If someone told you the first step to increase revenue is to understand human psychology, what would be your first reaction? You’d probably think it’s vague. Alright, let’s get more specific. 95% of the decisions humans make are subconscious. Moreover, the attention span is very short: first impressions are made within the first seconds. Now think about your first customer acquisition channel — what would you change knowing this information?

Superangel Insight session with Kristel Tuul, a data-driven growth marketing expert was all about hacking human psychology and turning it to your advantage for nailing conversion . You’d be surprised how much digging into human behaviour can change the way you want to present your acquisition channels. The original webinar or a podcast are available to follow how Kristel thoroughly analyses the website of GDPR Register and VideoCV. Be prepared for a session packed with practical information you can implement already today.

Run a 5-second test to optimise the value-proposition of your product and attract high-quality leads

When potential customers land on your page, they behave differently depending on their awareness level — they may be unaware that the problem exists in the first place or they might already know your brand. Regardless, there are effective ways to optimize the acquisition channels to ensure the conversion of high-quality leads.

Firstly, put on your customer hat and run two tests, 5 and 30 second test, which allows you to understand how well your design communicates the message. How does it work?

5 second test — watch the web for 5 seconds, close the screen. Ask yourself:

• What do you remember?
• Was it trustworthy?
• How did it make me feel?

You can do the same on a selection of people at your target group using UsabilityHub or at a coffee shop. Find out:

• What is the most important message?
• What is frustrating?
• What is confusing?

If the customer will spend only a couple of seconds on your page, will it be enough for her to understand what is the value of your product?

Here are some practical tips to maximise impact:

• Bring out the value first — why should they use your product? Is it to save time or money or to increase revenue? With this in mind, have a look at what your competitors are doing. Understand how they’re positioning themselves and what’s the value they are selling. Follow it up by bringing out benefits and then functions that allow you to deliver the values.
• People skim read and only read headlines. Put the most important messages into headlines
• For the same reason, put the most important messages into the 50% of your page
• Use simple language and easy to follow the structure: use bullets/italic/bold to bring out the most important information and break the reading pattern for the information to be actually noticed.
• Give the image of “easy” even if your concepts are hard — make it as easy for the customer to understand your offer as possible
• Use social proof to build trust — what have your customers or partners said before?
• Find out what’s the main device the visitors land on your page from. Make sure your website is mobile friendly and the message gets over the same way as from a computer screen.

Use mere exposure effect to create familiarisation

Have you ever clicked on an ad and realised you’ve ended up in a completely different place than you expected?

Most probably you left the page the same very moment. The same happens to your customer if you ignore the mere exposure effect — a tendency to develop preferences for things simply because we are familiar with them. In practice it means that the more you perceive a certain message, the more likely you’re to rate it positively and trustworthy. Thus, all messages in your funnel should support each other. Create familiarity through channels and avoid conflicting messages. It does not mean repeating the same message several times on the same web page

Survey your website visitors and existing customers to improve clarity

Getting live feedback from your website visitors and customers is the best way to hack what works well and what you are currently missing. Using questions like ‘what are the limitations of the current solution’ and ‘what matters the most for you in a solution’ is a great way of reaching the customers who are hard to interview. Use your customers also to optimise your tag line and value proposition: what are the 3 adjectives they use to describe your company/product and how would they persuade a friend to start using your product? It’s likely the answer is different from what you thought was important.

Do not multitask. Focus on 1–2 channels

Select active channel as first (e-mails, LinkedIn) and passive channel as second (SEO, content creation, word of mouth). Within these channels, constantly learn why something is working or not working — don’t just copy something from your competitor's website that looks nice. You cannot be sure whether the conversion works or not. Instead, focus on your biggest growth opportunity by continuing to visit your prospects and customers for their input.

If you’re keen to learn more, check out these resources:

• UsabilityHub for a 5 second test
• Google Tag assistant
• Wappalyzer
• The Bullseye framework: a five-step repeatable process to maximize your chances of getting traction: brainstorm, rank, prioritize, test, and focus.

Books & online materials mentioned:

• Eric Riese “Lean Startup”
• April Dunford “Obviously Awesome”
• Aaron Ross “Predictable Revenue” and “From Impossible to Inevitable”
• CXL.com blog

This article is from a series of sessions between Superangel and brilliant experts & entrepreneurs on the most relevant topics for early-stage startups.

