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If you are a founder in the B2B SaaS space, chances are high that you have heard of Product-Led Growth (PLG) as one of the most promising ways to grow. Notion, Canva, Airtable, Figma, Atlassian, Twilio, Zoom, and Slack are at the forefront of this new paradigm in software selling that places the product at the core of the go-to-market and growth motion. And they are unlocking huge value! Over the last couple of years, the number and market capitalization of public PLG companies has increased significantly. In 2021 so far, companies like GitLab (Oct, $11bn market value), Freshworks (Sept, $10bn market value), and Monday.com (Jun, $6.8bn market value) went public.

Why is PLG relevant? Traditional (enterprise) software sales and adoption are characterized by long sales cycles and procurement processes as well as complex products with a non-intuitive user experience. Salespeople educate buyers (e.g. C-level, VPs) on the product before a POC is run across parts of the organization. Then, during the implementation phase, the product is spread top-down through the company. Today, many software products just kind of show up in organizations, usually driven by end users trying to find a solution to a very specific problem they experience in their daily work (bottom-up). These end users generally hate demos, talking to sales, running implementation projects and training to use the software — they want to get a job done as quickly and easily as possible. This is where PLG comes to play. Compared to traditional software sales, a product-led growth motion uses the product to drive customer acquisition/distribution, conversion, retention and expansion. Users can try and use the product through self-serve (low friction), pay only as much as they use it (value-based pricing) and get more value out if by sharing it with others (virality). As a consequence, user growth is decoupled from sales headcount. However, it does not mean that sales teams are redundant — in fact, their role is critical for expansion and gets a more consultative layer on top (more on this in part 2 of this series).

Who is PLG for? As a B2B SaaS founder, looking at your users and their problem, you might decide for or against product-led growth to grow your company. Pete Kazanjy, the author of Founding Sales, suggests answering the following questions to come to this decision:

1. Is the value proposition simple enough for your target user group to understand through self-serve (i.e. get to the “aha” moment by themselves)?
2. Is the product new and differentiated?
3. Can the product co-exist with an incumbent in an organization’s tech stack (e.g. note-taking vs. accounting software)?
4. If none of the above apply: will you focus on smaller, fast-moving organizations not currently targeted by incumbents?

PLG fundamentally defines the company strategy as a whole, requiring the whole organization to be aligned. It impacts how you build the product, how you generate acquisition and expansion, how you price it, and how you engage with your customers.

Common blog posts and articles on PLG usually describe the growth flywheels of Loom, Slack and the likes which are mostly based in the US. However, we see more and more companies in Europe applying the PLG Playbook. We thus wanted to take the opportunity to have a closer look at it and the (selected) European founders applying the tactics to build and grow their companies. While some companies like Snyk have raised a significant amount of funding, others like Flowrite and Butter are still young.

The PLG Playbook

At Lightbird, we divide the PLG Playbook into the five different steps illustrated below.

This two-part series starts off with the first two steps of the PLG Playbook, which are how to focus on your end users and their pain point as well as how to acquire them in a cost-efficient and scalable way. The second part then discusses onboarding and pricing strategies, gives insights on the PLG tech stack for conversion and retention as well as on how to layer sales on top of the bottom-up approach. Let’s get started!

🎯 Focus on the end user and his/her problem

The first and most crucial part is figuring out who your end users are and what problems they experience with current solutions. Try to find out what they do in their jobs, how influential they are, what they are struggling with on the ground and how they are spending their budget. The more precise you are, the better! In addition: Try to understand how frequently users experience the problem you are trying to solve and what workarounds they have come up with. Ideally, they are actively looking for a solution and are willing to pay for it.

Maze (Location: FR, Founding Year: 2018, Funding as of 11/21: $17.5M), a software for user testing, is focusing on one specific use case, i.e. user testing, and a specific user group, i.e. product teams. A Product Manager immediately understands the problem maze wants to solve for him or her.

💎 Figuring out your end users and narrowing down the use case allows you to a) define the core value proposition of your product; b) nail your product’s positioning and messaging strategy; and c) consequently efficiently allocate marketing spend by focusing on high potential users who immediately understand your value.

📣 Get in front of your end user

Once you know your user segment(s), find out how and where they spend their time to get in front of them in a quick and cost-efficient way. Creating awareness for customer acquisition can happen through friends and family, word of mouth, waitlists, communities, and much more. We want to highlight four core awareness strategies in this article: waitlist & referrals, leveraging utility & virality, SEO and community.

Waitlist & Referrals

One potential strategy to apply before you actually launch your product is the waitlist. Flowrite (FIN, 2020, $660k), a writing tool powered by AI, is growing its waitlist with incentivized referrals. The product gets endorsed by early users helping to increase trust among their peers. There is even a public Google sheet that shows the referral leaders and a ranking. Gamification at its best! According to Samuli Pehkonen, Head of Marketing at Flowrite, this strategy paid out: The waitlist referral program brought in 30% of the total waitlist signups for Flowrite and was essential for customer development. Combining the waitlist with the private beta program enabled Flowrite to iteratively build the best possible product for the ideal users together with them.

Utility & virality

Ideally, the product has strong virality components to it. If the product can only be used with others or gains its value through collaboration, adoption rates can be increased significantly.

