Through these articles, you will get a chance to follow the world of marketing and successful entrepreneurial stories, and they will be an addition to the talks, to which ABC Accelerator will invite interesting guests once monthly. The Innotalks are enabled by the Nuvolak project, co-financed under the Interreg Italy-Slovenia 2014-2020 program from the European Regional Development Fund, to promote innovation, sustainability, and cross-border governance in order to create a more competitive and integrated life-friendly environment.

The first talk was moderated (and the first blog was written) by Jakob Gajšek, Head of Venture Relations and Co-Founder of ABC accelerator.

Often, I had the chance – as part of ABC’s acceleration program or some startup event – to talk to (mostly) interesting people about their experience, advice – about their journey in general.

It is always especially interesting, though, when you talk to somebody, whom you know relatively well otherwise.

In that situation, it often happens to me that I’m very quickly happy with the answers given since I can fill in the gaps of what is not said. I do realize that the audience is not in the same position as me – that’s why they came to listen! However, I often ask too few follow-up questions. Since I know the answer, I subconsciously think that others do, too.

I was in a similar situation on the 18t of January during the very first Innotalks event but was fortunately saved by the person I was talking to – Vasja Veber, the co-founder of the startup Viberate, who is a great interviewee. It is evident, that he’s a person who can write and talk – as he said, that was his role in their marketing team since the beginning. Copy. Communications. He wrote for the company so that everything flowed. And, that’s evident in conversation, too. So, in the end, I didn’t have problems with gaps in the narrative, since his answers were such that they mostly managed to fully explain something, and if they didn’t, they just called for more questions – to really know everything.

(Foto: Siniša Kanižaj)

In the approximately 45-minute talk, Vasja took us from the very beginning of the idea, which gradually evolved into Viberate in parallel to their music and marketing work, through the path of a regular startup, the transformation to crypto, and everything after that.

He told us how they – as event organizers, almost for their own needs – set up a website for popularity comparisons called TopDeejays, which was so popular, that the majority of the content was user-generated. And that’s the best and cheapest marketing. Much later, when they were already Viberate, and they continued on their vision of professionalizing the market, which runs behind the scenes of music events, the crypto revolution happened. Without a successful ICO, the company would have gone bankrupt, and the ICO actually strengthened their product on the technology side. Vasja’s comment on the media space in the crypto economy, which he believes to be low-quality and unprofessional. Most companies are able to set up decent marketing campaigns, and the cost of advertisements has increased significantly, but specialized crypto media are all still largely on an almost amateur level.

I believe that the team has entered a difficult market, which can only be changed from the inside. So, if anyone can succeed here, Viberate is in the right position, since they’ve been on this market for so long, that one of the key data sources for TopDeejays was ancient Myspace.

Lessons learned at the event:

• Silicon Valley investors actually respond positively if you just knock on their door uninvited.
• Marketing and media in newly-formed industries are quite unprofessional, and if the industry is currently “hot”, they can be very expensive.
• A good idea sometimes needs a few years before the market develops enough for it to be successful.

Inno is a result of the Nuvolak2 project and co-financed by the Interreg V-A Italy-Slovenia Cooperation Programme.