marketing plan that we customize for each venture together with our partners has another decisive advantage: Right from the start we help them pave the way for the data-driven marketing that we value. Project A stands for taking the “esoteric factor” out of marketing. Sound planning helps us to turn that into action.
Saying “we” explicitly includes our ventures, as we don’t have to convince our founders to base their marketing decisions on data. In fact the purpose of this planning is to facilitate the preparation of the data that is necessary to achieve data-driven marketing. This especially involves a business intelligence roadmap, as consistency in tracking is key in specifying exactly the marketing reports that our venture’s marketers need in order to make smart, data-driven decisions in their conceptual as well as in their daily work. Such efforts eventually result in a data warehouse, where all required data and reports can be found.
Walking through our generic marketing plan together with the founding teams we partner with has proven to be very valuable. Expectations, goals and objections get addressed and transferred into concrete project planning, leaving everybody with a clear idea in mind (and on paper) of what steps are ahead of them during the first months, when and by whom they are going to be tackled and what their effect will be.Â
Structuring recurring marketing efforts this way makes their execution more effective and leaves us with a lot more time for creativity.
In the second part we will focus on how we continuously improve the generic marketing plan together with our later-stage ventures to further optimize their marketing activities and to ensure that we build an asset that all our ventures can benefit from.
About the authors
As our Director Performance Marketing, Dorothee leads the online marketing team at Project A and decisively influences the marketing of our ventures, acting either as a sparring partner or interim CMO. Dorothee can build on ten years of experience in online marketing, during which she helped to grow the business at Zalando from almost the beginning and was previously responsible for the sales team at Zanox, leading the T-I-M-E-S department. Â
 Philipp is part of the Venture Development team at Project A and supports our ventures in the areas of project management, interim management and operational support. He holds an MBA with a major in Media Management and has executed several digitalization projects for companies such as Warner Bros. Entertainment and Sky Germany.
Last Sunday, we welcomed a familiar visitor: The German StartupBus stopped at the Project A office with 25 participants on board, who gained some insights into how we work as a company builder. Afterwards, we had some workshop sessions, where product managers from Project A and our portfolio sat down with the teams and gave concrete feedback on their business concepts.Â
We are very happy that we had the chance to host this project for the third time already, as sharing knowledge and experience in company building is very important to us. We want to support talents in discovering entrepreneurship and turning brilliant ideas into valid business models.
The team got advise from our product manager Luis
The challenge started last Friday in Munich and is currently heading to Cologne with a total of five stops including Zurich, Stuttgart, Berlin and Amsterdam as well. Founded in 2010, the StartupBus is an annual competition. This year, 75 participants in 18 teams from 5 countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, UK and Estonia competed against each other to launch a new technology business, all over the course of the bus ride. Around thirty participants, who refer to themselves as “buspreneurs”, specialized in design, coding, and/or business development, create ideas and build up a business concept as well as a viable prototype of their web application in only 72 hours. At the last stop, they will pitch their ideas to a jury at Pirate Summit in Cologne. This year, Allianz sponsored an additional prize: The #HackRisk prize for all ideas related to fintech, insurance innovation and insurance technology. Every team gets the chance to become part of the Entrepreneurs in Residence program sponsored by the Allianz Digital Accelerator.
After the competition, the participants rush back to their hometowns, profiting from their new skills, the experience and the new network, to build the next generation of technology companies and startup communities. The project is community-run and organized by volunteers, who have participated before themselves or who just like supporting the project.
Showing the first prototype
In our Project A team, we have some members who are especially dedicated to the project: Ben, for example, was a buspreneur and later organizer of StartupBus Germany, formerly known as “Gründerbus”, in  2012 and 2013. The stop at the Project A office with a presentation by our Venture Partner Mark Hartmann was the way he first got in touch with us back in 2012. He stayed in touch with Project A and eventually joined the company in 2014 and now supports our ventures as a product manager after working as a New Business Analyst:
“StartupBus is an incredibly intense and sometimes even life-changing experience. During the 72 hours on the bus you work extremely hard on your business model and product, hardly sleep, pitch your idea 24/7, identify and get your first customers on board and get the word out about your product. And all that stuffed in a moving bus with total strangers and a crappy internet connection. Due to the pressure and proximity you get to know your fellow teammates and participants really well during the ride. I’m still in very close contact with a lot of the buspreneurs and some have become really good friends.”