Whereby (NOR, 2017, $12M) is our favorite example here. Their video meeting tool makes it easy to join any video meeting without the nitty-gritty challenges one faces as a first-time user. Hosts just copy-paste their personal room link and share it with their attendees (activation). Attendees put in their name, enable microphone and camera and join the room (hook). No need to download an app, no need to set up an account, no extra windows popping up. By sending out the Whereby links, potential new users get instant value without signing up for it. These new users then send out their Whereby room invitation (trigger) and the growth loop starts spinning.

SEO

As with the other areas of the PLG Playbook, Product Led SEO also puts the end user in the center of the SEO strategy. This implies asking your end users how you can best close content gaps to help them solve their problem right at the moment when they are looking for a solution. Try to find out how your end users are using the site, what they are searching when they end up on it (via Google Search Console), talk to your customer success team on frequently asked questions (FAQ), and rely on your users to generate content for you (forums). Ultimately, a Product Led SEO strategy is aiming for a programmatic and scalable approach.

Snyk (UK, 2015, $1.3B), the cloud-native application security platform for developers, applies a strong SEO strategy. Francesca Kirhely, Developer Experience & Growth at Snyk illustrated in an interview with OpenView Partners how Snyk focuses heavily on helping developers find the relevant technical resources to their questions by leveraging suitable content. In addition to that, Quora is a way to apply programmatic SEO at Snyk: people are constantly discussing questions on the platform, thus creating content useful for SEO.

Community

The last aspect to help you with creating awareness and driving activation for your product is community. While a community is challenging to build, engage and scale, it is also very difficult to copy.

Butter (DK, 2020, $3.2M), a software making virtual workshops “as smooth as in real life”, strongly focuses on leveraging the community of its existing and potential users. According to Anamaria Dorgo, Head of Community at Butter, it helps them to a) get feedback from a curated, relevant user group; b) create product ambassadors helping them grow; and c) establish Butter as thought leader in the facilitation space. The community has now grown to close to 500 members. They get access to a knowledge base of the tool itself, “How-to-Butter” videos and best practice sharing, community-led events, expert AMA sessions, a discussion space, and much more. Being so close to its community members allows Butter to share future goals, progress as well as things that stand in the way and ultimately build the best possible product for remote facilitation.

💎 Leveraging these PLG tactics to create awareness has a ton of benefits. It allows you to build a close relationship with your end users to develop and sell the product. It helps to lower CAC through organic growth and virality as well as strong messaging. And taking advantage of communities can lead to improved LTV and retention rates if the members are fully aligned with the mission of the product.

Ritika Mehta has written a great article on why the next wave of startups will be community-led. And Sarah Nöckel from Northzone has shared her learnings of launching, managing and scaling a community with Femstreet if you want to dig deeper into the topic.

This first part of the PLG Playbook was all about focusing on the end users and how you can best solve their (specific) problem. The product is the center of your value proposition and your acquisition strategy, built for the end user. In the second part of this series, we will dive deeper into onboarding, converting and expanding your user base.

If you are a founder working on PLG as your growth strategy and want to geek out over it, feel free to get in touch with us via Email & Twitter. And don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date about everything happening at Lightbird. Stay tuned for part two!

The Product-Led Growth Playbook: Europe Edition (Pt. 1) was originally published in Marcau Partners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Erectile dysfunction (ED) and Intimate Men’s Health is still stigmatized — let’s change this!

This week, the German-American digital health startup Regimen announced its USD 2.25 million seed round with Ringier Digital Ventures, advised by Marcau Partners, as lead investor. We want to share some background on this investment and explain why we believe it’s time to change the stigma around ED and Intimate Men’s Health.

💰 A stigmatized and underserved but large market

Intimate health and wellbeing have not been topics to discuss during dinner conversations. Nonetheless, we see more and more funding going into the space, with Femtech leading the way by attracting EUR 189M of VC funding, according to a report by Speedinvest (Nov 2020). The same report also shed light on the lack of funding in the Sexual Health & Men’s Health space, i.e. EUR 7M in the same period of time.

To us, this was surprising to see, since at least 30% of all men across all age groups suffer from ED (Allen & Walter, 2019). The number is likely to be even higher, as men often do not speak about such issues. The market is also growing on both ends of the age spectrum: older people want to stay sexually active for longer while younger people experience increased sexual pressure. The andrology market is currently estimated at EUR 150+bn (Regimen, 2020).

Scientific research shows that ED can have many causes, such as unbalanced nutrition, lack of fitness, or poor mental health. ED is therefore closely associated with cardiovascular diseases or mental health issues. Symptom treatment like ED pills alone is oftentimes not enough to fully heal ED. In fact, symptom medication alone can lead to far greater and more severe consequences for the underlying issues. That’s why a more holistic approach is required to cure ED. Yet, the main focus of investors in the Intimate Men’s Health sector has been on telehealth or DTC companies such as Hims or Roman, selling subscriptions for prescription, over-the-counter drugs and personal care online. We believe that Regimen is well-positioned to provide benefits with a more holistic approach, accessible to all.

