11 minutes interview with Vladimir Oane
I had a chat with Vladimir Oane, after he won last week at SeedCamp, with his project uberVU.com. Seven people are working full time on the development of the project, but more hiring is on the way. Here are some highlights of the interview:
Describe the evolution of your project and your team, from when you won the 11minutes Award 10 months ago, then your participation to Next Web in Amsterdam and finally your presence at SeedCamp in London and winning the big prize of 50,000 euro.
When we won 11 minutes we only had an idea. That’s why it was called Big Bang… it was a codename. But 11 minutes gave us the validation of that idea. Enough to make us start building it. We developed the first prototypes in 2-3 months working with some of the people from Metromind team (my first company that I am not involved in on a daily basis). Now we have a dedicated team and we focus on uberVU only.
How was the Seedcamp experience?
Amazing. I have met a lot of great people and I was blown away by their modesty and their down-to-earth approach. I’ve learned so much in terms of product, marketing etc. I still have troubles to put everything together.
What do you feel you learned?
Seedcamp week was an intense mentoring program followed by a pitch in front of 40 of the most well-known VC’s from Europe and USA. Intense means that you have firechats and mentoring sessions with very qualified people all day, from 8 am to 8 pm. And in the evening cocktails where the discussions continue. It is very exhausting but also very rewarding as all the people you meet change your point of view and you begin to see your app and your market in different shades and colors. I have a notebook filled with ideas, connections and strategy ideas.
What can/will you do with 50,000 euro? How much shares did you give for this amount? Who are the investors?
One thing first: Seedcamp is not about the money. It is about the validation of your team and business, access to an amazing network of qualified people and third, access to capital. It may be just 50.000 euros but we are speaking about very smart money for a very short period of time. We are pretty advanced with the product and we hope to go to market until all the money are spent. Some of the investors can be found here. In terms of shares: we can not disclose anything for the moment.
How would you describe your project ubervU.com?
A platform for tracking and participating in conversations that take place across a variety of platforms/services on the social web.
For example when you post something (blog post, video, picture etc) you get responses on a variety of other services (Digg, Twitter, Facebook etc). It is hard to track all of them and respond to all of them, especially if you lack context. We gather all those responses and we build a structured and unified conversation that you can follow and add you own responses to.
How did it evolve from last year? Who are you competing with? And… What is the business model?
It evolved a lot. Paul Graham said you have no idea what you are building until you build it. He was so right. We changed the product many times since we started working on it. From mainly a distributed publishing platform we evolved into a conversation aggregation service. We have a lot of competitors in this space but none of them are really doing what we are doing. The exact business model is still work in progress but we will go freemium as a monetization model.
What’s next?…:)
Making uberVU big. Really big.
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