Originally published at https://post.superangel.io on November 13, 2020.

In October, Jeff App won Base Camp 2020 global competition for early-stage startups by impressing the jury with a strong capability to mobilise as a team and significantly advance the product in just 72 hours. Now raising a Seed Round, Superangel had a chat with the founder and CEO Toms Niparts on how Jeff App was born, how they plan to continue conquering South-East Asia and what is the most important lesson they have learned in building a fast-growing startup.

In Summer 2019, two friends quit their well-established jobs and relocated back to Latvia to focus on building up Jeff — a loan broker for the unbanked. Started in January 2020 — probably the most unique time to launch the startup considering the global pandemic, they’ve successfully established traction in Vietnam with 150,000+ users and revenue growing at a rate of 70% MoM. Today, the app has been used close to 1M times.

Jeff’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed in the startup ecosystem. Prior to winning the Startup Day pitching contest, Jeff App won Seedstars Latvia and CEE, and last month they were also a runner-up in Arctic15. They’ve also been recognised by Forbes USA, Sifted, Singapore FinTech Festival and Slush as one of the top FinTechs to keep an eye on.

‘If you don’t have big audacious goals, it’s extremely hard to build a great company with big success.’ — Toms, the CEO of Jeff

Jeff App operates in a market with high growth potential. With a population of 570 million and a booming GDP expected to reach $4.7 trillion by 2025, the six largest countries in Southeast Asia represent one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing regions. More than 70% of the adult population, however, is either “underbanked” or “unbanked,” with limited access to financial services. At the same time, most banks find it difficult to meet the needs of the underbanked population because of the vast mismatch between traditional bank credit scoring models and the actual data the consumers have at their disposal.

To change that, Jeff has created a loan brokerage app that utilises alternative data to boost financial inclusion in South-East Asia. For banks, Jeff becomes a lead generator that can bring new business and services a much bigger customer base. They provide a large number of new, valuable insights derived from digital footprint and various alternative and behavioural data sources.

Founding the company in Latvia, operating in Vietnam. How does it work?

The global economy is changing and building a company remotely is easier than ever before. Nevertheless, the founders quickly realised that local knowledge is everything — the culture, behavior and customer needs are different. Thus, whilst the technical team is located in Latvia, the customer and partner facing team operates in Vietnam.

It’s clear that the founding team is not afraid to go big — entering the South-East Asian market is incredibly exciting. Achieving a considerable user base would probably take years in smaller European markets but in Vietnam the market potential is much bigger. At the same time, Toms wonders if Baltic startups are dreaming big enough as building a company only in the Baltics diminishes the market size significantly. He follows, ‘If you don’t have big audacious goals, it’s extremely hard to build a great company with big success.’

The most important lesson: People create the business. Make sure they are in for the right reasons

Today, there’re 8 full time employees behind Jeff App in Latvia and Vietnam covering a range of expertise, including digital marketing, design, business development, data analysis and software development. Toms admits that T-shaped skillset and thinking is a very important aspect when putting an early-stage team together. Additionally, they’re looking for strong A players: people that have very strong domain understanding and deep experience in their area. In that way they’re considerably decreasing onboarding time, adding value sooner and maintaining internal communication and simplifying the know-how exchange.

The hiring process has also been the greatest learning point for Jeff’s team. ‘We learnt this the hard way. At an early stage, if someone wants to join your team only for a salary increase, run for the hills.’ In Toms opinion, it’s very important to understand right away what the person is looking for in his/her next challenge and how it aligns with what you can actually offer. ‘Be brutally honest about this — otherwise, you’ll waste your key resource: time.’

Base Camp gave Jeff App the opportunity to advance the product and take a step back from day-to-day hustle

Out of 120 applicants, Jeff was one of the 29 teams who was invited to attend Base Camp Autumn 2020, a biannual 72h product focussed hackathon organised by Superangel and Garage48. Toms thought Base Camp to be an excellent opportunity to isolate from the noise and be laser-focused on one idea: ‘An early-stage startup always has a great deal of ideas and hypotheses to test. At the same time, it’s easy to float away and shift focus to some urgent things to fix.’

The team decided to work on an idea that they had discussed internally for a while - a lender portal. The lender portal is a free-to-use web application for Jeff’s partner banks and lending partners to conveniently access incoming client flow. Considering that APIs are non-existent and exchanging data in South East Asia is currently inefficient, the system not only puts a new, better infrastructure in place, but also helps increase the number of prospects for lenders by 3–5x.