⚡ Easy-to-use product with strong initial traction

The product of Regimen is an easy-to-use app-based therapy available for iOS and Android. Following a simple onboarding and health risk assessment, Regimen offers a bandwidth of scientifically validated tools to fight the causes of your ED in a subscription. The covered areas are physical exercises, patient education on nutrition, mindfulness, lifestyle adjustments, and risk factor management based on a cognitive-behavioral therapy approach. Progress is tracked based on the established IIEF (International Index of Erectile Function) score, and the therapy is adjusted accordingly. The data and feedback from customers show medically significant improvement and delightful user satisfaction. Furthermore, users remain very active even beyond the therapy cycle.

The product was developed with international experts and is therefore unfortunately currently only available in English, but there is good news: A German version is currently in development!

👦🏽 Credibility through personal experience and backed by science

When we met the Regimen founding team, we were impressed by their unique setup. Max had founded two companies before and suffered from ED in his mid-20s. Wilko is Max’s long-time technical counterpart. Wolf has a deep understanding of ED as a doctor and urologist, as well as a well-respected researcher in the field of ED. The team has all the necessary ingredients to tackle this market: credibility through experience and backed by science, a technical skillset, and signs of strong execution. They also held each other’s back when Max started to speak about his own experience with ED after successful therapy. In doing so, Max has become an advocate for the destigmatization of ED and a true role model for many out there.

It is a great pleasure to lead this round and to invest along with skilled operational business angels like the founders of Foodspring or the Co-CEO of the Global Fashion Group. We are convinced that it is time to break the stigma and to make holistic therapy for ED accessible. Regimen has the optimal setup to achieve this goal and we are proud to be part of the ride.

P.S. The team is hiring. Reach out to Max for open roles.

Erectile dysfunction (ED) and Intimate Men’s Health is still stigmatized — let’s change this! was originally published in Marcau Partners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From a macro perspective, Switzerland has great prerequisites for a flourishing startup and tech ecosystem: It has been the most innovative country many years in a row according to the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2020 of the World Intellectual Property Organization, scores third in the World Happiness Report of 2020 and was just named Europe’s Innovation Leader 2021 by the European and Regional Innovation Scoreboard. Switzerland has the second-highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world and a very high standard of living. The average life expectancy at birth is almost 83 years. Looking at R&D spending in Switzerland, it amounts to over 3 percent of GDP or around CHF 22 billion. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2019/2020 concludes, that the entrepreneurial framework conditions in Switzerland are high as the country achieves great results in commercial infrastructure, tertiary education, finance, knowledge and technology transfer as well as government programs.

The big question to ask then is if these favorable prerequisites actually translate into big entrepreneurial successes? And how does the tech startup founding and funding situation look like in Switzerland then? In 2020, CHF 2.1bn ($2.3bn) was invested in Swiss startups over 304 financing rounds. According to the Swiss Venture Capital Report, the largest funding rounds in 2020 were Sophia Genetics & VectivBio (both CHF 110M) and Monte Rosa Therapeutics (CHF 89M). Unsurprisingly, Biotech, ICT and Fintech are the sectors receiving the most funding. The main hub for the Swiss tech scene is Zurich, with 113 financing rounds happening in 2020. The canton of Vaud (Lausanne and Geneva mainly) follows suit with 55 financing rounds. Lastly, there are currently 4 VC-backed companies valued at over $1 billion in Switzerland (Roivant Sciences, Dfinity, Nexthink, MindMaze). Two other unicorns, namely Wefox and GetYourGuide are not completely straightforward: while both were founded in Switzerland, they have since moved main offices and operations to Berlin, Germany.

Sounds good? Yes, it does! There are some great individual success stories, competent angel investors and VCs as well as good initiatives to support founders on their way to build big companies. However, when taking a comparable country like Israel in terms of size (9.0M inhabitants in Israel vs. 8.5M in Switzerland in 2019), R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP (4.95% vs 3.8% in Switzerland) and the lack of natural resources until recently, the state of the Swiss startup and tech ecosystem is rather sobering: there are currently more than 30 tech companies in Israel that are valued over $1 billion, and Israeli tech firms have raised a record $9.93 billion in 2020, up 27% year on year, in 578 transactions.

We are aware that a startup ecosystem has many interdependencies: startup founders and their peer groups, funding from angels and VCs, commercial and technical talent, and an entrepreneurial mindset. These parts all depend on each other in order for the ecosystem to work and for the startup & tech flywheel to turn, as illustrated on the left. The purpose of this article is to discuss different aspects of the Swiss startup and tech ecosystem and to draw on some examples from the “Israeli Startup Nation” to learn from.

👥💸 Founders and funding

A startup ecosystem needs big liquidity events in the form of M&A transactions or IPOs (i.e. exits) to drive positive feedback loops by way of know-how, network and money. In case of a successful exit, the startup’s founders and early employees are rewarded both financially and emotionally and can either build their next ventures or start investing themselves as Business Angels or VCs. Angels who have founded and grown a startup themselves have a deep understanding and empathy towards what founders really need in order to build and create something.

