Month: August 2015

Bram Kanstein_saas-invaders

Bram Kanstein: founder @startupstash & previously @ProductHunt!

by Tom Benattar

Bram Kanstein is an entrepreneur, Product Hunter and more! Bram makes us the pleasure to answer to some few questions.

Hi Bram, a few lines to tell us a bit more about your career?

I’ve been active in the internet world for some time now. Started at The Next Web with an internship and working in the Marketing team. Then I went on to work at an Amsterdam based investor, helping startups with product development and strategy. Tried and failed at 2 startups in between 🙂
Then I launched startupstash.com and joined Product Hunt as their European community manager. Now I’m off to pursue new adventures 🙂

Could you give us some tips to have a successfull launch on Producthunt?

Make sure your product is awesome of course 🙂 Find a hunter that has posted products in your vertical before. Check Whohunt.io for instance. Make sure you have a proper (not to long) comment ready + great images of your product you can add to the post. Stay active in the comments, thank people for upvoting (do this on Twitter) and try to leverage your appearance on PH with other publications like Techcrunch etc.

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How do you select your Apps on Startupstash?

It took my about 5 months to index around 700 products. Eventually I chose 400 products to be in the first version of Startup Stash. I look at the product itself and what they offer. Basically it’s my own opinion of cool tools 🙂

It seems that you’re working on a new project … Timeforstartups. Can you tell us a bit more about this? 🙂

YES!! This is going to be a weekly show on Blab.im where I, together with an awesome co-host give feedback to 3 startups (20 minutes each, 1hr total). This will be live-streamed and shared on Youtube also. confirmed co-hosts are Chris Messina, Jonathon Triest, Owen Williams, Cody Simms, Marc Kohlbrugge, Levels.io, Emiel Janson and more!

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Lastly, what are your 3 favorite Web Apps?

Getpoint.co: Share and discuss articles and websites with friends, directly from any webpage.

Getrevue.co: Create an engaging, gorgeous, weekly email newsletter.

And I use Twitter on Web A LOT 🙂

 

Follow Bram on Twitter!

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5 essential Web Tools to launch your startup!

by Tom Benattar

Here are 5 tools very useful to run your startup :

Namech_k

Namech_k is a tool that you can use to find your startup name and check its availability. Namech_k search for you on domain names available but also on all the social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or ProductHunt!

 

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Instapage 

Instapage is an app that lets you create a landing page in just 3 minutes. Before launching your product, you must have a landing page to test your market fit!

Get 50% Off during 6 Months on SaaS Invaders!

 

Bananatag 

When you’re launching your startup you will send a lot of emails ! Bananatag is the essential tool to track your sent emails. You will be able to check your emails stats : open rate ; clicks on different links from your email or even the location of your recipient!

 

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Simplifyd 

There are hundreds CRM on the market but Simplifyd is particularly well done and very beautiful. It allows you to have an overview about your sales, but you can also manage your contacts, calendar, to do list, timeline …

Get 3 Months FREE on SaaS Invaders!

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Buffer 

You are a web startup ? So you have to use social medias ! Buffer lets you manage all your pages (Facebook , Twitter, Google + …) from just one interface ! With Buffer, you can schedule your publications and track the performance for an optimal result.

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Kiss and Love from France
Team SaaS Invaders

Thibaud_Elziere_SaaS_Invaders

Thibaud Elziere, co-founder @Fotolia and great Web Apps (@mailjet, @aircall, @mention…)

by Tom Benattar

Thibaud Elziere is a fabulous french entrepreneur, he especially co-founded Fotolia (bought in 2014 by Adobe for 800 million dollars) as well as the startup studio Efounders which has performed Mailjet, Aircall, Mention, TextMaster or Front.

Thibaud makes us the pleasure to answer to some few questions!

Hi Thibaud, a few lines to tell us a bit more about your career?

I caught the entrepreneurship virus pretty early on – I never even worked as an employee. I decided to build Fotolia while I was still studying. After 4 years of building Fotolia, I built Zilok in 2008. 3 years later, in 2011, I met Quentin Nickmans to create eFounders. And it is what I’ve been working every single day since.

eFounders, what is it and how it works? If I have a great idea for a new SaaS app, can I contact you?

eFounders is a startup studio. Our process is to develop our business ideas inside our studio; once an idea is validated and falls under our building thesis, we “hire” two co-founders to develop the business with us and make it skyrocket. We build 3 to 4 SaaS startups a year. After 18 months, each startup becomes independent. So far, we have built 7 startups used my millions of businesses.
As a startup studio, we generate business idea internally. You can always contact me to talk about SaaS, I love it ; but it won’t become an eFounders startup! If you are an exceptional entrepreneur (business or tech), on the other hand, you are more than welcome to apply to become our co-founder.

In your opinion, what are the succes criteria for a start-up on a SaaS market?

1. The Market positioning. We believe in what we call the “Fortune 5 Million” market opportunity (as opposed to “Fortune 500”). Millions of companies that use your product, every day, and globally.

2. The team: in order to build a SaaS unicorn, you need a formidable founding team with both exceptional business and technical skills

3. A great mindset: to me, your startup mindset and culture should rely on resilience, ambition and a bit of craziness in order to succeed.

Can you give us THE metric to monitor when you have a SaaS software?

Definitely: Churn. Churn changes everything, it makes the difference between a pony and a unicorn. The cost of a huge churn, when your revenue is important, kills your business. And at the same time, the profit of a negative churn makes a very small business looks like the next unicorn.

Rather than an advice,  could you share with us a failure, regret?

About a failure: we recently shut down one of our apps, Solved.io after a few weeks in beta. Although we were very fond of the team and the product, we had to face the truth: we did not find a product-market fit. It was necessary decision to make and we learned a lot from it, yet it was a hard one.

And if there is one thing to regret… maybe not having built Slack? 🙂

What are your 3 favorite SaaS apps? Excluding those from eFounders, of course 😉

– Algolia: because they have a disruptive technology which is pretty rare for a SaaS solution (Disclaimer: I am an investor)

– Slack (of course): because it completely changed the way we communicate within a company. And all the integrations and the endless possibilities make it an awesome product.

– Workable: we like the team and the product at efounders – because we receive so many job applications every day, Workable has helped us streamline the process a lot.

 

Follow Thibaud on Twitter!