Base Camp also gave Jeff the chance to discuss their business with entrepreneurs who’ve been there before. ‘It can get hard to look at the big picture with a clear perspective.’ reflects Toms. ‘ Getting clarity and understanding is hugely important to reset the course again. From tips on UX and UI to high-level business talks, sessions with Base Camp mentors were valuable.’

But why should any early-stage startup attend Base Camp?

„Number one reason is focus. Then comes competitiveness and contacts, and besides: Why not? What do you have to lose?”

Base Camp Spring 2021 takes place again in March. Are you an early-stage startup looking to work with the best experts and investors, and gain deep knowledge to advance your business and product? Follow our social media and be the first one to be notified when the registration happens.

Originally published at https://post.superangel.io on November 12, 2020.

Within the last 5–10 years, the way VCs (and all of us) consume (and especially discover) information has moved from desktop-first to mobile-first. If your deck looks anything like the one below, and you also ignored Kawasaki’s guidelines, then getting people engaged is an uphill battle:

In Alpine House accelerator we did a special session in order to update start-up founders knowledge and discuss what are the new rules of pitch decks for VCs.

If possible don’t send your slides in advance before a meeting and try to set up a face to face meeting first.

Most likely you still have to send your slidedeck in advance from time to time. Here are 5 tips from Superangel to founders for creating engaging (and mobile-friendly) slide decks:

#1. Don’t waste your prime real estate for general keywords.

Assume the VC swiping through your slides. The first things she sees is the headline — if that’s the only thing they remember, what is the message you’d like them to remember? “Opportunity”, “Value proposition”, “Market Size” just take up very valuable real estate and if the rest is a two-paragraph text then most probably she will decide to read your slides sometime later from a laptop. Which means most likely…never.

# 2. Slide titles should tell a story.

Your slide titles should be simple to understand statements explaining what is the core problem, what is your solution, and why is the opportunity NOW. This way you can build interest and make sure your message gets delivered, regardless if it’s on mobile or desktop.

Do a test: write out titles of your slides and read them as a story. Is it a meaningful and a catchy story raising his interest in meeting you? If not, you have a work to do. If you do it right, you can significantly simplify the content of your slides by reducing the noise in each slide, allowing for more than 10 slides. We’ve seen 20–30 slide decks that are engaging, proving that slide count is just an arbitrary number.

#3. What is your Purple Cow?

Graphics and photos can be very powerful if you use them right. Avoid stock photos if it feels manufactured. Also, avoid images that have nothing to do with your message or your brand, such as a series of mountain range photos for your new accounting SaaS. General brand building and marketing tip: read Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow”.

#4. Your second slide must be the most memorable.

Although you have chance to get attention span for 20–25 slides it will never happen if your second slide is not catchy and memorable. Your first slide can be your start-up’s name and logo or info graphic or catchy sentence. But your second slide must deliver a message that you might be the next unicorn.

#5. Your slides have to work without you.

If you are the only one in your start-up who can present the slides and they make sense only if you present them, you have some work to do. You do not have enough time to be present every time somebody wants to read your slides. Test and ask for feedback to validate how independent your slides actually are. Or ask your fellow founders or team mates to present your slides and see how they understand them.

Of course, as your startup grows and you have more market proof to back up your story, you will need more detailed slides in your next fundraising deck. In that case you have the freedom to include more content in your slides, as people will be putting more money into the company, and following the guidelines presented here will make even more sense.

This is it. Let us know if you have questions about your deck. Go get them!

Are you an early stage startup founder? Do you want to get faster access to know knowledge provided by Superangel and reach to a next level? Check out our location-independent Alpine House accelerator program. In spring 2019 we take up to 5 high potential startups on a 1-year journey through Tallinn, Singapore & San Francisco Bay Area. Do you have what it takes? Apply before Jan 31, 2019

Superangel tips were summarized by Kalev Kaarna

The 10-slide startup pitch deck is dead was originally published in Superangel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently Q3 revenue, tax and employee numbers were published for all Estonian companies. Superangel analysts team selected 304 Estonian companies in startup space and dived into growth numbers. We found some usual suspects of fast growth, but also some not so obvious startup runner-ups on high speed growth trajectory. If you want to make your own rankings and lists, then go and play with numbers in Superangel’s Estonian startup statistics page: startuplist.superangel.io

QUICK HIGHLIGHTS

TOP startups by labor tax volume and growth

• TOP20 startups grew government’s labor tax budget 37% more than TOP20 industrial manufacturers (+€2.2M vs +€1.6M).
• In 6 years TOP20 startups total volume of quarterly labor taxes will surpasse tax Euros paid by TOP20 industrial manufacturers.
• Newcomers to TOP20 labor tax payers were Scoro Software and GoWorkaBit.
• Based on year-on-year (YoY) tax volume increase the less known outliers are Fiizi and Pipedrive.