When looking at exits in Switzerland, the Swiss Startup Radar shows that the growth of exits is smaller than expected considering the funding and founding boom which exists since 2005. In 2019, there were a little more than 30 exits in Switzerland, mainly in the ICT sector. Overall, about 300 startups have been sold in the past 15 years with an average of 20 per year. Data from 2018 showed, that the biggest exits (i.e. being more than $100M) were mainly in the Pharma and Biotech industry. Only 12% of exits above $100M were in the software industry. What is striking is the lack of a second exit alternative in the form of an IPO, as there were only a little more than 20 IPOs over the past 15 years by Swiss startups.

Comparing this to Israel, startups grow much more aggressively in Israel and are realizing liquidity events faster (8.7 years compared to 10.9 years in Switzerland). Despite the fact that M&A activity was lower compared to 2019, Israel still counted 93 deals with $7.8 billion. As IPOs became an attractive exit alternative, Israeli companies made 121 funding deals on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and global capital markets, raising a total of $6.55 billion.

Yet, there are some good Swiss examples to illustrate this positive feedback loop despite the (still) lack of big liquidity events: some early employees of the meeting organizer platform Doodle went out to found new companies while others like its founder Myke Näf became active business angels and/or investors with their own funds (see Übermorgen Ventures). The same goes for two of the three Wingman partners, with Pascal Mathis having co-founded GetYourGuide and Lukas Weder being the Co-Founder of Eat.ch. Jeremias Meier, Co-Founder of Bexio is now also Operating Partner at session.vc. Even before a potential exit, scale-ups play a significant role in advocating an ecosystem: Beekeeper, the secure employee app which has raised $86M to date according to Crunchbase, has also launched its Frontline Future Innovation competition, an accelerator program for companies operating in the areas of Upskilling & Training, Employee Lifecycle Management and more.

Looking at the startup’s investors, they are also rewarded with both cash and experience, potentially raising their next funds on these successes and becoming stronger supporters within the ecosystem. Overall, the Swiss seed and early-stage funding ecosystem has recently been enriched with two “dorm room funds”: S2S Ventures and the Wingman Campus Fund. They both want to bring the career path of VC and entrepreneurship closer to students at various Swiss universities. The seed and early stage funding ecosystem is further supported by professional investors like Tomahawk, SeedX, Wingman Ventures, Equity Pitcher, btov, Redalpine, Ringier Digital Ventures* and Lightbird* among others.

Another way to describe these positive feedback loops is with so-called “startup mafias”, a term stemming from the PayPal mafia back in the 2000s, when early PayPal employees ended up building, running and investing in companies like SpaceX, Tesla, Lyft, Youtube, Pinterest and more. In Switzerland, the first generation of startups has resulted in a broad range of “startup mafias” (credits to Swisspreneur) with early employees and investors from DeinDeal, unic, Namics or foodpanda (and jobs.ch, Scout24 as well as local.ch to add a few more) building their own ventures and/or backing their fellow colleagues. These companies serve as role models for future founders.

One last point to make is that there is a vast range of different consulting and coaching opportunities, awards and support initiatives, incubators and accelerators, information platforms and associations to be found in the Swiss startup and tech ecosystem. While it is great to see a broad network of support for founders, this can also lead to a lack of founder focus.

🧠Talent

The second important lever for the ecosystem flywheel to turn is access to a strong pool of talent — both commercial and technical. With its world-class universities, Switzerland has the best prerequisites for obtaining sustainable access to highly qualified young professionals. Regarding commercial skills and know-how, the HSG with its renowned programs provides an essential pillar. Concerning the technical talent pipeline, ETH and EPFL are among the global top 50 universities in computer science with an increasing number of spin-offs in the last years. Among the more than 800 ETH and EPFL spin-offs to date, more renowned examples are Planted, 9T Labs, Oxara, Archlet, Futurae, Archilyse, Lunaphore Technologies, Faceshift (acquired by Apple in 2015) and Nexthink (Switzerland’s latest unicorn as of February 2021).

Yet, choosing entrepreneurship as a career path is still not that popular: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2019/2020 found that only 40.2% of Swiss inhabitants view entrepreneurship as an interesting pathway for one’s professional future compared to 85.8% in the Netherlands or 69.2% in Canada. Students at specialized higher education schools and Swiss universities also have an entrepreneurial spirit which is below the international average (CH: 20.1% vs. Int: 34.7% five years after the end of studies). What’s more, talent in Switzerland is expensive: a software engineer in the Zurich region earns on average $115k. Switzerland also has a lot to catch up regarding gender equality in the tech and startup ecosystem: only 24% of software developers are female, ranking second-last according to an overview on European countries with more than 8k software developers in the State of European Tech Report 2020. In the same way, funding into mixed or purely female founding teams has also been very low, attracting only 17% of total funding between 2016–2020. The Female Founder Map initiated by Impact Hub Zurich and ZHAW wants to address this issue by bringing more transparency to the ecosystem. Lastly, we believe that role models like Melanie Gabriel (Co-founder & CMO at Yokoy), Yoko Spirig (Co-founder & CEO at Ledgy), Léa Miggiano (Co-founder & CMO at Carvolution) or Arijana Walcott & Sophie Lamparter (founders and investors at Dartlabs) play a crucial role in attracting a broader set of talent into the ecosystem.

