Swisspreneur podcast

About Sreenath Bolisetty and Blue Act Technologies

Sreenath Bolisetty is the co-founder and CEO of BluAct Technologies, an ETH spin-off which provides a technology for water purification from heavy metals through milk proteins. In 2020, the company won the Expert’s Choice Award at the Energy Startup Days. Originally from a small village in India, Sreenath obtained his PhD from the University of Bayreuth. He went on to work as a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich and in 2016, started BluAct Technologies as his first company. BluAct’s purifying system differentiates itself through its high level of effectiveness at a low cost point. Being able to run without electricity, it is the perfect choice for water purification in remote areas – something which BluAct Technologies has proven through their various pilots in remote communities around the world. Their milk protein membranes are suitable both for water purification in individual households and at large scales of thousands of cubic meters of water. With 2 products already on the market, BluAct Technologies wants to expand its offering to cover purification for radioactively polluted water. The company is planning to raise USD 3m in their next investment round to help with the commercialization and certifications of its products.

Memorable Quotes

“A very strong motivation to start BluAct was the fact that I come from India, where water problems are a very real day-to-day issue.”

The Episode in 60 seconds

Getting company culture right, according to Tobias Häckermann.

Common mistakes around company culture

• Underestimating its importance: Your company vision makes sure everyone pulls on the same rope. The culture ensures everyone pulls in the same direction. Having a strong culture helps employees take good decisions without always referring to their managers for guidance, therefore making the company more efficient and agile.
• Getting started too late: while a team of 5 might not need an explicit culture statement, it’s easy to miss the right moment to “get started with culture”. This is especially detrimental if you’ve already hired employees who are not a great cultural fit.

Finding and growing your culture

• Company culture is the result of shared values. Most often, these will be the values of the founding team.
• If you aren’t sure what your values are, a good place to start is by observing your feelings in your day to day business interactions. Do you get frustrated when someone doesn’t appreciate the work you do? Maybe appreciation is a value you hold dearly. Do you love to receive candid feedback from others? Maybe openness is important to you.
• Once the founding team is aligned on their values, make them explicit and talk about them often. Base your decisions (particularly around hiring and firing) on these shared values.

Scaling culture

• While you grow, it’s extremely important to stay true to your values and not to accept a culture misfit just because someone is good at their job and/or you struggle to find someone to replace them.
• Everyone is responsible for nurturing company culture and calling out cultural incompatibility. Don’t outsource this important task to a “Chief Culture Officer” or similar.
• Nobody is perfect and employees (and you as well) will sometimes fail to live up to your values. That’s okay, as long as you and the person in question clearly see the problem and a path towards improvement.

Measuring culture

• While there is no “right” or “wrong” culture, there is culture that works and culture that doesn’t. A way to measure the “health” of your culture is via employee happiness and employee Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• To add more color to the employee NPS, consider also measuring the number of employee referral hires you get. Referring a friend is a strong indicator of happiness and a well working culture.

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Memorable Quotes

“Establishing a great company culture reduces the amount of time you need to spend handling internal affairs, and leaves that time free for actually helping your customers.”

“If your core team does not share your company values, then you’re never gonna establish a culture. Culture is established through behavior.”

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About Laurent Coulot:

Laurent Coulot is the co-founder and CEO of Insolight, a photovoltaic startup. Laurent started Insolight in 2015, together with his two co-founders, Mathieu Ackermann and Florian Gerlich. Within 5 years, the company has grown to over 15 employees. With Insolight, the co-founders focus on a very specific area of the photovoltaic market which is not yet well served by mass produced photovoltaic panels – agrivoltaics. Insolight’s solar panels are both translucent and highly efficient. These properties make the panels uniquely suited to be  deployed on top of areas which are used for growing crops – therefore reducing the land use competition between agriculture and photovoltaic by allowing them to coexist in the same space. In 2020, Insolight closed a $ 5m series A and received its first orders from industrial customers. The company was also awarded the public choice award at the Swiss Energy Startup Days. In 2021, Insolight plans to build and ship more than 1000 panels.

Before starting Insolight, Laurent worked as an Applications Engineer at Melexis. He holds a Masters in Micro and Nanosystems from the EPFL.

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Memorable Quotes:

“We think market regulations should reflect the fact that solar energy has a pretty much non-existent carbon footprint.”

About Tobias Häckermann:

Tobias Häckermann is the co-founder and CEO of Sherpany, a provider of meeting management software for leadership meetings. Tobias started his first company right out of high school. As a long time practitioner of martial arts, he was the go-to person if one of his friends needed a bouncer for a party or other event. Seeing an opportunity, Tobias started PNC security. Through his first venture, he met Nathanael Wettstein, who would later become one of his co-founders at Sherpany. Tobias sold PNC security to a competitor for CHF 70k. He went on to start easyComm, a platform for digital events which he sold to Alphablue Eventmanagement. During this entire time, Tobias was still obtaining his law degree from the University of Zurich. During his semester abroad at University of Siena, the idea for Sherpany was born. Originally, Sherpany was conceived as a communication tool between companies and their shareholders. For nearly two years, Sherpany was trying to bring the product to the market, until the founders realized they were not solving the right problem for their customers. The company pivoted to providing software for agile meeting management in leadership teams and has since grown to a multinational company with offices in Paris, Lisbon, Milano, Wroclaw, Berlin and Zurich.

Memorable Quotes:

“It’s okay to work part-time on a startup at the beginning. But at some point you’ve got to start giving it your all, otherwise you’re gonna iterate too slow and you’re gonna get frustrated, because you’re going nowhere.”

“I always thought the bigger your company gets, the more things it should be able to do. But it’s the opposite — the bigger you get, the more focus you need.”