TOP startups by sales volume and growth

• Two newcomers into TOP20 startups by sales volume are Comodule and Bondora.
• Two startups in TOP20 showed over 800% growth on their YoY quarterly sales: Comodule and Hashcoins.
• There were 9 startups, who could show both quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) and year-on-year (YoY) sales growth. Most interesting outliers among these were Comodule, Realeyes, Fiizy and Skeleton Technologies.
• Based on YoY and QoQ growth volume the runner-ups reaching to TOP20 in a year are Fitlap, Funderbeam, and Majandustarkvara.

TOP startups by team size and growth

• Newcomers to TOP20 startups by team size are LeapIN and Testlio.
• In YoY team growth LeapIN has tripled their team to 45. Monese has almost doubled their team to 85.
• Out of TOP20 we counted 9 startups, who have been able to grow headcount both quarterly and annually. The not so well known startups among them are Guardtime, Ridango and Starship Technology.
• Based on YoY and QoQ team growth volume the runner-ups reaching in a year to TOP20 are Veriff, Digital Sputnik Lighting, Click & Grow, SprayPrinter, and Quretec.

Based on the public data on 2018 third quarter results of Estonian startups(18Q3) we looked for answers to following three questions:

1. Who were biggest taxpayers (most valuable startups for Estonian government)?
2. Who were selling the most (most valued among customers)?
3. Who were hiring the most (fastest team builders)?

Yes, we are fully aware of all the problems of TOPs, differences in stories behind similar numbers, and gaps in data making startups not fully comparable. We have listed main issues in “Problems with TOPs” section (see below). That said, we will now present you the TOP20s.

In order to analyse dynamics we selected TOP20 startups according to volume of sales or labor taxes paid or people hired. In each category we looked at year-on-year (YoY) changes comparing current 3rd quarter numbers to 3rd quarter in 2017. We looked also at quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) changes comparing 3rd quarter to 2nd quarter in 2018 among TOP20. We also made some predictions on which runner-ups will be in TOP20 in 2019.

In order to know where TOP startups stand among country’s growth drivers, we compared some numbers of TOP startups to TOP industrial manufacturing companies.

Biggest taxpayers among startups in 3rd quarter

TOP5 biggest labor tax payers are usual suspects: Transferwise, Pipedrive, Taxify, Starship Technologies and Cleveron. These 5 startups pay 60% of all taxes paid by TOP20. This is much more concentrated compared to manufacturing industry, where TOP5 taxpayers pay 41% of labor taxes of TOP20.

There are only two newcomers among TOP20 compared to previous quarter: Scoro Software and GoWorkaBit Estonia. Scoro’s business management software-as-a-service solution combines project, time and team management with sales, billing, and professional services automation. GoWorkaBit has built a platform for helping retail, logistics and hospitality companies to find temporary workers. If they keep up with growth speed, they will definitely start to get more publicity and become more known.

The most interesting tax numbers come from Adcash, who has worldwide advertising and campaign management platform. While their labor taxes remained around 400 000€ in 3rd quarter, their total taxes had a 5x spike and reached €2.9M. Most likely Adcash has paid out €10M dividends in Q3, which have spiked tax payments. Yet in their 2017 annual report there are no hints about plans of paying out dividends.

If we look at Year-on-Year (YoY) labor tax numbers growth volume and speed we have 13 startups whose quarterly taxes paid have grown at least 5%. Out of these there are four outliers. Two outliers have shown remarkable speed of tax payment growth on yearly basis: Taxify (+308%) and Fiizy(+235%). The other two outliers are remarkable on tax payment volume growth. Transferwise labor tax burden has increased by 643 300€ and Pipedrive, a cloud-based sales software company, has increased government’s tax budget by 383 000€.

