YPlan’s founders
Rytis Vitkauskas (left) and Viktoras Jucikas (right)
Last November, a London-based startup launched a last-minute event discovery app that gives city dwellers just ten events available that day to choose from. By June, YPlan had secured £7.9m in its first funding round, with the likes of Shakil Khan, investor and advisor to Spotify and Summly, and Octopus Investments coming onboard. Twitter allegedly raised just £650,000 to £3m in its stage A funding round in 2008. The mobile-only, filter-free platform now offers 15 events per day, is on 10 percent of London’s iPhones and its founders plan to take it to major cities in Europe and the US from later this year. Cofounder Rytis Vitkauskas, says this success, and the company’s ability to grab an impressive amount of funding early on, is not just down to product, social networking or even technological brilliance, but old-fashioned one-on-one, real world networking. Vitkauskas shares his take on how offline relationships took YPlan to where it is today, ready to launch internationally.
It’s fair to say that over the last five years, Britain has succeeded in establishing itself as one of the world’s leaders in tech innovation. Whether it’s Cameron’s support of small startups through the AngelCo Fund, or the huge array of brands emerging from Old Street and Silicon Roundabout; Britain is breathing life into small ideas, nurturing them to become big successes.
Tech City has become a mecca for designers, hackers and builders who are flocking to the capital to create new systems and drive new projects which are helping to re-establish the UK as a leader in the digital economy. These companies are not only creating jobs and driving significant domestic growth, they’re attracting considerable international interest, as time and again we see our entrepreneurial ideas breaking into global markets.
“We took time to visit friends and old colleagues at 50 large and small tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Skype and Dropbox”Despite these new opportunities however, fledgling startups in London and across the world often make one mistake that could very well cost them success. In failing to recognise the importance of the offline network — by neglecting to meet with your contemporaries and future customers in real life, not just in real-time — companies are overlooking a key strategic area. By over-focusing on digital marketing, startups all too often are overlooking opportunities to make a much bigger impact through offline channels.
When my cofounder Viktoras Jucikas and I decided to leave our jobs at Goldman Sachs and Summit Partners, we took time to visit friends and old colleagues at around 50 large and small tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Skype and Dropbox, with the sole purpose of receiving their advice and mentorship. We spent a significant amount of time couch-surfing our way across London, Berlin and San Francisco, iterating idea after idea, formulating wireframe after wireframe, gradually taking small steps forward each day, based on the feedback of those we were visiting. With their help and a rigorous process of MVP (minimum viable product) testing, we eventually refined our list of 51 startup ideas down to one workable product: YPlan. Surrounding ourselves with like-minded contemporaries, and the new introductions and chance encounters this led to, was invaluable in helping us evolve our thinking.
We envisioned YPlan as a discovery driven, mobile only, two-sided market place for same-day events. But how do you build a business like this, when mobile commerce is still very much in its infancy, and not far off from where ecommerce was in late 90s (today mobile comprises only 11 percent of all online commerce transactions)? From examples set by big and small businesses alike, it’s clear that shoehorning one’s online business into a mobile app just doesn’t work.
“I’m still convinced that no online tool can compare to the power of face-to-face human relationships”Once again, we looked back to our offline network for advice. We gleaned nuggets of product best practice over a couple of beers at a Notting Hill pub with Jay Bregman, Hailo’s CEO. We internalised the importance of the singular use case and sat down for a late-night take-away with HotelTonight’s Sam Shank.
After laying the groundwork for our idea, we then set about talking to our customers — as future users of our product, we needed to know that the idea would resonate with them. As well as putting YPlan in front of some of the best tech minds in the business, we wanted to test the idea on friends and family who could give us immediate product feedback from the consumer’s perspective.
Before the company went live in London, Viktoras and I made an effort to introduce ourselves to many of our startup neighbours as possible. We got involved with university events, attended lectures and talks given by leaders in tech and business, spoke at the HackerNews conference and spent time spreading our message and generating hype about our upcoming launch. Growing grass roots awareness of YPlan right from the outset resulted in rapid product adoption, growth, and support by our amazing customer community. This organic movement allowed us to cross a quarter of a million London users in our first six months, and ultimately helped to secure a larger amount of Series A funding than Twitter, Soundcloud and Dropbox achieved combined when they were at a similar stage in their life-cycle.
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We may be in a business that constantly has digital at front of mind, but despite this, I’m still convinced that no online tool can compare to the power of face-to-face human relationships. It’s no coincidence then that YPlan facilitates just that — online discovery which leads to a moment of offline, real-world spontaneity.