signals Pre-Seed presents: spreekit
Winners of the ‘SME Tech Challenge by signals Pre-Seed’
signals presents companies, people and partners from the signals innovation ecosystem. This week, we have seven questions for spreekit, the winner of the SME Tech Challenge by signals Pre-Seed. Out of 69 applicants and after a competitive round of pitches at the signals Founders’ Academy, spreekit came out on top. The team won a spot in the signals Founder Fellowship, including mentorship, office space and 20k of equity-free funding by signals.
What does spreekit do? We’ll let the team explain themselves!
- What is spreekit and what problem are you solving?
spreekit will change the way businesses create and manage orders online. We are a Berlin-based startup that started with an app for businesses to manage inventory and request resupplies. Along our journey, we talked to zillions of buyers and sellers from different verticals to understand the root of their current challenges with sales. The buying process is exhausting — a constant back and forth to negotiate prices through emails, faxes, WhatsApp, which sometimes takes weeks to finalize. We call these ‘Ping Pong transactions’. To tackle this, we built a solution that is fully designed to work on orders together in real-time.
2. What makes your team special and what skills are you still looking for?
We are a colorful mix of different skills and super powers. Everyone in our team can code — still we have a dedicated, experienced technologist on board as well as strong business experience. We think that one important aspect is that everyone understands and respects what the other person is doing. Every single one of us is dedicated to building something that people love, and as a result, we live and work by a simple motto: next week will be the most important week of our lives.
3. Why did you apply for the SME Tech Challenge?
SMEs are left out of the technology revolution: Cutting-edge technology is almost exclusively tailored towards large enterprises as they are able to procure software on scale. signals offered us a chance to change that — we took it. Our software is specifically designed to be very useful even with a small group of people.
4. What are you most proud of?
We are proud of our team, which has a crazy work ethic and never loses sight of our mission: To create something people love. Thanks to our in-house skills, we got to this point without spending a single cent of external financing. Our partners also always love us for our unconventional, hands-on mentality.
5. What is your biggest challenge, how do you tackle it?
At our stage, the biggest hurdle is to use our limited resources as effectively and efficiently as possible to create a valuable product. We are currently focusing on just one aspect: customer feedback to get to product-market fit. Iteration after iteration, we are getting closer to build a remarkable product. Our mantra is “This is probably too early to release, let’s do it”.
6. What will you have achieved in one year?
We’ll be the technology leader and innovator in our space.
7. What one piece of advice would you give someone starting a company?
In the beginning, only product-market fit matters: You should do everything to validate your ideas and hypotheses. Talk to experts from the respective sectors to get insights, put yourself in the position of the customer and always listen when people explain their problems to you. Good entrepreneurs are problem solvers and not problem creators.
The signals Founder Fellowship Program is your road to pre-seed funding. We select up to three teams every year for the signals Founder Fellowship Program. During the 3-months Founder Fellowship, the selected teams receive up to €20k (no-equity), office space in the signals Open Studios as well as mentoring via the signals team and expert network so you shape your product vision and gain initial traction. For more information, head over to hellosignals.com/signals-pre-seed-program.
