4 month after launching in beta-mode Absolventa announced today to welcome the 50.000th graduate. The sales and key accounting team is also busy: Far more than 300 Companies have now access to our graduate-database, - active clients include Daimler, Google and E-ON. Anyway there is still a lot to do and the team of now 22 great entrepreneurial employees, interns and founders is still working day and night…
Klaus-Martin Meyer has interviewed me about Absolventa.de and Entrepreneurship:
Today our team in Berlin announced that Absolventa.de reached more than 17.000 Registrations within 18 days of closed-beta. As the whole amount of graduates per year is only 200.000 we could never have expected to grow that fast. The number of employers is now 155 and includes 29 of the 50 largest hiring companies in Germany. That are about 50 more within the last 3 weeks and means our sales force akquires about 4-5 new companies each work day. Next task to complete our launch is to finish the matching functions and start the official search in the next days or weeks. Our engineers are already working day and night on it. When looking at my Skype contacts online status it seems that our office in Berlin is open 24h… Anyway I`m very happy to be (non-executive) member of this great team!
On Gruenderszene.de, which is Lukasz Gadowskisgerman blog about entrepreneurship, I wrote a longer analysis on the probability of start-up success and on the different factors of risk which can lead to start-up failure. Most important risk factors are in my eyes:
1. Risk of market entry barriers
2. Risk of (lack in ) resources
3. Risk of the idea (including technology and market risc)
4. Competition risk
5. Team risk
Depending on the business idea, risks in law and economics could also play an important role.
Anyway it is incredibly important to screen the risks of potential business ideas very thoughtful. All different kinds of risk should be evaluated separately. A failure of unsuccessful web2.0 start-ups is often that they underestimate the amount of entry barriers (especially network effects). If your (potential) business includes network effects you should estimate the necessary critical mass and calculate if your resources are enough to jump over this barrier. 1 day of detailed risk analysis could save you a lot of struggle later with adapting the business or even prevent you from spending some years of your life on the wrong idea…
After the launch of Absolventa.de hit the best expectations we are in urgent search for further Ruby-on-Rails-Rockstars as employees (or maybe also freelancer) to expand our service. Contact me if you like to join a great team in Berlin-Mitte!
Greetings from Mexico!
Today was a very exciting moment for our german E-Recruiting-Start-up Absolventa.de. After a long night of work we went live at 5 a.m. (german time). I´m very proud of the team in Berlin which did a great job the last months and acquired 100 companies such as BWM, Daimler, and Boston Consulting as early clients. At the moment we are still in closed-beta, but you may have a look inside if you enter the code “jan”. During the next weeks we will open the site for a larger audience and start our marketing campaign at StudiVZ.net.
I´ll let you know about the further progress of Absolventa.de and continue to list some blog-responses (in german) here:
Recently I uploaded the video of my farewell party from Germany:
My farewell party was integrated in the 2nd birthday of my party series “FULL HOUSE NIGHT” in Muensters No. 1 Club “Heaven”. I had a really great night and enjoyed the time with a lot of good friends and guests that joined my parties since years. I look forward to see you again this summer!
Hi together, I´m enjoying blogging since I joined Lukasz Gadowskis famous german Entrepreneurship-Blog “Gruenderszene.de” in May 2007.
Now the time has come for me to start also a personal blog while I will continue to write also for Grunderszene.de.
What do I expect from this blog and what can you expect from my blog if you are going to read?
First of all I hope this blog will allow me to share some more personal minds which would be in the wrong place on a general entrepreneurship blog like Gruenderszene.
Second I`m going to write this blog from an international viewpoint, with a focus on regions that will play the largest role for my further plans as entrepreneur:
- Silicon Valley (and the U.S), the most entrepreneurial region of the world and also my current residence.
- Germany (and the rest of Europe), where I spend most time of the first 24 years in my live, started my companies and enjoy my family and friends background.
- China (and other emerging countries in Asia) that I look forward to explore in the second half of 2008.
While I will not have the time to publish a lots of “News” or company details I want to provide you from time to time with some deeper analyzes mainly related to entrepreneurship and social life in a world, which people and countries are becoming more and more connected.
Furthermore i want to give you some recommendations for interesting articles and blogs that I found.
Beyond business I will also add some personal notes on stuff that I´m interested in.
I hope you enjoy my blog as well as I do and give me new insights on the covered topics by sharing your thoughts via comments or my profiles.