In Israel, students are exposed to advanced computing studies from an early age and traditional jobs have lower salaries compared to software and tech, making it an attractive industry to work in. There are over 300 R&D centers located in Israel, and a lot of high-tech development comes from the Israeli military intelligence units (IDF). The military thus serves as an important startup incubator and accelerator. While both countries provide quite a high amount of grants to early stage companies, there exists a difference in government innovation funding: In Israel, government innovation funding can go directly to a private entity or a startup, whereas in Switzerland these government grants are given to researchers at higher education institutions to complete projects by collaborating with private companies.

🦸🏼‍♀️Social norms

The last aspect to consider when discussing the Swiss startup & tech ecosystem flywheel are the social norms that exist when thinking about starting and building a company. With approximately 8.5M inhabitants (2019), Switzerland lacks a large home market. This would imply that founders think big from the start, wanting to build products for the bigger markets in Europe to achieve the necessary scale for venture returns. As Alex Danco puts it:

Startups are a bet that the future will be radically different from the present, and they are valuable on the way up because they are, effectively, a call option on that future coming true. Their founders set out to discover that future; their value is indefinite, not definite. One day they might become giant, cash-gushing businesses; but not anywhere near your current horizon. Your only goal right now is grow, explore, and earn the right to keep growing and exploring.

This mindset is critical to put VC money to work. However, the Global Competitiveness Report of the WEF has criticized the lack of entrepreneurial risk-taking in Switzerland — in the category in which Israel is by far the leading country. This is also shown in the total insurance premium per capita, which is at $6’835 in 2019 for Switzerland, only topped by four other countries. The opportunity costs of working at a startup are also high in Switzerland: the gross monthly wage median in 2018 was $7'116, making it very attractive to work at a well-paid corporate position with a great work-life balance and even more corporate benefits instead of a low paid early-stage startup with a mediocre MVP. This also leads to probably the biggest differentiator of the Swiss to the Israeli startup and tech ecosystem: Israel’s mix of questioning culture, and appetite for risk among others makes for a fertile place for fast-moving companies to appear.

⛰️Concluding thoughts

To sum up, an ecosystem relies on many different parts to interact with each other in order to mature, i.e. startup founders and their peer groups, funding, talent, and social norms. It’s still early days for the Swiss startup and tech ecosystem but there are good signs that it’s moving in the right direction: The first generation of entrepreneurs has paved the ground for a strong second generation of startup mafias to emerge such as Beekeeper (Yokoy, Angle Audio), Teralytics (decentriq), Climeworks (neustark), and Dacuda (Locatee, PXL Vision) attracting funding from international VCs. The funding landscape is also slowly becoming more operational with Business Angels like Bettina Hein (Founder & CEO of juli), Nicolas Bürer, Jeremias Meier (Co-Founder of Bexio) or Laurent Decrue (Founder of MOVU) being active in the space. However, we still believe that there need to be more and bigger liquidity events, an increasingly operational and diverse investor community, and a cultural shift towards a stronger risk appetite and entrepreneurship as an aspiring career path for the Swiss startup & tech ecosystem flywheel to take up speed. Let the ride begin 🐱‍🏍!

*) Marcau Partners is an investment advisory boutique offering “Venture Capital as a Service” to entrepreneurial investors. Clients include Ringier Digital Ventures and Lightbird Ventures among others. For more information visit marcau.vc and follow us on Linkedin.

Thoughts on the Swiss startup & tech ecosystem flywheel was originally published in Marcau Partners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2020, global disasters intensified by climate change produced USD 210 billion of losses, 26.5% more compared to 2019. This dramatically shows that the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is critical both to our planet and the human civilization. The path to net zero however is narrow and requires an unprecedented transformation of how individuals and companies across the globe measure and minimize their carbon footprint.

Emitwise, the recently announced first investment by Lightbird, has designed a software solution that empowers companies to automatically measure, report and determine actions required to reduce their carbon footprint across their operations and supply chain. It integrates with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and lets its customers ingest raw data files across all emission categories (scope 1, 2 and 3). Coupled with data from Emitwise’s proprietary emission factor database, artificial intelligence algorithms analyze emissions in real time with precision and allows its customers to align with global climate targets.

Below you’ll find the reasons why we were so bullish on backing Mauro and his team at Emitwise.

Why we invested

🙋🏽Referred from a friend: A big thank you goes out to our dear friend Rodrigo Mallo who is an early angel investor in Emitwise and who introduced us to Mauro, co-founder & CEO of Emitwise in March. As we were already looking into the space for quite a while and had a strong conviction about its potential, we were immediately excited by the value proposition of Emitwise.

👥 A strong and complementary team: Already after our first meeting with Mauro, we were impressed by his deep understanding of the industry, his passion for the problem to be solved and his customer-centric thinking. What’s more, the Emitwise team consists of a strong mix of experts from the fields of Carbon Accounting and AI, driven to help firms realize the major economic upsides of this transformation.

