This article is written by Nardine B. M’barek, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Erik Anderson is an entrepreneur and a Venture Partner at Tera Ventures since 2017. He is also the Marketing Director of the Startup WiseGuys which is a mentorship-driven accelerator program that aims at helping the early startups, providing seed capital of $30000, office spaces, and world-class mentors.
Thanks to its wide and big network of Unicorns and companies, as well as their partnership with well-known companies around the world, ‘WiseGuys’ offers to its B2B startups the opportunity to sell their products to companies in an easier and quicker way. They also give them the chance to not only get valuable mentorship from experts and entrepreneurs as well as being able to reach success thanks to the development tips they get.
Mr. Erik Anderson was present with us during Startup Istanbul 2014, he is the Marketing Director of ‘WiseGuys’, and gave a speech to our audience in which he explained in details the main goals of the company, and how B2B startups and companies actually work.
He presented us with a chart that deals with the exists and fundings of companies between 2007 and 2008, we were able to see that ‘social’ is very much at the top of the list, followed by gaming, advertising, and sales. B2B was not as prevalent in 2014 yet. We were able to see how much the trends shifted towards data, business intelligence, Cloud and SAAS between 2011 and 2012. Advertising was still up there, and they think that it is gonna be around forever if it is not gonna grow.
In the future, there will be certain opportunities that are developing now. Mr. Anderson mentioned that manufacturing in 3D printing is growing 60% year over year. We all know that 20% is a nice number, but 60% is a way better one. The total economic impact by the year 2025 is expected to be over one Trillion Dollars. These things and opportunities are the ones that need to be tested.
For instance, the use of A/B testing was proven to be very useful; President Barack Obama’s administration implemented A/B testing during the time when he was running for US presidential re-elections, which contributed with apparently over 40 million additional dollars to his campaign. Over 60% of tech companies these days run less than five optimization tests on their sites each month. People are doing it because mostly, they know that there are going to be very positive results at the end thanks to this A/B testing system.
We talked about the Cloud and Cloud-based startups earlier. Cloud is characterized by security and safety, which prevents data leaking and hacking. Trust, as well as privacy, since it gives its uses complete privacy and control over their data and information. SAAS is also on this list, most investments and exists today are actually going towards SAAS because it is just much smarter and more efficient, and it is a very scalable solution.
Almost 40% of accelerator programs are actually going to SAAS-based companies. Data also constitutes a part of the future, 95% of the data created in the history of humanity was actually created around 2012/13, and false data costs US companies over $5 billion annually. Maybe now you would consider B2B, which is a business model that is moving forward each year.
https://youtu.be/CISJK90c7nE