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Resources Mentioned:

Blinkist

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About Liliane Ableitner and Exnaton

Liliane Ableitner is the co-founder and CEO of Exnaton, a software provider for energy communities, allowing neighbors to trade renewable energy amongst each other. Before starting Exnaton, Liliane was a Doctoral Researcher at the Bits of Energy Lab at ETH Zurich. She met her two co-founders, Arne Meeuw and Anselma Würner, during her work on the research project “Quartierstrom“, funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy. The project resonated well with all stakeholders involved and the three PhD students decided to spin it out into an independent company in 2019. Since then, Exnaton has signed 2 pilot customers and is currently fundraising. In December 2020, they won the Investor’s Choice award at Energy Startup Days, which helped the company to gain exposure amongst relevant stakeholders. Contrary to some of their competitors, Exnaton doesn’t sell their software to end consumers. Rather, they cooperate with local utility companies and allow them to white label their solution and distribute it to their customers. Exnaton is greatly benefiting from the liberalization of European energy markets because it has been driving competition for innovative products between utility companies. They are hoping to further benefit from an opening of the Swiss market, which has traditionally been very protected.

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Memorable Quotes

“If you’re in a market with 0 competition, then you’re in the wrong market, because either you’re on a completely wrong track or you’re way too early.”

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The Episode In 60 Seconds

Pivoting your business idea to success, by Teo Borschberg.

Mistakes to avoid

• Waiting too long to pivot because you have gotten emotionally attached to the solution or somehow locked yourself in too early.
• Iteration cycles which are too long. Building out a finished and polished product for every iteration will make you slow and waste large amounts of resources.

The Startup Pivot Pyramid by 500 Insights

• The Pyramid gives you an idea of how aspects of your product build on each other (customer, problem, solution, tech, growth).
• This helps you understand, for one, which areas you need to define first in order to move up the pyramid, and two, how consequential a potential pivot in one area is for other areas of your business (i.e. a pivot in customers you are addressing is far more consequential than a pivot in the tech stack you are using).

Customers and their problems

• Finding enough customers in a big enough market that have the same problem is always the first problem you’ll want to solve when looking to achieve product-market-fit.
• Talking to potential customers under the pretense of collecting data for a survey can be a subtle entry point to start a conversation.
• Your primary goal in customer conversations should be to evaluate how the problem you are trying to solve for them ranks amongst their other problems and how much they’d be willing to pay for solving it. Ideally, if the problem is big enough, customers will ask about buying your solution once it’s live already at this stage.
• Try to interview 50 to 100 potential customers and narrow down the hypothesis about your customer profile as you go.
• Analyze the results of your conversations based on the $ amount each type of customer is willing to pay to have their problem solved.
• Clarify the 3 whys for your customers in detail: why buy anything, why buy us and why buy now. As for the “why buy now”, it often pays off to have a fix point to create urgency: a product release, a trade show, a board meeting or something else your customer cares about and that encourages them to move the deployment of your product along quickly.

Solution

• Once you think you have an idea of who your customer is and what problems you are solving for them, come up with the simplest version of your product that addresses the most pressing points of the problem.
• You’d be surprised how much can be faked in these early product versions. Don’t worry about having efficient code and well-trained algorithms. Most likely, hardly anyone will be using this first version anyway and you’ll have to rebuild your tech stack anyway as you learn and scale.

Growth

• Today it’s cheap to run growth experiments across different channels, so there is really no excuse not to do it.
• Notice that growth sits at the top of the pyramid. There is really no point in throwing money into growth marketing if you are not certain yet that you have found the problem and solution that really works for your customers.

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Memorable Quotes:

“You need to show to your customers why they need to buy your product now. This sense of urgency is the key to your startup’s success.”

“When it comes to pivoting, as with many other things, getting attached will hinder you from making the right move.”

About Teo Borschberg and OTO.ai

Teo Borschberg is the co-founder and CEO of oto.ai, an AI-powered voice intelligence solution. Teo started his entrepreneurial career after obtaining his maturité (high school diploma). He relocated to China, where he spent 8 months working in a factory, 6.5 days a week. During this time, he started to resell paintings and furniture from China to Europe, and his first company, Artefact Co, was born. Three years later, upon the completion of  his Bachelor in Hospitality Management at Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne, Teo returned to China to start his second company, the media advertising business Good Media. In 2015, he sold Good Media and reoriented himself towards the US. He joined SRI International, a renowned non-profit research institute as Entrepreneur in Residence. In this position, he was tasked with finding business opportunities for the cutting edge technologies the Institute was developing. This is where the idea for OTO.ai originated. Three years later the company has raised $ 5.8 m in seed financing, has analyzed over 10 m conversations and serves 10 large customers globally. While OTO.ai was originally selling mainly to call centers, they – as so many others – had to pivot during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Within a few short months, the company set itself up to offer an API / SDK to its product in order to let developers use it in almost any context imaginable – from wearables to smart home devices, and even telemedicine.

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Memorable Quotes

“It’s always dangerous to have a technology and be looking for a market, instead of having a market and be looking for a technology.”

“I will only say we have a product-market fit the day we have customers kicking down our door to get their hands on the product.”

About Tatiana Cogne:

Tatiana Cogne is the President of START Lausanne and Head of Communication at Swiss Solar Boat. Tatiana joined START in 2019 as an event organizer, after having participated in START Hack and START Summit in St. Gallen. After 9 months as Event Organizer, she advanced to President of the chapter in June 2020. Under her leadership, START Lausanne has been reinventing itself over and over again during the last couple months in order to comply with ever changing COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Beyond that, Tatiana initiated the forming of a network of entrepreneurship organizations across the Swiss Romandy: rather than each organization working independently in their city, they now collaborate on news distribution and other opportunities. START Lausanne offers events, workshops and mentoring to students and other people interested in entrepreneurship. They also organize the START Contest, a 6 month-long competition where startups receive support to refine their business idea and potentially win a CHF 30k prize.

START Lausanne is one of 10 chapters of the START Global organization in Europe. START Global was founded in 1996 out of the University of St. Gallen (HSG) and has since become one of Europe’s top startup events.