Footnote: bubble size represents labor tax amount paid in 3rd quarter

There are a 10 startups, who have shown growth numbers both in Quarter-to-Quarter (QoQ) and year-on-year (YoY) tax payments. The ultimate champion is Transferwise whose numbers do not fit on the chart below (quarterly tax payment growth +248 000€ and annual +643 300€).

Footnote: bubble size represents labor tax amount paid in 3rd quarter

Estonian startups have been accused in having a lot of press, but much lower impact on Estonian economy and nation’s wealth compared to industrial companies. Comparing labor taxes paid in 3rd quarter of 2018 and 2017 we see that TOP20 startups have within a year grown their quarterly contribution to Estonian national budget by additional €2.2M. Industrial manufacturing companies contribution growth was in 3rd quarter €1.6M. Already now TOP20 startups give 37% bigger additional contribution to Estonia’s labor tax budget than TOP industrial manufacturers. Total labor tax volume wise are industrial manufacturers still quite a bit ahead, but TOP startups are closing in fast. TOP20 startups paid in 3rd quarter €9.4M, which is 29% of TOP20 industrial manufacturers €32.6M contribution. If startups 3rd quarter labor tax payments YoY growth (+32%) continues then in 6 years TOP20 startups pay more labor taxes to government’s budget than TOP20 industrial manufacturers.

This is all about growth of labor tax funds. Keeping the current baseline will remain heavily on the shoulders of manufacturing companies. Comparative share of taxes paid by 304 selected startups will reach in 6 years to 30% of labor taxes paid by all industrial manufacturing companies. In Q3 the total numbers were 209MEUR for manufacturers and 15MEUR for 304 startups. Joint effort is needed from both industrial and startup community to keep economy ticking and growing.

Startups with fastest sales machines in 3rd quarter

According to tax authorities data TOP5 startups with highest sales volumeare our usual suspects: Cleveron, Taxify, Adcash, Fortumo and Pipedrive. Two newcomers into TOP20 are Comodule and Bondora.

Comodule is positioning themselves as global leader in bike and scooter connectivity, digitalization and fleet management for light vehicles industry. According to Crunchbase by 2016 they raised €525K in 3 rounds + more in 2 rounds, which sums are not available. They have skyrocketed from position #92 (80 800€) to #18 with €1.167M. We will keep an keen eye on the startup and hope that this a start for continuous growth.

Bondora is an online platform for fixed-income investments in European personal loans and has raised from #35 to #19 in sales TOP. Their last investment round was in 2015 and in five rounds they had accumulated funding of €7.2M.

Startup sales volume is important, but not nearly as important as growth speed and volume of sales. 17 startups in the sales TOP have increased their quarterly sales on yearly basis. There four clear outliers in this pack.

Volume wise Cleveron and Taxify dominate the list as they have added €12M and €10M respectively to their YoY quarterly sales. The other two outliers have had over 800% growth on their YoY quarterly sales: Comodule and Hashcoins. Hashcoins builds cryptographic hardware, creates blockchain technology-based solutions and provides remote hardware access services. They have increased quarterly sales from 500 000€ in 2017 to €6M in 3rd quarter of 2018. Still it is a drop compared to Q1 and Q2, where they were making over €8M. Lets see how they are doing in coming quarters.

Footnote: bubble size represents sales in 3rd quarter

Although quarterly sales increase can be influenced by seasonality it can be also an early indicator for growth trajectory. There were 9 startups, who could show both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year sales growth. Cleveron with its €2.5M quarterly sales increase compared to Q2 is a beast. They are just like printing money and we took them off the chart (see below).

In addition to quarterly sales skyrocket Comodule there are three more interesting outliers: Realeyes, Fiizy and Skeleton Technologies.

Realeyes measures how people feel as they watch video content online and their reports help video marketers to create better content. In May 2018 they raised €16.2M in a series-A round from Draper Esprit. They show up on the chart because they had a really weak sale in Q2 and €2.98M all-time-high in Q3. Let’s hope that they put investors money to work and Q3 was just the first quarter in long series of all-time-highs sales.

Fiizy is a financing solutions giving consumers approved loan offers at the point of sale from the majority of creditors. They have made headway in Spain and now have expanded their activity to Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Poland and United States. They have increased their sales 11% quarter-on-quarter, 100% YoY and reached to €2.7M quarterly sales in Q3.