🏢 The market is huge and growing: Emitwise is addressing a huge problem for companies as they face increasing pressure to decarbonize. This pressure not only comes from policymakers and regulators (such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the European Green Deal), but also from changing purchasing preferences of consumers based on sustainability and investors committing to net-zero targets. Many forward-looking companies have grasped this shift and made net zero pledges, including Shell, Nestle, Daimler and more. 2020 was also the year where one announcement of a climate tech fund followed the other with Amazon (Climate Pledge Fund of USD 1bn), Microsoft (Climate Innovation Fund of USD 1bn) and Unilever (Climate & Nature Fund of EUR 1bn) leading the way. While the market is still in its infancy, we believe that this pressure will further increase over time and that there is momentum where Emitwise is well-positioned to gain relevant market share.

“There is no company whose business model won’t be profoundly affected by the transition to a net zero economy” (Larry Fink’s 2021 letter to CEOs).

💎 The product solves a big pain point: Carbon accounting and especially also measuring a company’s carbon footprint is the basis to put carbon reduction measures into place (“if you can’t measure it, you can’t change it”). Companies still face challenges in making their data available and transparent as well as in ensuring the satisfactory quality of such. Emitwise helps its customers to automate the collection, analysis, and reporting of carbon emissions for scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and to comply with auditing and disclosure systems like CDP, GHG and TCFD.

💚 Customers love what they’re getting: Since its launch in late 2020 Emitwise has gained significant traction in a variety of sectors such as ICT, Logistics, Construction, Financial Services, Manufacturing and more. From the customer feedback it became clear that there is increased pressure on the executive level and that most enterprises so far relied on specialized consulting firms which provide little help to continuously measure an organization’s footprint and to take data-driven decisions about critical actions needed.

“Emitwise saves us invaluable time in data collection, processing and analysis that we can now use to focus on minimizing our carbon footprint.” (Emitwise customer)

Onwards and upwards

We are very excited to be on the Emitwise journey alongside lead investor ArcTern Ventures, Saltwater, True Ventures, Social Impact Capital and Peter Harrison (read more on TechCrunch). We are looking forward to working closely with the Emitwise team as they expand their sales and marketing operations, deepen their product offering and significantly contribute to a world of net zero.

The team is hiring: find out more here.

Why we invested in Emitwise was originally published in Marcau Partners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lightbird — Backing founders aiming to rise above the crowd

We are excited to announce the launch of Lightbird Ventures, a new early-stage VC firm backing Swiss & European tech entrepreneurs.

The tech scene in Europe is thriving. Over the last decade, it has seen unprecedented growth in capital inflow and the number of world-leading tech companies with multi-billion dollar valuations created in Europe is accelerating. Also, outstanding talent is more widely available than ever before. Even though most deals and exits still happen in the US, the European momentum is indisputable. We are extremely excited by the limitless possibilities Swiss & European entrepreneurs face and humbled to be able to support them on their journey with the team at Lightbird Ventures.

What we are looking for

With Lightbird Ventures,

• we back technology entrepreneurs at one of the most intense periods of a company’s life — the early stage.
• we invest in ambitious founding teams that use technology to solve real problems for real people and real businesses.
• we are able to invest globally, yet the majority of our investments will be close to home. The Swiss and European ecosystems have grown tremendously in the last decade, and we expect the biggest success stories yet to come.
• we have a particular focus on B2B SaaS, Fintech, Proptech, Cybersecurity and Data & Analytics but are keen to work with outstanding founding teams in other areas as well. Surprise us!
• we are open to lead or co-invest and are strong believers in the power of complementary investor syndicates.
• we are active partners to our entrepreneurs and relentless supporters on their path to fulfill their vision.

Who is behind Lightbird Ventures

Lightbird Ventures is a new Swiss-based VC firm managed through the independent investment management company Marcau Partners and fueled by its sole investor la Mobilière, Switzerland’s oldest private insurance company.

Our brand Lightbird is another name for the phoenix, a mythical creature from Greek mythology. This bird burns in the fire and is reborn at sunrise. “Like a phoenix from the ashes” has made it a legend of proverbs, symbolizing resilience and grit to never give up and to always get back on one’s feet. The phoenix was also depicted in la Mobilière’s logo until 1998. Lightbird thus symbolizes both innovation and growth as well as founders’ daily lives of falling down, getting up and starting over again.

The only thing that remains constant is change

Change is a constant, but it takes catalyzers with a global impact to transform our entire lives along with our image of the world we want to live in. Working with the next generation of entrepreneurs who change the world for the better is beyond exciting. I am thankful for this opportunity, being supported by an awesome team and backed by la Mobilière.

And to all the Swiss & European founders out there building for change: we want to meet you! Reach out to us at hello@lightbird.vc.

Lightbird — Backing founders aiming to rise above the crowd was originally published in Marcau Partners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Your next car may be a subscription and other reasons why Ringier Digital Ventures invested in Carvolution

On February 25, 2021, Carvolution announced its Series C of CHF 15M led by Avaloq founder Francisco Fernandez. Ringier Digital Ventures, advised by Marcau Partners, took part in this round. Read on if you are curious to know more about the reasoning behind this investment and why it’s exciting to ride along.