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Memorable Quotes:

“When I finish my presidency at START Lausanne, I want to do so with the knowledge that I motivated every single one of my colleagues to surpass themselves.”

About Mina Kamel:

Mina Kamel is the co-founder and CEO of Voliro, a producer of robotic drones for inspection and light maintenance at height. Mina obtained his Bachelors in Automation Engineering Technology from the Politecnico di Milano before moving to Zurich to obtain his Masters and eventually his PhD in Mechatronic, Robotics and Automation Engineering from ETH Zürich. During his PhD, he contributed to the Aeroworks project, where much of the inspiration for Voliro was drawn from. He also met his 4 co-founders, Timo Müller, Dr. Marius Fehr, Dr. Anurag Vempati and Dr. Thomas Schneider, during this time. With all five co-founders coming from a technical background, they supplemented their business knowledge through advisors and coaching by Venture Lab. The team quickly realized that the timing for Voliro was right. Not only had the technology for robotic drones matured, but there was a strong pull from the oil, gas and infrastructure industries to lower operational costs through increased efficiency in maintenance. Voliro closed a CHF 2m seed round in 2020 with Alex Fries’s Alpana Ventures as lead investor. They will use the seed round capital to get their product to the market faster and are planning to raise a series A round towards the end 2021 for CHF 5-10m.

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Memorable Quotes:

“Falling from a great height is the number 2 biggest cause of workplace injuries. With our solution, robots do the dangerous work, and people stay safely with their feet on the ground.”

“Product development is a skill you can develop, but it takes a very long time. Sometimes it’s just more practical to hire professional help.”

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Resources Mentioned:

Garmin Sports Watch

Dare To Lead, by Bréne Brown‍

About Aldo Podestà:

Aldo Podestà is the founder and CEO of L2F, the company behind the platform Giotto.ai, which builds and hosts high performance machine learning applications. Before starting Giotto in 2017, Aldo Podestà worked in Sales Strategy at Philip Morris, in Lausanne. The idea for Giotto was born when he presented at a high level management meeting and was asked to provide an explanation for the recommendations his machine learning based strategy model had provided. When he was unable to explain the recommendations of his own model, he suspected that there would be tremendous value in a solution that would increase a machine learning model’s interpretability. Not long after its inception, Giotto.ai won a competition on Kaggle, one of the most prestigious data science platforms globally. In 2019, the company closed a CHF 3.2 Series A round which allowed them to pursue their ambitious vision. As a CEO, Aldo initially struggled to assemble the right team around him: betting on exclusively young and ambitious employees proved to be a mistake. Today, he counts on a more mixed team with various levels of experience.

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Memorable Quotes:

“You don’t run a company alone. You run it with every single one of your employees.”

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Resources Mentioned:

VentureLab (Venture Kick)

Innosuisse‍

The episode in 60 seconds

Getting employee participation plans right, according to Yoko Spirig.

Common mistakes

• Not taking participation plans seriously in the early days and postponing it for later, therefor losing out on the motivational benefits for early employees
• Not being transparent and structured about participation plan, which can lead to a feeling of haphazardness among employees

Why participation plans are important

• As a startup, you’ll often struggle to compete with established companies on the salary front. Stocks are your secret weapon to attract top talent in spite of limited cash.
• Holding stocks factually makes the employees co-owners of the company. It’s easy to see the positive influence on mindset and attitude that co-ownership can bring.

Participation plans in Europe vs the US

• Employees in Europe hold less than half of the company stock than their US counterparts. This is among other things due to lower awareness of the value of participation plans amongst the European workforce.

The mechanics of participation plans

• How much stock should you reserve for employees? Generally good bench marks are 5-10% in the early stages of your company and up to 20-30% in later stages
• Who should receive stocks? Ideally, everyone. Large companies like Google still offer stocks to every new employee which joins the company. Long term employees should get regular “refreshers” i.e. more stock added to their portfolio
• How do you decide who gets what? There are 3 dimensions to get you started. Depending on your priorities and culture, you might to weigh them differently

• Seniority level: more responsibility means more stock
• Employee number: early joiners took a higher risk when betting on your company and should be rewarded accordingly
• Tech vs non tech talent: the truth is, tech talent is much harder to compete for in today’s labor market, so it’s common to offer them larger participation options
• What is vesting and why is it important? Stocks are usually not transferred to employees in bulk all at once but in smaller tranches over a period of time. This process is referred to as vesting. A 4 year vesting period for example means that the entire pool of assigned stock for an employee will be distributed to them over a 4 year period. It’s advisable to make the tranches fairly small  (i.e. distribute stocks every month rather than once a year) in order to avoid a situation where you give a large portion of stock to an employee and they leave the company immediately after.

Communicating participation plans to employees

• Be aware that many of your employees might not have heard of participation plans before and aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of venture capital. Therefore, take the time to explain and frame the participation plan for your employees as a way to become co-owners of the company
• Create a table that clearly shows who will receive how many stocks and based on what criteria. This will prevent employees from feeling treated in unequal ways.

Pitfalls of participation plans

• When you are short on cash, it’s tempting to think you can make up for a low salary with stocks. This is not a fair way to treat your employees as you are forcing them to bet their financial security almost entirely on the success of your company.
• It may also be tempting to oversell the value of participation plans to your employees. While it’s certainly not wrong to strive for a unicorn valuation, the truth is most companies will never get there and you should be honest with your employees about this.
• Be aware that in Europe, every country has their own rules for how employees participation plans work and how they are taxed. Consider getting some legal help when you want to internationalize.

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Memorable Quotes

“You shouldn’t let equity plans be an excuse not to pay your employee a decent salary.”

“I think it’s the immaturity of the European startup ecosystem that makes it not take employee participation plans seriously yet.”