Tobias, from our Venture Development team, participated last year, when the German team even won the second prize with an idea called “Never eat alone”:
“The best thing about this unique experience was to develop and implement a business concept with highly motivated people in a very short time and with valuable live feedback. There is no comparable experience that perfectly displays the roller coaster ride of being an entrepreneur given the short amount of time. It’s awesome to see how much can be done in only one weekend when you’re surrounded by a cool team and everyone pulls together.”
Lucas, who used to work for Project A and is now working one of our ventures, organized this year’s StartupBus with three other volunteers:Â
“In my opinion, entreneurship cannot be taught in university classes but needs hands-on experience like at StartupBus. This is why after being a buspreneur myself in 2014, I knew I wanted to conduct the German bus this year.”
The winner of this year’s competition is a team from the German Startup Bus: Warm Hands, a platform aiming to connect educated refugees and elderly people.
Happy winners: Bara Wahbeh and Anirudha Jagta from warm-hands.org
As he mentioned in his last post, Ben will be illustrating the evaluation process that we use for both our incubation and acceleration projects (see here for more information on these two separate types of investments). Based on selected examples from our portfolio, he will explain the reasoning behind why we invested in certain ventures and discuss the criteria underlying our evaluation process.Â
Those who would like a full overview of the key factors in our evaluation framework, which was also explained in detail in Ben’s previous post, can find it here.Â
Incubation of Internal Ideas
For our incubation projects we’re constantly on the lookout for new business models, technologies, trends and markets. We regularly organize brainstorming sessions and interdisciplinary think tank workshops involving experts from different teams. Those workshops are paired with constant market and trend research focused on finding opportunities that align with our investment themes and fields of expertise. Once we have narrowed the creative processes and research down to a concrete opportunity, it then enters our evaluation framework.
Recent examples of incubation projects are our ventures Loopline Systems, Spryker Systems, and Contorion:
Loopline Systems offers an easy to use SaaS solution for performance management and feedback. At a time where the replacement of an employee can cost companies between 30% and 400% of the employee’s annual salary, Loopline Systems helps to retain key performers by improving employee management (problem solved) and thus keeping engagement, motivation and satisfaction high. The ongoing "war for talents" and the high demand for cutting edge solutions in the area of talent management make the HR tech market very attractive. The technology, unit economics and business model fit perfectly to Project A’s capabilities and focus, allowing us, in addition to simply funding, to support Loopline with product development and testing, business development, customer acquisition, and – last but not least – user feedback, as we use the tool ourselves internally.
Spryker Systems is a new approach to e-commerce frameworks built on our internal e-commerce framework Yves & Zed. Rather than building a “one size fits all” software as even state-of-the-art players do, Spryker offers a highly evolved modular development framework allowing continuous feature development while maintaining a scalable and agile infrastructure (USP and competitive advantage). Spryker primarily focuses on bigger ambitious e-commerce customers, most of whom suffer from inflexible shop systems (problem solved). Regarding the growing e-commerce market, there is no doubt about market size and exit potential. With Alexander Graf and Nils Seebach from eTribes and CTO Fabian Wesner (formerly CTO at Project A Ventures and Rocket Internet), we have a very experienced and extremely knowledgeable team in place. This and the wide network of agencies (partners) which are being enabled to implement the framework drastically reduce the market entry barriers. The recent investment by Cherry Ventures and several private investors (such as Benjamin Otto) furthermore underpin our investment thesis.
