For the last seven weeks, the ‘pre-accelerator’ ‘How To Web MVP Academy‘ in Bucharest, Romania has been working with a class of super early stage startups to finesse their products into shape. Today those efforts culminated in a demo day in the Romanian capital. Startups come from anywhere these days, but it’s particular awesome that they can come from a country like Romania. All of the startups are fundraising.
Programme Manager George Dita introduced 12 teams at the event, which is backed by the How To Web organisation. Here’s a short run down on each.
Accelerole
This is a pay as you go tool that helps companies manage independent contractors and freelancers.
Catwalk Fifteen
Millennials spend a lot on fashion and usually ask their friends to comment on their outfits. Catwalk Fifteen lets you use to take a selfie and ask friends to rank your outfit. Think SurveyMonkey for fashion. They have 2000 users and 10k outfits have been tested so far, with a high engagement rate. In theory they would turn into a sales channel for clothes stores.
Conversion Network
This is a site that enables affiliate marketers track and analyse targeted campaigns. Some 30% of all affiliate campaign budgets are spent on tools competition includes fishpond, site bildz. It costs $49 a month
Inner Trends
This is an Analytics tool. It’s a way of interrogating web analytics by asking simple business questions, such as how many users has my site converted into customers.
Swapr
Most clothes women buy are only worn twice. Swapr is a location-based app that allows women to meet and swap their clothes with those close by.
MyDog.xyz
A site that helps dog owners find each other so their dogs can play. They hope to get affiliate sales from doggy products. (I think it should be a dating app for dog owners).
SafeDrive
This is a counterintuitive app that, a little like a reverse Foursquare, rewards you with points for NOT checking your phone while you are driving. It senses you are driving and at the end of your journey, you clock up points you can exchange for real goods offered by partners like gas stations. It’s users have driven 4 million Kilometers in Romania, the UK, US and Australia. This is like a new sales channel.
Cleptisoft Cyberfog
This cyber security startup creates thousands of fake instances of your company online to confuse cyber attackers. It’s then impossible to track down original. Built by an ethical hacking team.
Unloq
This is a secure authentication system using a special smartphone app.
CloudHero
This is for developers to “deploy any app across any infrastructure”
Seeds
This platform manacles users to create distribute and analyse online surveys. It’s mobile ready, has offline support, and real time data synchronisation.
SwipeTapSell
This mobile web app helps online stores increase smartphone and tablet conversions.