About Sébastien Jaffaux and Swiss Solar Boat

Sébastien Jaffaux is the founder and CTO of the Swiss Solar Boat Association, a project created by engineering students from EPFL and HEIG-VD. Swiss Solar Boat aims to create a solar powered racing boat from scratch, to compete in contests such as the Monaco Solar & Energy Boat Challenge 2021. Swiss Solar Boat is not your typical startup. It emerged from the EPFL Hydrocontest Team which represented the EPFL at the Hydrocontest competition for maritime energy efficiency. Sébastien Jaffaux started out as communication manager at the Hydrocontest Team and became president of the association in 2018.  As president, he led the transition from Hydrocontest to Swiss Solar Boat in 2019. Today, the Swiss Solar Boat Association is made up of over 60 students from various technical backgrounds who work together to create a solar powered boat from scratch, including producing the individual boat parts. Currently, Sébastien Jaffaux lives and breathes his project and enjoys pulling off such a challenging feat with some of his closest friends. But due to the nature of the association, he will be handing over his responsibilities as CTO and Vice President once he finishes his Masters degree in mechanical engineering at EPFL in the Summer of 2021.

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Memorable Quotes

“The Swiss Romandy is missing a place where all entrepreneurs can meet to exchange know-how and enrich their perspective.”

About Yoko Spirig And Ledgy

Yoko Spirig is the co-founder and CEO of Ledgy, an equity management company for startups and high growth companies. Yoko studied Physics at ETH Zurich, the University of Oxford and CERN. She was also project lead of Swissloop, helping to build the first Hyperloop pod in Switzerland. Yoko met her two co-founders, Ben Brandt and Timo Horstschaefer, during her time at university. It was also during that time that they were first made aware of the problems related to equity management that many young companies (and their investors) face through a conversation with the Doodle founders, Michael Näf and Paul Sevinç, who were looking for a startup team on cofoundme. After graduating from ETH Zurich, the three friends went on a journey with the transsiberian railway from Vladivostok to Moscow where they read up on startup business strategy and sharpened the idea which would eventually become Ledgy. The company pivoted after 1.5 years from a free product to introducing business pricing and targeting larger companies rather than early stage startups. In the early days, the co-founding team also toyed with the idea of using Blockchain technology to enable their product. They however abandoned that plan after evaluating the regulatory framework and their customer needs. Today, Ledgy serves companies like Frontify, VIU and Sherpany and employs a team of over 10 people.

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Memorable Quotes

“A good board is a hands-off one — they don’t try to micro-manage the company. But they are also always there to offer good advice.”

“I became an entrepreneur because I wanted to have a direct, short-term impact on society.”

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Resources Mentioned

Zero to One, by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries

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About Alessandra Rojas and Tech4Impact

Alessandra Rojas is the manager of the EPFL Changemakers program, an incubator program which is part of the EPFL’s Tech4Impact initiative for accelerating ground-breaking and sustainable technological solutions to create positive societal and environmental impact. Alessandra Rojas was also a co-initiator of Versus Virus, a hackathon to develop solutions against the COVID 19 crisis.

As one of the world’s top universities for technology and science, EPFL is one of Switzerland’s most significant hubs for innovation. The EPFL Changemakers program emerged from the EPFL’s grant program and belongs to the unit of the Vice Presidency for Innovation at EPFL. Where previously entrepreneurs at EPFL were mostly supported through financial means such as grants, the goal of the Changemakers program is to provide more holistic support to early stage entrepreneurs and to make sustainability a cornerstone of what it means to be an  EPFL startup. The program was launched in October of this year with a first cohort of 20 students across the Bachelor, Master and PhD level. Due to the challenging circumstances presented by the pandemic, the program has had to evolve rapidly over the past months. Nevertheless, the 20 students will receive 6 months of intensive training and mentoring through peers and experts and are on track to graduate successfully from the program in February 2021.

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Memorable Quotes:

“Our GameChangers program has shown to us that the EPFL’s students’ interest in sustainable solutions is much higher than we had originally anticipated.”

“The changes that Covid has brought about have really helped startups with founders spread all across Switzerland cooperate better among themselves.”

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About Luiza Dobre and Komed Health

Luiza Dobre is the founder and CEO of Komed Health, a healthcare communications platform. She started Komed Health in 2016, after a long time toying with different ideas and struggling to find the right co-founder. Komed Health emerged from the realization that while communication is a challenge in every sector, in healthcare, the consequences of failed communicate faster and more effectively among themselves, which results in better decisions, a happier staff and healthier patients. With Marc Bornträger, Luiza Dobre has also finally found a technical co-founder to complement her skill set.

Before starting Komed Health, Luiza Dobre worked as marketing and sales specialist for major brands like Swarovski and Schindler. She also obtained a CEMS Master of International Management from the University of St. Gallen and ESADE Business School.
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Luiza Dobre’s Favorite Resources

Be Obsessed Or Be Average, by Grant Cardone

Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight

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Memorable Quotes

“I knew that I would only be the best version of myself if I were creating something.”

“I think life is too short to live in a certain country just because of a paycheck. To me, Switzerland is my home. My friends are here, I love the nature… I’ve found my place.”

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About Anaïs Matthey-Junod and Sun’n’go

Anaïs Matthey-Junod obtained a BA in Environmental Science and Engineering and an MA in Energy Management and Sustainability from the EPFL. In the last year of her masters, the idea for sun’n’go was born, after a trip to India with EPFL in 2019. In the following months, they developed their idea further, creating a portable energy center which can be used in impoverished communities to light up the community’s households and charge phones. These energy centers are sold through micro credit schemes. Running entirely on solar power, they are a green catalyst for economic development. In December 2020 Anaïs and her co-workers will be finalizing their prototype. In parallel, they are preparing to conduct their first field study in Malawi, as well as a pilot project in the first half of 2021. Anaïs Matthey-Junod is currently also a research assistant at the EssentialTech Centre, and has just joined the NORCAP Accelerator Program at NRC.