Skeleton Technologies is positioning themselves as the global technology leader in ultracapacitor-based energy storage. Their total funding amount is €46,4M and most recently they got €15M loan from European Investment Bank (in Feb 2017). They have put investors’ money into a good use and tripled their YoY sales from 573 000€ in 2017 and doubled quarterly sales to €1.9M. Good job! Lets see can they keep up and double their sales again in Q4.

Footnote: bubble size represents sales in 3rd quarter

We counted also 3 runner-ups, who based on their YoY and QoQ sales growth numbers could reach €1M in quarterly sales and be in TOP20 after a year. These are in alphabetic order: Fitlap, Funderbeam, and Majandustarkvara.

Fitlap has shown steady growth based on Estonian market. Can they break out? Funderbeam quarterly sales were first time in hundreds of thousands (€310K vs usual €40K). Can the keep that momentum? Majandustarkvara is an affiliate company of Erply team. Will it be able to keep up with salary surge trend and continue to find new engineers it needs for growth?

Fastest team builders in 3rd quarter

Transferwise is still far in a lead (680 people) and has twice as many employees as Pipedrive (298 people), who is next in the TOP20. They are followed by Taxify, Norstat, and Cleveron. The least known of these 5 is Norstat founded in 2007 by Kaspar Küünarpuu and it has grown into one of Europe’s leading providers of data collection services helping clients to understand their markets and customers.

Newcomers to TOP20 startups by team size are LeapIN and Testlio. LeapIN is powered by Estonian e-Residency and provides services for starting and remotely running location independent company online, in Estonia/Europe. They have raised €1.3M using equity crowdfunding in October 2017 and hired recently a serial entrepreneur, an executive and an investor Allan Martinson as CEO.

Testlio provides a community of highly vetted testers and an end-to-end QA management platform. They raised $7.5M by 2016.

In speed of team’s annual growth category Transferwise still dominates the whole startup scenery. They have added 216 more people, what is more than #2 Taxify and #3 Cleveron have added together. Transferwise is off the chart…literally.

On the graph there are 2 more outliers by YoY team growth metrics. LeapINhas tripled their team within a year to 45. Monese has almost doubled their team and reached to headcount of 85. They have built an online banking platform that offers super quick current account opening for all EU residents. In September 2018 they raised $60M in Series B from Kinnevik AB. With such funding they surely can keep growing.

Footnote: bubble size represents team size in 3rd quarter

Out of TOP20 we counted 9 startups, which have been able to grow headcount both quarterly and annually. Transferwise and Taxify quarterly hires are again off the chart (74 and 34). Out of other 7 there are three startups we have not mentioned yet Guardtime, Ridango and Starship Technology.

Based on QoQ and YoY numbers we have identified also a few runner-ups, who most probably will be in a year in TOP20 startups by team size. These are Veriff (YoY +500% to 40 people), Digital Sputnik Lighting (YoY +150% to 30 people), Click & Grow (YoY +144% to 36 people), SprayPrinter (YoY +200% to 27 people), and Quretec (QoQ +10% to 35 people).

Problems with TOPs

There are several problems with making such lists. Here are the ones we consider most important.

Metrics. Early stage startups growth can not be measured in revenue, but in attraction, learning speed etc. Ash Mauyra has written a whole book on it “Scaling LEAN”. Growth in number of people and increase in revenue are not the earliest leading indicators, but they definitely are indicators measuring momentum of already growing startups.

Seasonality. Some markets are very seasonal, hence revenue growth quarter to quarter does not make much sense. Seasonality is most common to consumer electronics and consumer products. Most Estonian startups are not active in these markets so seasonality should not be such an issue. There are only two quarterly revenue indicators out of 8 we measure. Hence seasonality should not have too much weight in filtering out best of the best.

Corporate structure. Several successful startups have built up their corporate structure by splitting revenue and employees into different legal entities. Most often foreign mother company has revenues in their books and most of employees in Estonian subsidiary. For this reason companies such as Transferwise will not make into high ranks in our index. Until we have not figured out a way to compensate it we just have to accept this anomaly in numbers.

Advantage of smallness. Estonia is a small country and startups are also small. If you have low baseline then adding 5 people might skyrocket you into TOP of the list of highest growing employers. Our current approach is to select by volume TOP20 startups in three categories and see who are the fastest growing companies among the biggest startups. This somewhat minimizes the advantage of smallness and low baseline.

Fast, faster, fastest: was originally published in Superangel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.