At LeWeb, I’ve mainly met people rather than listening to keynotes and attending workshops (even if some of them were amazing… it’s unfortunately difficult to duplicate itself!). One of the workshop I have listened to was hold by LaPoste.fr and was about e-commerce. Here after you’ll find some key learning from this workshop! Behind an enviable growth, e-commerce is an industry making little money! Because of: two e-commerce websites are created every hour gross profit is tiny, except if you integrate the complete value chain digital production + logistics + marketing is extremely costly. Cost of customer acquisition is growing and conversion rate is decreasing repeat purchase doesn’t happen so often, even at Amazon (only 3 times per year, and when you recognize they have a huge inventory… that’s scaring for e-commerce players!) Customers are mutants, changing much quicker than …
Is wine the new goldmine?
There are many entrepreneurs out there desiring to start an incredible business to change the world. You sometimes hear people expressing they’d like to launch something, but they don’t have THE idea now. Or you meet people reinventing the wheel, copying a business that was already successful in the US (on this topic: in the recent years, business models originally launched in Europe were also copied in the US, like Criteo or Vente Privée). In my opinion, there is nothing wrong to adapt a business model to fit the local needs. Because 1-to-1 implementation often doesn’t work (2 Swiss show cases of this theory are Ricardo.ch or DeinDeal.ch), especially in a tiny but complex market as Switzerland. Problematic can be when a dozen of entrepreneurs are hunting the same game. In Zürich, the Graal seems to be the parking solutions: …
7 tips for a successful social media campaign
Last week was LeWeb conference happening in Paris. Again, a lot of interesting talks and amazing people to meet during these 3 crazy busy days. Alexis Thobellem, Global Digital Manager at Evian and one of the guy involved in the amazing “Roller Babies” video clip success (60M + views by now), gave a talk about Evian’s experience on brand curation and editorialization of content to better engage its fans. At Evian, they started not by the question “what can do web & social media for the brand?”, but by what their brand could do for the web! I’ve found some offline content about Alexis’ beliefs on what are the key indispensable factors to run a successful corporate social media marketing campaign and I thought it was worth sharing. So here they are! Be sure you have something to gain by jumping …
HOW TO get press coverage for your startup?
When you’re starting your awesome startup, you’re facing many challenges and you have a lot of assumptions you have to test. For instance, you often don’t know if your Minimum Viable Product will find its market fit (OK, you can meltdown this a bit thanks to customer development), if you’ll be good enough to motivate people (read: other fools) to join your journey, if your business is really scalable, if investors will catch the potential of your startup and if you’ll be credible enough to convince them to bet on you… And there are many other assumptions I’ve not written here. And there’s also getting known on the market. How do you handle that? For sure, you can build your brand awareness by making targeted advertising. But that’s often too expensive for startups and probably not so effective. Or you can establish …
Learnings from luxury watchmaking industry
Earlier this month, I’ve attended the 16th “Journée Internationale du Marketing Horloger” in La Chaux-de-Fonds (you know, the other watch capital alongside Biel/Bienne). This year’s theme was about experiential marketing, which can be defined as a concept that integrates elements of emotions, logic, and general thought processes to connect with the consumer.. Which industry could more qualified as one which sell so expensive products? A program mixed between presentations from research institutes and industry experts gave the non-geeky audience (yeah, this time, no more than 3-4% of the audience had a Macbook on his knees!) some insights about the topic. Independent of how much efforts the brands put in the experiential marketing strategies, people always stay master of their experience. An interesting formula was presented: a lived experience is the result of People x Object x Situation. What is to learn there …
Cloud & Big Data Summit – catch the opportunity!
Every year in November, the Tech Tour stops by in Lausanne region to match web & mobile startups with investors community. Since 1998, this association has organized more than 55 events throughout Europe and so has a wide reach and awareness among investors. Around hundred of investors (among ones the top notch Index Ventures, Doughty Hanson, Iris Capital or Sofinnova Partners) will carefully listen to 25 entrepreneurs presenting their case around the theme ”Cloud & Big Data” on November 21-22 in Lausanne Palace. Cloud computing is becoming ubiquitous and now people understand what it is (3 years ago, that was… a bit different!). More and more, we are adapting to this new standard and storing a huge amount of data in the cloud. And all these information can be a goldmine, as it opens the way to analyze and interconnect …
It’s time to lift up your startup!
Once a year, more than 1’000 people from every corner of Switzerland and abroad gather in Geneva for 3 days at Lift Conference. In contrary to purely startup events like Next Berlin, Dublin Web Summit or LeWeb, Lift is also focusing its efforts on discovering new trends and helping you to transform them into opportunities. From 6th to 8th February 2013, Lift13 will present you a wide and interesting program, comprising workshops (like the memorable “Hacking Venture Capital” by Fred Destin back in 2010), main stage sessions, speed dating, a startup competition and the amazing cheese fondue-dinner (more than 600 people eat a traditional Swiss fondue, talking about tech and innovation…). The ladies behind the event (Sylvie, Abir and co) are actively engaging Lift community: everyone had the possibility to suggest a workshop idea he would organize during the conference. …
Ireland – a European startup eldorado?
As you already know, I had the chance to attend Dublin Web Summit mid-October and I’m going to share what I’ve learnt and experienced there. First, DWS is probably the best tech startup event in Europe (OK, I haven’t been to all of them – I’ve also heard lot of good comments on Pioneer Festival). Or at least the biggest: Around 300 startups (among them, the Swiss startups mobino, 3Baysover, Alensa, InZair) were present at Startup Village. More than 4’000 startup-minded people (8x as much as the first edition back in…2010!) from over 45 countries attended. Top speakers from around the world (founders from Pinterest, Skype, Flipboard, etc.) presented their point of view or shared their industry knowledge on 3 different stages (main, digital marketing and cloud stages). Moreover, each startup present at Startup Village participated to a competition with a prize …