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About Caspar Coppetti and On Shoes

Caspar Coppetti is co-founder of On, one of the world’s fastest growing sports brands. Though initially quite hesitant to quite his well-paying corporate job and jump into such a crowded market, Caspar started On together with his two co-founders Olivier Bernhard and David Allemann in 2010, based on their patented CloudTec® technology. Why CloudTec? Well, because when you wear On shoes, you feel like you’re walking on clouds! They faced a good deal of social stigma at the time, since back then there wasn’t the huge buzz around startups that there is now — quite the contrary, actually. But through luck, perseverance and creativity, On shoes have climbed their way to the top.

They have famously been worn by  Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and of course, their brand ambassador, tennis star Roger Federer. Over the last 10 years, Caspar Coppetti and his co-founders have expanded the company to over 55 countries, turning it into one of the top 5 leading running shoe brands in the DACH area and in the US. Now On is expanding into the trekking shoe market, launching their extremely lightweight Cloudrock trekking shoe in 2019.

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The Episode with Jeremias Meier in 60 Seconds

How to find, optimize and scale your sales funnel from early stage to exit.

The early mistakes to avoid

• Sell like the incumbent: just because one sales funnel is working well for incumbents in your field doesn’t mean it will work for you. Especially if your unit economics are different (think for example on-premise software vs SaaS).
• Ignoring the unit economics: especially if you are entering the market with a new kind of business model, it’s very important to know your unit economics in order to understand if you are selling your product in a margin enhancing way or if every sale you achieve actually incurs a net loss.
• Only focusing on closing the deal: your long term goal will be to achieve negative churn (gaining more customers than you lose in a certain interval). This will not happen if your product does not delight customers across the entire lifecycle.

On data and experiments

• Data is your best friend when it comes to finding your most effective sales funnel. Don’t allow your organization to go astray on hunches and gut feelings.
• Becoming a data driven organization starts with the mindset and the mindset starts with the people you hire.
• Run experiments, and run them often. There is no way you’ll know from the start which funnels will work for you, so testing (and failing) is the only way to find out.
• To run a meaningful experiment you need two things: a quantifiable definition of success (and therefore failure) and a significant sample size. Leave either one out and the experiment will not deliver its value.

Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Cost

• A good way to measure success of your sales funnel is the ratio between customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LVT). So what you spend to acquire a new customer and what they in turn spend on your product during all the time they are your customer.
• There are a variety of ways how to calculate these two numbers. Whichever you choose, make sure it is comparable to benchmarks in your industry.
• A good ratio of LTV/CAC is 3-4. If you are higher, you are not spending enough on marketing / growth. If you are lower, you either have a lifetime value problem or you are not spending your marketing /  sales budget effectively.

Scaling and optimizing your sales funnel

• Don’t forget that once your sales funnel works and you have an acceptable and proven LTV/CAC ratio, this will help you get money from investors, because you can say: for X amount of money in, we’ll very likely get Y amount of revenue out. That’s a pretty safe bet.
• If you are scaling one of your sales funnel rapidly (especially online), most likely prices will increase because of the higher demand. Therefore it’s important to continuously optimize. Optimization is never done.
• Over time, a funnel may change and become less valuable to you. It’s time to pull the plug when you see the quality of customers you are getting through that funnel decrease  (i.e. lower LTV).

If you would like to listen to our first episode with Jeremias Meier, click here.

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About Jeremias Meier and Bexio

Jeremias Meier is the co-founder and managing director of Bexio, a company offering SaaS around payrolling, invoicing and accounting. Bexio was born out of Jeremias’ first business iBrowse, that he started while still at university. The team had built Bexio (called Easysys at the time) for their internal invoicing needs but found that a lot of agencies like themselves were interested in using the product. In 2014, they separated the product and agency business and spun out Bexio into an independent company. iBrowse was acquired by PwC in 2015 and transformed into a digital experience center.

About Mark Essam and YASAI

Mark Essam is the co-founder of YASAI, a vertical farming startup and ETH spin-off. The idea to pursue vertical farming originated from the book  “The Vertical Farm: How to feed the world in the 21st century” by Dr. Dickson Despommier, which Mark read during his exchange semester in Mexico City in 2016. He subsequently wrote his thesis at ETH Zurich on the following topic: “How to integrate Vertical Farming within the Swiss landscape?”. The building material manufacturer, LafargeHolcim supported an initial feasibility study of the hypothesis brought forward in the thesis and allowed YASAI to grow. In October 2020, YASAI secured a collaboration with fenaco for a industrial-scale vertical farming pilot project in Zurich through a joint investment of CHF 1.5 m.

About Lukas Stuber and DEPT

Lukas Stuber is the Managing Director of Dept, a digital agency. Previously, he had founded Yourposition, a digital marketing agency specialized in search engine optimization, which was acquired  by Dept in 2018. In 2004, Lukas published the book “Suchmaschinen Marketing” (search engine marketing) and became known as one of the pioneers of this field in Switzerland. He also serves as a lecturer on the topic at several Swiss universities such as University of St. Gallen and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

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The Episode in 60 seconds

Why expand your business to Asia

• Asian markets are growing rapidly, with a strong increase in purchasing power.
• Asia’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has long caught up with the US and is almost unparalleled in its agility and speed.

Preparing to expand your business to Asia

• Make sure you get a very good understanding of the cultural differences, especially with regards to contract negotiations.
• Ensure that your war chest is large enough. Like everything, the expansion will take you twice as long and cost you twice as much as anticipated.
• Swiss Global Enterprise offers a market checkup to determine if you are ready to enter a particular market.

Market entry

• Out of all the Asian markets, Singapore is probably the most similar to Europe, so it’s usually a good place to start building your base.
• Get in touch with the Swiss Embassies and Chamber of Commerce on the ground. They can introduce you to their network and put you in touch with experts in the region.
• It’s advisable to have a legal entity in the market you are trying to enter, especially if you are a service business.
• English will only get you so far in Asia. Outside of Hongkong and Singapore it may get tricky, so invest into an interpreter or find an employee which is well versed in both English and the local language.

