“Nobody cares about your technology”

In their Blog of 21 November 2016, Teleport announced that the startup was selected to join a four months boot camp in the American based accelerator 500 Startups. 500 Startups is the world’s most active seed investment fund, with over $250m in management. Teleport has learned its lessons and has also yielded positive results from 500 Startups. In this interview Gavrilo Bozovic, CEO of Teleport, shares his experience and highlights some key aspects startups should look out for.

What has changed for your startup since the start of your participation in 500 Startups?
500 Startups has stellar mentors and advisors for absolutely every problem a startup faces. For Teleport, their contribution was helping us "close the loop": better measure the impact of our sales and marketing efforts, so that we may focus on what works and stop or alter what doesn't. We've started implementing "business development sprints" with well-defined sales initiatives and KPIs and assessing their impact on a weekly basis. This allows us to have a much better picture of what lies ahead of us and therefore have a better predictability in our business.

What has brought so far your participation in the program in terms of opportunities? (Network, business, investment)
In terms of business, we've been able to establish a US branch and start prospecting in that enormous market. We already have a contract with Chevrolet and several other ones in the pipeline. The 500 Startups network was also a great boost: other batch companies are one of the best ressources there is since, whatever problem we may have, one of the other companies there certainly already had to deal with it. There's also a great deal of market experience in the 500 Startups alumni.

Finally, through 500 Startups we've been able to meet with some of the biggest investors in the Silicon Valley, and prepare our pitch for them. We now have several of these investors in our pipe-line for our current round. One thing that's important to consider is that this is not only money: it is the guaranteed involvement in our company of some of the most experienced people in the IT sphere – something which does not hold true when working with some business angels.

Do you any experience or advice you would like to share with our readers?
Nobody cares about your technology. I see a lot of entrepreneurs giving all of their attention to perfecting their technology, and neglecting the development of their sales strategy. The thing is, except in some rare cases, your technology can be reproduced by someone else: the difference will come from whether you have a better understanding of your market than your competitors, and you know how to cater to this market's needs.

What are the next steps for Teleport? Can you tell us more about your future plans?
Our current tasks are to consolidate our US presence by hiring a local VP of Sales, and closing our current financing round. We expect both these to be done by Spring of 2017. The goal of our round is to validate our market, and have a sales playbook and robust CAC & LTV values in several verticals. This will be what we'll be working on in 2017, with the objective of starting a Series A raise in early 2018.

Are any specific news you would like to share with us?
We'll be presenting to all of Silicon Valley's investors on Feb 15th, during 500 Startups demo day.

About Teleport
Teleport offers users a platform to create and navigate videos by scrolling, in a smooth, fast and intuitive way as they would on any website. Contents can be overlaid on the image to contextualize it; images, texts, social media statuses or videos and basically anything that exists on-line can be integrated in a Teleport. This hence gives users full control of video content and enables them get detailed information about a place, its features and atmosphere. This service is suitable for universities, virtual tours, museums, events among others.

(ES/ran)