💰 A large market in a small country like Switzerland

According to the Federal Statistical Office, 6.24M road motor vehicles were registered in Switzerland in 2020. This is an increase of 36% over the last 20 years. Thereof, passenger cars account for the largest share with 4.66M. The picture is similar for new registrations — more than 70% of the 335k new ones were passenger cars. This means that almost 10% of passenger cars are renewed every year, or the market continues to grow accordingly. Why are these numbers so important? Market research by well-known consultancy firms such as Roland Berger and Frost and Sullivan have assessed the potential market penetration of car subscriptions and concluded that 10% of car sales are expected to be subscriptions by 2025, reaching 40% by 2030. Applying the 2020 figures for Switzerland, this would mean just under 24k new subscriptions in 2025, and over 95k new subscriptions in 2030. Assuming an average subscription to be CHF 500 per month would result in almost CHF 50M revenue per month as of 2030 — not yet including any potential remarketing[2] revenues.

Carvolution has taken the pole position in this market in Switzerland and we strongly believe the team can further expand its position.

⚡The customer experience

Customers have learned over the last few years through digitalization how purchasing processes can develop online (more transparency, other payment options, more financing options, etc.) – be it to hail a taxi, to buy a smartphone, to book vacations, to order furniture, clothes or to buy media content. But the car purchasing process is still mostly happening offline, with the last big innovation being the classifieds sites and leasing options. Car subscriptions offer customers what has become a familiar experience — completing a transaction with just a few clicks and getting the car delivered to their home.

Furthermore, a car subscription teaches customers something which is often ignored or forgotten: total cost of ownership. This term describes the total costs of owning a vehicle including purchasing price, depreciation, insurance, maintenance etc. The car subscription price transparently shows the total cost of ownership at the time of purchase and can keep up with the leasing and buying price of a new car.

While purchasing or leasing a car involves a commitment over several years and a high initial capital investment, the car subscription requires little commitment except for a minimum subscription term of 3 months. This value proposition fits well into the overall trend of the consumer subscription economy, with subscription business models being adopted in a variety of industries such as music (Spotify), movies (Netflix), health (Headspace) and data storage (Dropbox). Subscriptions in the mobility space are a great advantage especially in the market of electric vehicles, where technology develops rapidly.

Another benefit that customers know from other subscription services is the all-in-one service. The stress and bureaucracy of buying a car is eliminated with Carvolution. The subscription comes with insurance, registration, taxes, services & maintenance, tires, toll sticker and a fuel card/charging card.

Carvolution’s value proposition allows consumers to focus solely on the driving experience, resulting in a high NPS score of 75 (compared to the average NPS score of 34 for car rentals or 48 for car dealers).

💡 Asset-heavy or asset-light

Ringier Digital Ventures mostly invests in asset-light models such as Blok and CheckYeti, but is not afraid of asset-heavy models like Yamo or AboutYou. The question of the “right” model is one we have been asking ourselves repeatedly for the last almost two years during which we have looked at the car subscription market. We consider the hybrid solution of Carvolution via a so-called Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which enables asset backed financing, as very promising. This allows the company to buy the vehicles the customer wants to subscribe independently from single brands or types, which are otherwise normally pushed by car dealers or manufacturers. Furthermore, Carvolution has total control over the remarketing of the car which is an attractive additional revenue and margin stream for the company. In the meantime, the vehicle is neither on Carvolution’s balance sheet nor tying up too much of the company’s liquidity. This form of financing also offers the freedom to provide services like insurance, tire change and more, internally or with partners, as desired.

👦🏽 Team and Co-Investors

Hypothesis-driven, we have been looking for possible investments for Ringier Digital Ventures in this area for about two years. That’s also how long we’ve known Carvolution, and some team members even longer from their former activities. We were lucky to be able to track their progress, which is always desirable before making an investment decision. The team delivered what they promised and the developments of the company were more than satisfactory. We also liked that the team grew with the tasks at hand, indicating very capable personalities and a good mix of skills within the team.

In addition, Ringier Digital Ventures is pleased to invest together with trusted and well-known partners such as Redalpine, Mobiliar and Francisco Fernandez.

🤙🏾People buy a lifestyle — not just a product

It is clear to us that business model innovation needs some sort of explanation and proper advertising. Usually, the first step for a startup to test and find product-market-fit is to run performance marketing campaigns. Carvolution also used this strategy initially but quickly realized that getting a new car is not a spontaneous, low-involvement kind of decision. Learning from this experience, the team built a proper lead funnel and a trustworthy brand to guide potential customers during the whole purchasing process. By joining forces with media companies, startups have another interesting option to push their branding efforts in order to become top of mind for potential customers as a new brand — that’s also one of the strengths of Ringier Digital Ventures. As soon as potential customers are thinking about a new car, Carvolution is already in their minds. Lastly, today’s customers often not only buy a product but the lifestyle associated with the brand. This is also true for Carvolution, which promises flexibility, choice and a hassle-free experience.

We are convinced that the Carvolution team has the necessary skills, the right timing and the ideal partners to succeed on this rollercoaster ride to the top. Therefore, it’s exciting to ride along!