Corporate Governance and Regulations

• It’s important to have a good mix of people from your team in Europe and locals from the region. This will help you relay your company values and corporate governance while also adapting to the local ways of doing things.
• Especially in Mainland China, regulations are rapidly changing and violating them can have serious consequences. Get expert advice on how to navigate the regulations of your industry.

About Doris Albisser and CLS Communication

Doris Albisser is the founder and executive Chairwoman of Evaluglobe AG. Through Evaluglobe, she focuses on board mandates, growth investments and advising companies’ in their international expansion. Before starting Evaluglobe, Doris served as the Group CEO for CLS Communication AG for 16 years, developing CLS from a startup through a management buyout and internationalization, to a company with 600 employees and 5.000 freelancers in 10 countries across Europe, Asia and North America. Amongst others, Doris also served on the boards of Switzerland Global Enterprise, SOS Children’s Villages and the Psychiatric University Clinic of Zurich.

The Episode in 60 Seconds

Bootstrapping your marketing from scratch

• The first commandment of bootstrapping: do it yourself. Don’t pay agencies or lawyers for things you can do yourself or copy paste from templates.
• Don’t start with branding, start with the performance marketing of your product. This way, you’ll earn back your ad spend immediately (if you do it well).
• Use cheap CPM media (cost per 1 million clicks) such as Pinterest or snapchat for brand awareness. Facebook and Instagram for retargeting.
• A lot of world class knowledge about social media marketing is freely available on the Internet. Use it!

Experimenting and tracking success

• Experiment with a broad variety of channels to find out what works. Be sure you understand the basics of how the platform’s algorithm works, so you are able to interpret your data  (e.g. how long does the algorithm take to learn, i.e. how long until it produces significant results).
• Run experiments over 1-4 weeks. External events such as the weather or other events can significantly influence the performance and skew your data.
• Branding ads should have at least a return of 1x, performance ads a return of 2x or higher. This means, with every $ spent, you earn 2 $ in purchases or customer value.
• Watch the CTR (click through rate), engagement and ROAS (return on ad spend) to gauge how effective your campaigns are.

Tracking offline marketing

• Usually a billboard alone won’t cut it. Combine off- and online marketing to build strong brand awareness.
• Use custom links or discount codes in order to track your offline marketing.

Finding your target audience

• Google analytics or Facebook audience are great tools to help you with this.
• You can create “look alikes” based on your Facebook pixel. Be sure to integrate it on your website early, so it can collect data.
• Look into the other Facebook pages that your audience likes and build your targeting based on them.

Scaling your social media marketing

• If an ad performs well DON’T just double the ad spend. This will throw off the algorithm and it will start learning from scratch again (and you’ll pay again for the learning). Instead, increase your spend slowly or duplicate your campaign and launch a second one with the same spend, to immediately duplicate your spend.
• Don’t go too broad. When expanding, do so in narrowly targeted locations to help build word-of-mouth.

About Joseph Jung:

Joseph Jung is a historian, consultant and the author of one of the most influential biographies of Swiss entrepreneur Alfred Escher as well as “Laboratorium des Fortschritts – die Schweiz im 19. Jahrhundert”. Joseph studied Swiss history, modern general history, history of law and German language and literature at the University of Fribourg, where he received his doctorate in 1987. In 1998 he habilitated at the ETH Zurich and was a private lecturer there until 2006. In addition to his scientific activities, Jung was Managing Director and Head of Research at the Alfred Escher Foundation (2006 to 2016).

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About Alfred Escher:

Alfred Escher (1819-1882) is considered one of Switzerland’s most influential early entrepreneurs. Among his “ventures” are the ETH Zurich, Credit Suisse, the Gotthard railways and Swiss Life. He was also a prominent political figure of his time. He served as National Councilor (Bundesrat) for 34 years and was elected National Council President (Bundesratspräsident) four times during this period.

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About Nicholas Hänny and Nikin

Nicholas Hänny is the co-founder and CEO of Nikin, a sustainable fashion startup. Nicholas started Nikin in 2016 together with his childhood friend Robin Gnehm. Within only 4 years, the startup grew to 30 employees and CHF 7.2 m revenue. In 2019, Nicholas received the “Aargauer of the Year Award” as recognition for his work with Nikin. Nicholas has a background in marketing and business administration. He holds a Master of Arts in Business Innovation from the University of St. Gallen and was part of the CEMS program.

About Phil Lojacono and Advanon

Phil Lojacono is the co-founder and CEO of Advanon, one of Switzerland’s formerly fastest growing fintech startups. Advanon offers a platform for SMEs to bridge long payment terms by providing them with liquidity through financial investors. Phil started Advanon in 2015, shortly after his internship at Google, where he also met his co-founders. In January 2017, the company closed a financing round of CHF 13,5 m with investors such as Daniel Gutenberg, Partners-Group co-founder Urs Wietlisbach, Eric Sarasin und Moneypark founder Stefan Heitmann. In 2018, Advanon was confronted with a significant fraud case on its platform. Under Phil as their CEO, Advanon recovered, and in 2020 successfully sold to CreditGate 24. Phil has now started his own blog where he reflects on the learnings of his tumultuous 5 years at Advanon.

The episode in 60 seconds

Starting a business with your significant other can be a rewarding experience. In this episode, Dorina shared her insights about how to make it work.

Rules and communication

• Starting your business is a 24/7 endeavor and it can become overbearing if you also spend your free time with your business partner. Set clear rules about when you plan to take breaks from work.
• Set more rules than you think are necessary because you’ll likely underestimate the temptation of wanting to talk about your business on your date night out.
• Be realistic about the chances to succeed with your business and don’t make your relationship dependent on business success.

How to know if your partner would make a great co-founder

• As with all co-founding relationships, complementary skill sets are crucial.
• Working together on smaller projects (like building an IKEA shelf) is probably a good indicator on whether you function well in a business context or not.

