mastef

Your company is in the top 5! Congrats!

We added all Startups exclusively through the AngelList API - it exposes Startups currently marked as fund raising. Also people can submit their suggestions as long as the Startup is listed on AngelList itself and matches a certain quality score.

And then we also went ahead and added promising startups manually ourselves :)

you could try ctrl+refreshing for latest version

yes in the beginning we were loading in the whole data from firebase, of course it got a bit big with 250-300 people playing non-stop for the past hours :)

we have optimised it now and it should be much better - remember to ctrl+refresh to clear your browser cache

Here's a live feed of the current guesses : https://startupfighter.com/#/guesses

pick the lesser evil

It's the same, I commented there too :) Thanks!

There's 2 games :

a) Which pitch is better - no player scoring there, only scoring for the startups b) Guess the startup - One slogan, 3 choices

You can switch between the games in the top navigation

Thanks! Will look into it :)

Are you being serious

It's only scored for the startups themselves ( hi-score list on frontpage )

As part of a 7 days product challenge we got this small idea about a startup game, which pivoted itself into 2 games... :)

An experiment with Firebase + AngelList API and too many childhood memories on the SNES

With 'step in the proper direction' I was referring to the table showcasing how calculations from 2014 to 2015 are now even further simplified.

VAT in itself is another debate. However, as many others have commented on this in this thread already, I don't have to go into specifics too much.

I was super-annoyed when first time in USA to find out I had to pay more at the cashier. Also it makes products seem cheaper than they really are - it's a cop-out to display pre-tax prices if you're billing more at the counter.

Are people shopping with a calculator?

It seems like this is actually a step in the proper direction. The removal of 'VAT based on seller country' from the system, standardizes now everything towards 'VAT in buyers country'

Now after talking with other SaaS owners it seems we're one of the 'few' non-EU companies that actually complies with this - however that choice is rather due to the provider we use.

We comply with the rules by using a payment reseller ( fastspring / saasy ) which allows us to reduce accounting ( only major payments are being sent from reseller ), and at a comparable rate to stripe ( 1-2% higher )

Since they specialise in regulations and payments, it's really a big headache off our shoulders - plus you reduce the invoices you have to handle. Also it removed that whole merchant account setup process etc, which was a bigger pain for a Hong Kong based company.

pretty cool!

we're a team of 4 core ppl ( some part time ) working on http://www.pitchxo.com and have managed to increase revenue since launch ~4 months ago MoM by ~20% - to around 2000$ monthly. ( famous slow SaaS ramp of death )

In that whole time running manual services like http://www.sharkboard.co ( monthly investor updates ) and http://www.stefanxo.com ( cto consulting, PA services & hosting ) kept us afloat while building it with 4-5k$ + shortterm gigs

backstory: i ran a small mvp 1-2 years ago on a blog of a famous european angel investor. we uploaded his next project's pdf behind a social login - 800 people signed up.

few months later we made a similar page for a fintech firm that was raising a round - this time with email notifications about sign ups and adding them to a CRM. they got about 150 investors signed up and raised the money quite quickly

so we started automating the process and building it as SaaS app step by step. at first with a few customers who we set up manually, then end of summer we finally launched the SaaS version

impressive!

Duly noted.. let's have a coffee when you're in the area again and review some vests

This is AMAZING :)

Just tweeted this yesterday : "Docker = future of IT infrastructure, Firebase = future of product focused companies running circles around competition" and today Firebase announced Google acquisition

Love it, big congrats!

Preferred stack now for app development would be Angular JS + Firebase + Go on Google Apps Engine for triggers/additional logic I guess

As promised, we offer now a trial period on the product!

As promised, we have now introduced a 7 days free trial on all plans!

Thanks for your feedback, it was valuable as from all the others who commented. We just opened the doors, so of course we'll have to adapt quickly.

There's a few points this taught us :

a) Trial period to showcase the product is a must - done! b) The pricing doesn't reflect the perceived value of the product - we need to work better on showcasing what's actually 'beneath the box', so visitors and potential customers don't just think that we're providing simple landing pages c) The current page doesn't showcase the product well enough - we'll have hopefully by next week a short video on the frontpage to easy that up + an additional page which has to be simple enough to explain the usecases and what's all connected to it d) Keep pricing simple. We removed the additional pricing options, and offer now unlimited admins and have set the lead limits way above the usual usage levels.

We are eager to grow with the feedback! Since yesterday we have introduced the trial period and simplified our pricing model as well.

I really appreciate your responses.

Thank you very much :)

If that works for you, this is great!

Not everybody needs a secured presentation, and if you can create a page manually, that doesn't need access control, a CRM connector, slide behaviour tracking, activity notifications and/or lead background information - and if it looks great on mobile and other devices - then by all means!

The problem we solve is not the hardest problem in the world. It simply takes a lot of time to get around it, to maintain it and to implement all the 'nice to haves' into it. As we like to say in the XO office - "it's simple, not easy"

If you can do it yourself, without hiring another person for much more money than the existing solutions out there cost; and if it doesn't keep you from your main focus - then that's the way to go.

We have with some of the early stage startups based on trusted investors, but unfortunately this is a very risky, manual and not-scalable model based on too many factors.

Thank you for the great feedback! We are currently looking into implementing a trial in the next few days.

We have with our first few customers already approx. 1000 accumulated leads together, so based on that data and their feedback we can safely say that it does not provide any considerable friction.

Having said that, yes there's going to be some oldschool investors or leads who will ask you for a PDF. But most leads won't give you friction if you mention that they need to log in to receive access to your secured investor area - it's not hard to understand that your company material cannot be out in the public; and the tracking part is not ever mentioned from experience.

Our primary goal with this product is to give the presentation owner a full background picture on their leads. There is no email + password sign up possible to evade that process as a conscious choice - no escape routes. If it's a big friction for an investor - by all means send him the PDF.

About frictionless sharing : A) We believe the business owner would like to know who sees his presentation, which areas they are interested in, and when they see it ( and PDFs don't provide any of that ) B) We are planning to add 'invite links' in the future, so leads can simply share to other leads by typing in their email address. If the feature really makes sense as opposed to keeping it simple - not 100% sure yet; but we'll keep on evaluating the idea.

A 7 day trial is def. something we want to add! Also happy to showcase you the product in the meanwhile if you reach out to us

Our early pricing was actually much steeper, starting at 1999+ USD setup and 649+ USD per month, so I'm quite happy we were able to bring it down a bit further with the automation.

Compared to other companies in the field it's competitive pricing for the extra-value it brings ( e.g. social connectors for lead aggregation instead of just emails, full background checks, standalone professional looking sites from the get-go, behaviour statistics on the slide decks, CRM connectors etc. )

Our early clients managed to raise rounds in the 8 digit values with the help of a more organized fund raising round, and then transformed their pitchdecks into investor pages to keep investors updated.

So based on those good experiences and seemingly no comparable product out there on the market I do believe strongly in our product being very competitively priced.

We started all this for an early Skype seed investor; he was overwhelmed with pitching a lot of different companies to investors and losing track of it.

So we put a simple presentation behind a Facebook login, and that was it for starters. Later connected it to a CRM; added LinkedIn, AngelList.

Started signing on customers and growing it based on their feedback, mostly manual work. Finally we built a whole automated SaaS solution around this, and added some nicer style to it plus a lot of background checks on the leads themselves and their behaviour.

You can see an example of a lead view here : http://datascreens.pitchxo.com/lead_info.png

Hope you like it!