A nice validation of being in the UK, given the rather negative air over startups in the UK recently. As much as I want to be in the US one day, the labor here is certainly a lot cheaper and easier to obtain.
I wonder, though, where's the money in something like Lanyrd? Payment processing for events? Promotion of events to the userbase? I'm guessing the investment is primarily a way to start exploring these possibilities?
I have always seen tons of monetization potential in Lanyrd. Conferences are a time of significant travel, planning, wining and dining, and other things that companies spend money on. And, Lanyrd stretches across a ton of industries. Just like companies will pay big bucks to sponsor an event, sponsoring the Lanyrd destination for that same event, if thousands of attendees will see it, is highly targeted and of similar value. As someone with a lengthy background in the advertising and lead gen space, Lanyrd seems like a gold mine to me in those areas alone, to say nothing of speaker reputation management, event planning assistance, group discounts for specific industries surround events, and more.
Why did you invest? I'm always interested when e.g. Fred Wilson blogs about this kind of thing. So in terms of team, market, product, trends, or whatever you want.
I knew Simon before he did Lanyrd. I try to back friends when they do interesting stuff. I figure if your friends don't have your back, they aren't really your friends, right?
I've done about as well investing in friends as I have on thesis investment, so it's not a terrible strategy.
Do you worry about the friendship souring if things go awry with the company/investment? In the sense that if a !friend investment goes sour, perhaps it's rough, but you're not out a friend in addition to the money.
I'd love to hear some opinions here on the difference between "angel" and "seed" funding.
From some information I've gathered by reading and talking to people, "seed" funding is for product development, right? You might have a prototype, but you really haven't been able to prove product/market fit yet for lack of funds? In that case it seems that some "seed rounds" (eg. Lanyrd and OnSwipe) are really large.
I also gather than the size of the investment is not what determines the "stage" of the round - ie. Tech Crunch reported $1mil in "seed funding" for OnSwipe. They later went on to raise a "Series Awesome" of some $5mil.
Then there's "angel investment" which seems to be much less formal and probably more likely in the tens of thousands than hundreds of thousands (or $1mil+).
What I'm really wondering is: at what stage are these companies with their products when they get these seemingly enormous seed rounds?
A lot of what I read about "getting investment" seems to suggest you need traction, paying customers, product/market fit, a track record of running successful companies, etc.
But then it seems to me (from the outside, at least) that some companies manage to get quite a substantial investment as a "seed round" which seems to be (again, from the outside I really have no idea what's going on under the hood here) largely to finish off an otherwise prototypical product so that it can be released to the target market.
It's my understanding that once you get to "Series A" you're basically not a "startup" any more (by the definition that a "startup" exists to find a business model).
As you may be able to tell, I'm thoroughly confused. Any advice or links to relevant articles most appreciated.
Lanyrd is one of those weird sites that I expect never to work because of how hard it is to consolidate content, and yet it always works. Glad to hear that things are going well for them; without Lanyrd I'm not sure how I'd sort through conferences.
Thanks very much. Lots of people ask us how we scrape the data... the answer is we don't, it's all added by our community (the only exception is the schedules for larger events such as OSCON, which I sometimes import in to the site).
I'm impressed by how you've able to crowd source data collection to the users. Does the site contain gamification elements that reward and encourage community contributions?
Not exactly - we're cautious of adding scoreboards / points etc because they can very easily distort the site, resulting in people gaming the system to increase their score rather than adding genuinely valuable data.
Instead, we've focused on getting the right incentives for people to add data. Speakers add events to fill out their speaker profiles for example, and attendees do it to track the events they've been to (you sometimes see people include conferences attended on their CVs, so this is actually a useful tool even for non-speakers).
Indeed. Even though Wiki(pedia)s are now everywhere in people's online lives it's always a pleasant surprise when the execution is done right for something like Lanyrd to succeed.
The Start Fund money gave us a bit of breathing room at the end of YC, meaning we didn't end up having to rush in to a deal we weren't happy with. From talking to other companies in our batch this seems to be one of the recurring advantages: you get a bit more time to put together your ideal round.
See my other comment here. I've got years of advertising and lead gen experience, and marketing to wide variety of decision making professionals during peak times of travel is a huge opportunity with a lot of options to increase ad pricing. There are other ancillary opportunities in event planning, speaker reputation management and more.
I wonder, though, where's the money in something like Lanyrd? Payment processing for events? Promotion of events to the userbase? I'm guessing the investment is primarily a way to start exploring these possibilities?