Advantages of starting a business with your partner

• Studies show that family businesses on average are more sustainable than other businesses although with lower growth rates.
• Being able to share the roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship with your partner can be very valuable and rewarding.
• In tough times, you won’t have to put on a brave face for your partner because they’ll know what’s going on.

About Dorina Thiess and Piavita

Dr. Dorina Thiess is the CEO and co-founder of Piavita AG, a medtech startup that develops and distributes digital veterinary diagnostic systems. Previously, Dorina worked for the innovation team at BHS in Munich and in the US while completing her doctorate in entrepreneurship at the University of St. Gallen, where she also served as the Managing Director for the Center for Entrepreneurship. She started Piavita in 2016 together with her partner Sascha Bührle. Within three years Piavita has grown to over 30 employees and has obtained financing from renowned investors, among them Fyrefly Venture Partners and Investire.

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The Episode in 60 Seconds

Getting inspired for your brand

• Building a recognizable brand is like building a character – it can come with its own edges and quirks.

• Your brand is probably not the first thing you need to worry about but if you move beyond the proof of concept phase, you should invest some time into it.

• Get your inspiration from the how, what and why of your company.

• Looking around for inspiration is good but your brand needs to be unique and recognizable, so don’t just copy paste from someone else

Getting real with your brand

• Getting the branding right is important – and hard. If you can, work with specialists in your surroundings – friends, board members, investors…

• Your brand follows your purpose and mission, so make sure to have that defined first.

• Your brand is not just your logo and color palette. Take a holistic approach and include everything from the language you use to how you present yourself in pictures (and of course make sure those pictures are high quality).

5 steps to your first brand set up

• Choose a short, simple name.

• Add some simple and concise messaging (a claim).

• Define your core audience and how you’ll address them with visual, spoken and written language.

• Connect the dots between the three first steps.

• If you can, work with a specialist in the field to fine tune your branding work.

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About Peter Käser and VIU

Peter Käser is the Founder and COO of VIU Ventures AG, a Swiss eyewear brand. He started VIU in 2013, together with his co-founder Kilian Wagner, both of them bespectacled. VIU was originally conceived as an online-only store, integrating the entire eyewear supply chain and therefore offering higher quality at a lower price. But the founders soon realized that their customers like to physically try on their glasses before buying them. Today VIU has over 50 physical stores in 6 countries and several hundred employees. Peter holds a Masters in Banking and Finance from the University of St. Gallen (HSG).

About Renato Stalder and Klara

Renato Stalder is the Founder and CEO of Klara Business  AG, an accounting and administration software provider for SMEs. Previously, Renato rose through the ranks to become CEO at Soreco, where he served for 12 years. Afterwards, he held the CEO position at Axon Ivy, a digital platform provider which is part of the Axon Group. Renato holds an MBA in International Management from Fachhochschule Nordostschweiz.

The Episode In 60 Seconds

What is Generation Z?

Young people born between 1995 – 2010, NOT Millennials.

How to win Generation Z as customers

• Do not simply base your assumptions on conversations with your kids.
• Talk TO members of Generation Z instead of only ABOUT them.
• Your brand image is important
• Remember, members of Generation Z are activists.

How to win Generation  Z as employees and retain them

• A compelling company vision will be more important than high salaries.
• A clear path for growth within the organization.
• Meaningful and mission-driven work.
• Responsibility and appreciation.

What’s the deal with TikTok?

• Fast growing social media platform with over 2bn downloads (July 2020).
• Very young audience.
• Still high virality potential.
• Now is the time to get started with your company account.

About Yaël Meier and Zeam

Yaël Meier is an actress, journalist and the co-founder of Zeam, an agency helping companies leverage Generation Z. At the age of 14, Yaël held her first movie role in the Swiss Drama “Upload”. She later on also featured in movies such as «Die fruchtbaren Jahre sind vorbei» and «Blue my Mind». As a journalist, she worked for SRF, Ringier and Weltwoche in various roles. In January of 2020, she started Zeam together with her co-founder Jo Dietrich.

About Julian and Relai

Julian Liniger is the co-founder and CEO of Relai, a startup aiming to empower everyone to invest in Bitcoin. Julian was an early crypto currency aficionado and the go-to person for his friends for anything crypto-related. This made him realize that there was no easy way for the “average Joe” to purchase Bitcoin – and that’s how Relai was born. He and his co-founder, Adem Bilican, went from 0 lines of code in April to launching the first version of their app on July 1st of this year. Relai is looking to raise CHF 200k in order to scale their product and make it more user friendly.

About Verena Kaiser and UBS

Verena Kaiser served as the Head of Direct Investment at UBS before becoming Chief of Staff, Corporate & Institutional Clients International in May 2020. As Head of Direct Investment, she was responsible for due diligence and matching of growth stage startups with UBS private investors. The UBS Direct Investment arm has already provided over CHF 120m in capital, among them VIU Ventures AG, Coatmaster AG and Cutiss AG.

About Christian Fehr and Clickahoy

Christian Fehr is the CEO and co-founder of clickahoy, a Swiss marine-tech startup. The founding team behind clickahoy is the same as for ship-ahoy.ch, the boat sharing platform launched in 2016. The founders saw a personal need to make owning a boat “smart” the way owning a car or a house can be. The company is currently looking to raise CHF 400k to increase the number of connected boats 10x and expand outside of Switzerland within the next 18 months.

The Episode in 60 seconds

Considerations when deciding whether to bootstrap:

• Bootstrapping is a long term project which needs time and dedication.
• Once you decide to get on the VC train, you can’t go back.
• External funding rounds also mean valuation rounds, which you have to keep driving up. A downround can be detrimental.
• If you cannot get a top tier international investor, it may not be worth the trouble.

Bootstrapping a user base:

• Brand: building trust and recognition is a long term game that will pay off.
• SEO / organic search: quality content and a product that truly meets the user needs will go a long way. Of course, this makes you dependent on the search engine algorithm.
• Community: know your target audience and build a community around your product.