[1] Marcau Partners is the exclusive investment advisor of Ringier Digital Ventures

[2] Remarketing is the resale of the vehicles that come back from a subscription

Your next car: a subscription? Reasons why Ringier Digital Ventures invested in Carvolution was originally published in Marcau Partners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

FemTech seems to be on everyone’s lip at the moment and startups operating in this space have raised more than USD 498 million in 2019 according to PitchBook data. Yet it is still at an early stage. According to a recent report by RockHealth, only 3% of the more than 2’500 digital health deals since 2011 focused on women’s health. Ida Tin, who coined the term FemTech after launching the period tracking app company Clue in 2012, stated a little more than a year ago on Sifted:

“I see a big difference from when we started pitching to investors back in 2013 (…). There is much more awareness and there are lots more companies within femtech now, but honestly, there could be a lot more… I would argue that it is still vastly underfunded. Arguably there is still a blind spot, but at least now there is more awareness that there is this blind spot.”

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to find answers to the following questions: What are these underfunded areas? Which sub-categories could be of interest in the future? Additionally, as we’ve been looking a lot at female founders lately and supported the initiatives by btov & Grace Accelerator as well as the VCs for female founders office hours by JOIN Capital & APX, the following question is also of interest to us: What is the composition of the founder teams in the FemTech space?

This article is based on a guest post in Fundraising, Marketing & Sales by Sébastien Flury (June 30, 2016), re-written in co-authorship with Jasmin Heimann and edited by Jacqueline Wirz.

It is widely acknowledged that the S-curve is one of the most important concepts for a startup founder to consider when thinking about his or her startup’s growth.

1) In the beginning, growth is slow or not existing at all. This is the time where the startup founder is figuring out what to do, thus searching for the Problem-Solution Fit.

2) Once a possible solution for a problem is found (which can obviously always change and is not set in stone), the next step is to assess if the value proposition of the product actually meets the (underserved) needs of potential customers in the market (Product-Market Fit). In addition to finding out if the product solves a real pain, the startup also has to communicate and inspire others to join and use the product (Language-Market Fit). Sari Azout makes a strong point in her blog post on the power of narrative here and provides a storytelling framework that can be used to directly put words into action.

Both Product-Market Fit and Language-Market Fit are crucial to avoid this:

yamo, the Swiss foodtech startup creating and offering healthier food for babies and young children, just announced a EUR 10.1M Series A investment round. The round was led by Five Season Ventures, one of the leading food VC’s in Europe. They were joined by industry experts like Müller Ventures and other VC’s like btov Partners, Backbone Ventures and the Swiss Entrepreneurs Fund. With Ringier Digital Ventures, we also participated in this round but our journey with the team started much earlier…

How it began

We got to know the team around Tobi, José and Luca for the first time in the summer of 2017 at the start-up competition >>venture>> at ETH Zurich. The product was not live yet but they had some samples available already. They caught our attention because we not only made great experiences and learnings in the direct-to-consumer space with our investment in Foodspring but also because I personally learned firsthand how it is to prepare baby food twice a day as a proud father of a baby boy. In addition, we got a recommendation on the founder team by our very successful Movu founder Laurent Decrue who brought us a good portion of basic trust into the yamo founders. Nevertheless, it was too early for us to make an investment since our investment guidelines require first traction in the market.

Consequently, we passed for the first round of financing while the Movu founders led the round together with other business angels. This allowed us to follow the team and their progress closely. Then in spring 2018, time was ripe for us. Together with btov Partners and the existing investors, we invested in the company for the first time and took the lead of the round.

The FemTech industry is booming: startups making products that are built for women have raised more than USD 498 million in 2019 alone, according to PitchBook data. To celebrate the innovation in women’s health, the first global virtual conference about FemTech took place on the 25th of June 2020. People from all kinds of fields — doctors, founders, venture capitalists, journalists and more — discussed a wide variety of topics ranging from data privacy concerns to product design and investments as well as sexual wellness and fertility.

What struck me the most was how far we have come already but then again how many problems are not yet being addressed by the (female) health industry. I thus want to take the opportunity to share my main insights from a venture capital & startup perspective — serving as a starting point for plenty more deep dives and discussions to follow!

Entstehung

Das international tätige Medienunternehmen Ringier startete mitten in der Finanzkrise 2007/2008 eine fulminante Aufholjagd zur Digitalisierung und Diversifikation des unter Druck geratenen Mediengeschäfts. So wurde in kurzem Abstand weit über CHF 1 Milliarde in strategische Beteiligungen an etablierten Marktplatz-, Entertainment- und Medienunternehmen investiert. Scout24 Schweiz, JobCloud, Ticketcorner und verschiedene eCommerce-Unternehmen wurden in der darauffolgenden Dekade zu tragenden Säulen des Unternehmens. Das Joint Venture Ringier AxelSpringer Media vollzog eine simultane Entwicklung in osteuropäischen Märkten. In Afrika und in ausgewählten asiatischen Märkten wurde die Internationalisierung des Marktplatz- und Mediageschäfts ebenfalls weiter vorangetrieben.

In Part 1 of this investment analyst resources series, I introduced you to a list of newsletters, books etc. I rely on when doing market research and trend scouting. The goal of Part 2 is to support you in your daily tasks as investment analyst like screening pitch decks, evaluating deal terms and doing due diligence by providing you with KPI spreadsheets, lists on tools, trend reports and much more (again with a focus on B2C marketplaces and direct-to-consumer startups). I hope this is useful to you and let me know what you think!