Contorion aims to conquer the massive B2B MRO market, which shows strong digitalization trends (market potential). While existing competitors still tend to ignore the online world, Contorion has shown amazing progress in entering the market as a pure online player. As a trustworthy partner with an easy to use product, it solves a real problem for its customers while building strong relationships. The underlying Yves & Zed technology enables Contorion to build a scalable and very personalized shop system (see Spryker above), demonstrating the competitive advantage and the perfect fit to Project A’s capabilities.
Acceleration of External Ideas
Besides our incubation projects we also invest in existing businesses in Seed and Series A stages. In these cases, companies and entrepreneurs approach us through our vast network, fellow investors or our website. Usually, companies interested in collaboration/cooperation are looking for “smart money”, i.e. they are not solely looking for the money itself, but also for operational and strategic support. We really like this model as our involvement aims to reduce the operational risk on both sides.
Consequently there are two questions which need to be answered when evaluating external ideas. First, we need to analyze the idea itself, including the team, technology, and traction behind it, using our evaluation framework in a first step. Second, we need to think through what kind of support and expertise we can offer at the given point in time and going forward. We often receive amazing ideas from great entrepreneurs but simply don’t see a perfect fit with our focus and capabilities.
Some examples of recent acceleration investments are Catawiki and ZenMate:
Catawiki aims to become the leading auction platform for often hard to find collectibles such as stamps, comic books, or jewelry. The platform is very focused on passionate collectors offering highly curated auctions, which is the biggest differentiation from existing platforms such as eBay (USP and competitive advantage). Catawiki showed exceptionally good growth over the last month (traction and KPIs), a very solid business model and great economics (such as user acquisition cost and retention). Furthermore, we co-invested with Accel Partners, with whom we had already made successful investments (co-investors). Since our involvement ,we have successfully worked together with the Catawiki team to improve their product, help with internationalization, implement our data warehouse solution and train their staff in performance marketing.
ZenMate, which I covered in an earlier post, offers easy to use VPN-like data
encryption for browsers and mobile phones, which matches our digital infrastructure investment theme. The ease of use of the product is both a USP and competitive advantage compared with existing solutions. It has solved a big problem for users all over the world. Additionally the timing of the very capable and committed founder team was perfect, as the launch concurred with the growing interest in data privacy on the internet (followed by the Edward Snowden story shortly thereafter). This development favors the constantly growing potential customer group and market size. Last but not least, the fit to Project A’s capabilities worked out great as we were and still are able to support the team in product development, server architecture and performance marketing.
As an investor with a proprietary fund we made a promise to ourselves that we would carefully choose the projects and companies in which we invest the money that has been entrusted us. So we work very hard to identify and evaluate the best business models, teams and technologies to build and support great, sustainable and successful companies and entrepreneurs. There are many very exciting investments spaces such as Health, Energy and Social Entrepreneurship, but we always try find the project with the best possible fit with our focus, capabilities, and strategy, in order to leverage the best possible effect.
 Previous posts from this series:
Part 1: “Our Evaluation Framework”
Part 2: “How to turn great ideas into successful businesses”
About the Author
As New Business Analyst, Benjamin looks for and evaluates new business ideas, technologies and trends for Project A Ventures. He assesses the market situation for new businesses and coordinates our internal idea generation process. Benjamin coded his first website at the age of 13 and has broad experience in web development, online marketing and design thinking. He studied Business Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), where he also grew PionierGarage into Germany’s biggest student entrepreneurship club. Benjamin worked for Kiveda, co-founded SwipeCat – a mobile shopping application – and ran StartupBus Germany after having been a Buspreneur himself. Besides that, he’s an ambitious photographer, loves mountaineering/climbing/biking and is always open to trying nerdy gadgets.
Follow Benjamin on Twitter: @benjaminbolland or read his personal blog at bobolland.com.Â
At Project A Ventures, we support our companies in key areas such as Marketing, IT/Product, BI, Organizational Development and others. Beyond that, to get the maximum possible benefit out of our efforts and to ensure a high probability of success for our ventures in general, we also add a sufficient portion of “Venture Development”. This is achieved by a team which is responsible for a variety of tasks ranging from project management to interim management, from providing the necessary structure all the way to the operational coverage of work functions.