Running experiments:

• Once you have a user base, experiment everything and optimize whatever you can.
• Always test on a subset of users to minimize overall impact of negative test results.
• Monitor all KPIs, not just conversion (e.g. customer retention, customer lifetime value, satisfaction, etc.).

About Ketevani and Logmind

Ketevani Zaridze is the CEO and Founder of Logmind, an AI-accelerated log data analytics platform. Originally from Georgia, she got her Masters in Computer Science from EPFL in Switzerland. After gaining work experience at Xerox, Open Systems and Cern, she started Logmind in 2018. Recently the company signed their first enterprise customer. They are now looking to raise CHF 1.3m in their seed round in order to grow to CHF 1.5m in recurring annual revenue within the next 2 years.

About Dennis Just and smallPDF

Dennis Just is the CEO of smallPDF, a SaaS company which offers all-in-one easy-to-use online PDF tools such as merging, editing and signing. Dennis is a serial entrepreneur, having started his first company, dSlash.de, while still in high school. During his university years, he started compreo.de, a translation service, but stopped the venture after 2 years because it was too early for the market. He went on to be Head of Product at DeinDeal and subsequently started Numbrs and Knip  (now Digital Insurance Group), two successful fin/insurtech companies.

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About Martin and Turicode

Martin Keller is the co-founder and CEO of turicode, a machine learning based document extraction solution. The company bootstrapped to CHF 1m in revenue. Their technology, MINT.extract, works to extract information from any type of document, supporting their customers along the entirety of their business processes. They are looking to raise CHF 2m to diversify the skillset in their team and also to scale internationally.

About Reto Lämmler and Testing Time

Reto Lämmler is the CEO and co-founder of Testing Time, a recruiting  platform for usability test users. Some of Reto’s previous ventures include:  Xellery, a cloud-based collaboration service for Microsoft Excel, which was sold to expressocorp.com and RememberTheName, an app for learning names in your address book. At doodle.com, Reto gained international startup experience as VP Product Management. He holds an MAS in Interaction Design and a BSc in Computer Science.

About Sophia and Caressoma

Sophia Borowka is the CEO and co-founder of Caressoma, a startup providing ultrasound diagnostics for monitoring soft tissue injuries. Sophia is a physicist by training and has spent several years as CERN Fellow in Geneva. Together with her two co-founders, Jana Maes, an experienced Osteopathy practitioner and Jinesh Kallunkathariyil, a physicist and R&D expert, they have already raised 270k CHF from investors. Now looking to raise an additional 800k CHF to bring the product to market as a non-medical device for training optimization for athletes.

About David Alain Bloch and Legartis

David Bloch is the CEO and co-founder of Legartis, a legal tech company which uses AI to help businesses with their legal needs. David is an Attorney at Law admitted at the Zurich bar. He was a member of the “Global Shapers”, a World Economic Forum (WEF) community network of highly motivated individuals who have a great potential for future leadership roles in society. David also co-founded Foraus, a Swiss think tank on foreign policy.

About Fabian and UNISERS

Fabian Walter is the co-founder and CTO of UNISERS, an ETH spinoff specialized in automated analysis equipment for high-purity liquids used in semiconductor production. UNISERS emerged out of the ETH pioneer fellowship in 2017. The company holds a patent for their technology and is currently looking to raise $ 1.2 m to expand their marketing activities at several high profile events and to bring their MVP solution to the market.

About Manuel Hartmann and SalesPlaybook

Manuel Hartmann is the Founder of SalesPlaybook, a Swiss sales accelerator for B2B startups. Before starting the SalesPlaybook, Manuel was part of Onedot, where he increased sales by 260% over 2 years. He holds a Masters of Business Innovation from University of St. Gallen and spent three years as a consultant at Accenture.

About Igor and What To Label

Igor Susmelj is the co-founder of WhatToLabel, a Data Preparation Platform for Machine Learning. Together with his co-founder, Matthias Heller, they bring together the best of the tech and business world. WhatToLabel is both a HSG and an ETH spinoff. Currently, they are looking for funding to take them to the next milestone – 100k in recurring revenue from their international client base.

The Episode In 60 Seconds

Lars Mangelsdorf is one of the co-founders of Yokoy, an expense automating tool.

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The ABC of B2B sales

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First Contact:
– Consider a mix of standardized outreach via cold emails and personalized strategies via phone or more creative means (ever thought about sending your prospects a shoe?)
– Don’t pitch your product upon first contact. Ask questions about your customer’s pain points and wishes.

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Demo:
– Don’t just demo all your features. Know what will create value for this specific customer.
– If possible, demo on-site to establish a more personal relationship.
– Even if you can’t convince the customer, ask for a referral to someone else in the industry.

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Tools to help you close:
– Hubspot
– LinkedIn Sales Navigator
– Hunter
– Soap Box
– Outreach

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Documents you need:
– Data security whitepaper
– 1-pager of your product
– Testimonials of happy customers, if possible

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KPIs of your sales team:
– Accounts Receivable vs target
– Conversion rates after first meeting. 30% would be desirable
– Diversified leads: ⅓ big accounts, ⅔ small / medium accounts

About Alex Tyropolis and Realbot Engineering

Alex Tyropolis is a co-founder and CEO at Realbot Engineering, a startup offering robot technology for remote viewing of real estate. He co-founded the company after years of experience in the real estate industry as an analyst for Engel & Völkers. After only 2 years of bootstrapping, the company already has a working product on the market and has conducted 4145 remote viewings for clients such as wincasa and livit.

About Melanie Gabriel and Yokoy

Melanie Gabriel is co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Yokoy, a SaaS company which leverages Artificial Intelligence to fully automate all expense- and company credit card processes. Before starting Yokoy, Melanie joined Dizmo as Marketing Manager and worked her way up to Head of Marketing. She is a board member of WE SHAPE TECH and holds a degree in Business Management from the University of St. Gallen (HSG).