Taking our inspiration from Ben Horowitz’s description of good and bad product managers, in the following we have laid out our view on what differentiates a good venture developer from a bad one.
Good Venture Developer vs. Bad Venture Developer
Bad: Mostly concerned with the valuation and the investment in the last round.
Good:Â Knows which KPIs drive the success of a venture and knows where they stand.
Bad: Does his/her job in the best interest of the founder.
Good: Does his/her job in partnership with the founder and in the best interest of the venture.
Bad: Blindly follows the strategy and vision of the founder.
Good:Â Adds value by bringing in a fresh external view and challenges the status quo.
Bad: Treats every venture as a project for itself.
Good:Â Draws parallels to previous projects and establishes contact to other ventures.
Bad: Ends the support when the official assignment is over.
Good: Stays in touch with the venture’s team and cares about its current development.
Bad: Only focuses on his/her operational function.
Good: Is aware of key value drivers in all departments and encourages collaboration between teams.
Bad:Â Tolerates confusion and unstructured reality.
Good:Â Sorts out confusion and builds structures.
Bad:Â Does whatever the founder sees as a priority.
Good:Â Balances timeliness, risk and cost.
Bad: Manages against “as good as possible”.
Good:Â Decides objectives for all three, keeping in mind which one has priority and limits.
Bad: Has all planning in his/her head (or worse: trusts that the founder does).
Good:Â Guides the founder and the team in structuring their efforts and helps them to keep on track.
Bad: Changes applied planning tools often and use multiple plans in parallel.
Good: Anticipates complexity and find a pragmatic way to use tools in the required way.
Bad:Â Is frustrated by things not going well.
Good: Expects that things won’t necessarily go well and changes them.
Bad: Draws a clear line concerning the limits of the role.
Good:Â Does whatever it takes, whether it be management tasks or operational legwork.
Bad:Â Puts full focus only on maximizing revenue tasks.
Good:Â Supports maximizing revenue, but keeps an eye on soft factors such as team development and satisfaction.
Bad: Develops the venture striving for exit.
Good:Â Develops the venture striving for value.
Our venture development team supports our ventures along the dimensions of project management, interim management and operational support. Tobias, Christoph, Philipp, Mark and Rainer have gathered significant experience in running businesses and managing complex projects before and within Project A. They specialize on any functional area that is vital for the success of our portfolio.
At Project A, we regularly try out new things to improve our daily work, especially when it comes to knowledge sharing. Recently, we have initiated a new format for our IT staff: the IT Open Space.Â
Every first Friday of the month, all of our IT teams are invited to gather in the afternoon to share knowledge, exchange experiences, and to experiment. While freely grappling with IT-related topics, our developers have already experienced some positive effects on their development culture, shared knowledge, and explored technologies.
Take a look on our Techblog, where Paul Sturm and Alberto Assmann give some insights into the working atmosphere and the benefits of our IT Open Space.
If you want to be a part of our open development culture, check out our IT job offerings. For example, we’re currently looking for a…
"How the old and new Economy can benefit from each other...
...and why this is important for German competitiveness"
Like every disruption in the history of economics, digitalization provides founders and entrepreneurs with a huge chance to create new business models and develop new products. In Marc Andreesen's legendary WSJ article from 2011 “Why Software in Eating the world”, he observed two partly parallel developments: That products and services are becoming more and more digitized, as well as their type of distribution.
But how can companies handle this trend and possibly even benefit from it? And what does it mean for specific industries?
Read Florian’s full article in the new edition of the Hundert (p.20/21) and learn why building digital specific competency is the key to sustainably overcome the obstacles coming along with digitalization.
Free Download here.
(Unfortunately this article is only available in German)
From Mockup to App-Store: Developing the Catawiki-App
In October 2014, Project A invested in Catawiki, an online auction house exclusively for exceptional collectibles and unique items. Our goal was to help them expand and internationalize their business, providing financial investment and operational expertise. Founded in 2011, Catawiki holds weekly auctions in 35 categories, providing a platform to unite buyers and sellers, resulting in transactions of tens of millions of euros each year. Specialized auctioneers supervise the auctions, with their expertise guaranteeing a large variety of high quality lots (“lot” is an auction term meaning an item up for bidding). Each auction contains a diverse number of lots, all pertaining to a specific topic.
Beyond supporting their marketing and BI efforts, our team identified the importance of immediately notifying users when they are outbid, allowing them to react quickly and avoid losing an auction. To provide the users with the fastest possible bidding experience, we decided to create an iOS app, taking Catawiki mobile and bringing the auction experience to the smartphone.Â
We focused our initial development efforts on iOS exclusively – rather than two platforms at once – in order to provide our users the best designed, most bug-free experience possible, as well as to save time and money.
 In this blog post I'd like to walk you through the evolution of the app, taking  look at the design of several different areas over a number of stages.  We'll go  over the design process, and I'll explain why changes were made to the  design of particular areas. The changes we applied are based on user  feedback and on mobile best practices.
 Auctions Screen
 We start with the first screen the user sees when he opens the app: a list of all  auctions, starting with the auctions ending soonest.
As you can see in the GIF, the transition from mockup to final app involves a  number of changes:
 Reduction of functionality:
We found that the "Pin the auction" feature distracted the user, so it was removed.
The "View all Lots" button, which was designed to show all lots available in an auction, was removed because users don't need a button to go to the  details of an item; they know to tap on a particular item instead.
The display of the auction’s ending time moved to the header
We reduced the size of the auction item to display more auctions on the screen (from three items to four)
We started with one picture per auction. The feedback we got from users was that they want to see more preview pictures to get a better   impression of  what to expect. Accordingly, we first increased the number of review images to four, and later to five, in order to provide a more complete preview of what the specific item looks like, and to give the users a better idea  of what to expect.
Lots Screen
The Lots Screen shows the lots of a particular auction, and is updated in real time: for example, when a new bid comes in.
 In this case, we changed the mockup by removing the "View the lot" button for  the same reason we removed the "View all Lots" button.
 Bidding Screen
 The bidding screen allows the user to bid on a lot. There are two possible  ways to place a bid:  by tapping on “Place bid,” or tapping on “Automatic bid”.  "Place Bid" allows the user to fill in an individual amount, entering a single,  one-time bid for a specific value.  "Automatic Bid" allows the user to set a  maximum amount they are willing to bid, up to which their bid will automatically  be raised in response to another party bidding on the lot.
The two input fields were removed due to user confusion over having two text fields.
The text explaining the auction fee was changed to an explanation alert.
An image of the lot was added to the screen, to make it easier for the user to connect the bidding screen to the particular lot
The size of the information bars at top were reduced in order to allow the user to focus on the bidding.
After we finished and launched the final version of the app, it was downloaded many times  before we even began marketing, and we have already received very positive feedback from the users. This shows how crucial it is to allow an app to evolve through different stages of development, and to not be afraid of making fundamental changes. Another essential aspect is to provide your test users the ability to try the app directly on their phone, as well as to test in an interactive modus (I'm not sure if you specifically want to the word "modus" or not.  If not, I would change it to "manner"). Doing so will make their feedback much more valuable.
The changes we made during the development process have been very important to the success of the app.  My advice is to not hesitate to change the look and feel of the app while you’re developing it. The most important questions you should ask yourself when thinking about mobile user interfaces is “What’s the job the user want to be done." Then, with the early feedback of your test customers, try all possible avenues to create a solution which is the simplest way to get the job done.
Download the Catawiki app
About the Author
Leonard, Head of Mobile at Project A, realized several mobile projects for companies like Axel Springer and Rocket Internet. Part of Project A from the beginning he’s responsible for helping our ventures with the development and implementation of mobile strategies. His heart beats primarily for iOS.
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