We were inspired by the large mural that local graffiti artists Moris and Sander (aka Dosa) made on a wall next to our office. You can see a section of it here. So, we asked those artists to do something similar to our building but turn it up a notch.

Starting tomorrow, they will transform the outside of our building into something spectacular. We gave Moris and Sander pretty much carte blanche, except that we asked them to include Emilia van Nassau, the namesake of Emilia Capital, who lived in Wijchen’s castle for a while.

The mockups are below (click them to see the larger versions). Overall, this is about 185m² of wall.

(Don’t know what this is about? Read the announcement post. We have room for another pitch if you want to join, still, just reach out!)

The schedule

Here are the four companies pitching, and a short blurb of info in their own words:

WP-DXP

June 9th – 11.00
Presenter: Paul Halfpenny

WP-DXP is a plugin that allows you to start using WordPress as a digital experience platform, adding personalisation, segmentation, lead scoring and more so that you can display relevant content to your visitors. It integrates fully into the Block Editor, works with caching and combines with plugins such as Gravity Forms and WooCommerce to allow you to show content based on user behaviour. We would like to expand the plugin to allow the storage of data offsite, analytics, A\B and multivariate testing, journey mapping, and add AI content recommendations and optimisation.

Kanoppi

June 9th – 15.00
Presenters: Louise Towler, Paul Wong-Gibbs, Kelly Wilson

Kanoppi is a WordPress extension which helps progressive business owners and ambitious content editors with sustainability reporting, real-time insights and learning. Kanoppi integrates into the WordPress admin showing the total carbon footprint and trends over time with granular reporting for individual posts and pages. Providing actionable insights empowers editors to identify improvements and track the resulting impact in order to meet their organisation’s net zero targets, all whilst doing their day job.

AXE-WEB

June 10th – 11.00
Presenters: Anastasia & Roman Axelrod

We are building a powerful development tool designed to streamline and standardize the website development process for expanding teams. This tool enables agencies to efficiently create design systems for their clients, seamlessly implement these systems into clients’ platforms, and effortlessly maintain them over the long term.

APPExperts

June 10th – 15.00
Presenter: Saad Iqbal

APPExperts is an easy-to-use, intuitive, SaaS-based mobile app builder that lets you create fully-functional iOS & Android apps using a no-code solution. APPExperts creates an application for WordPress websites using the flutter technology, which is currently being used to create cross-platform mobile apps that work on both Android and iOS.

How to find our booth

You can find our booth close to the Elementor and Hostinger booths:

Make sure to check out our booth anyway for a fun game and to pick up a nice Emilia Capital pen!

But, we would also love to meet our next big investment opportunity at WordCamp Europe! So… are you seeking investment for your startup? Do you want to take your business to the next level? And would you like to collaborate with us? Here is your chance!

Apply for a pitch-spot in our booth

Emilia Capital will have a booth at WordCamp Europe. We’re going to invite people (you!!) to pitch their product, service or company to us in our booth. You’ll have 10 minutes to pitch your idea (we’ll be very strict with the time) and we’ll ask you some questions afterwards (another 10 minutes). After that, we’ll give you a ‘YES: let’s talk numbers’ or a ‘NO: this is not for us’. 

How does our booth-pitching idea work?

Let me talk you through the process! If you want to apply for a booth-pitch, you fill out our pitch-form before May 11th. We’ll review the pitches and invite the best ones for a booth-pitch on June 9 and June 10th. We’ll let you know  before May 17th whether or not we’re inviting you to our booth for a real-life pitch! 

About a week before the start of WordCamp Europe, we’ll publish an overview of all of our booth-pitches on our website. The pitches will be public, we hope a lot of people will come and listen to all of the booth-pitches. Perhaps, we’re not interested in investing in your product, but someone else will be. And, you’ll have a chance to promote your product or your idea! 

If we give you a ‘YES: let’s talk numbers’, we’ll probably schedule a follow-up conversation during WordCamp Europe. We usually decide quickly and we are planning to leave Athens with a couple of new awesome investments! So, you’ll get a definite GO or NO-GO before the end of WCEU. 

Why we are investing in the WordPress Community

We really hope to meet some cool new WordPress startups in Athens. As you probably know, we sold Yoast in 2021. The Yoast business became large (and successful), but we really missed the startup phase. This was actually a big reason for wanting to sell Yoast: we just love that first start-up phase of companies (and Yoast outgrew that). We like to move fast, we get excited when working with passionate entrepreneurs and we love growing businesses. Next to that, we genuinely LOVE WordPress and we want to keep investing in and giving back to WordPress.  

Our investment philosophy

Our love for WordPress is rather obvious. In the last few years, we’ve already invested in a number of WordPress companies. Next to that, we also made some other investments. All of our investments are in tech companies or in companies with a strong online presence. That just makes sense because of our own background, we can help those companies excel. Next to that:  each investment  aligns with at least one of our three core values:

1. We are open-source fanatics and want to invest in open-source software solutions. In WordPress, that also means we ask companies we invest in to respect the GPL, the WordPress guidelines and understanding the importance of the WordPress community. Some of our WordPress related investments are Atarim, Equalize Digital, Extendify, Castos and previously Strattic.
2. We are passionate about sustainability and want to invest in companies that provide sustainable solutions. We would like to expand our investment portfolio with products and solutions that help make the world a better (and a greener) place. We’re really excited about our investment in Peerby, a platform that helps people share tools and utilities with their neighbors.
3. We want to encourage female entrepreneurship, so we seek investment opportunities in companies that are founded by women. Marieke experienced how difficult it can be to be a female entrepreneur in the tech industry. We want to help more female founded companies flourish. We’re really proud of our investment in Equalize Digital, but also in Stieglitz.

Questions?

Don’t be afraid to ask! We’re on Twitter, or email us through our contact form.

Photo by Patrick on Unsplash

This love for bootstrapping may seem strange coming from people who call themselves investors, or even “venture capitalists”. However, we bootstrapped Yoast, and we’ve learned a lot in doing so. With most of our investments, if they can, we’ll try to help them to break even so they don’t need add-on rounds of funding to keep growing. In economic times like these, this means it will at least give them more runway, and in the best case, will make them profitable (more) quickly.

Unhealthy effects of funding / too much money

Having a lot of money on your bank account, regardless of whether you made it yourself or got it from an investor, takes some of the pressure away. Part of that is healthy: it might free you from some stress that might block you from achieving greatness. But for many people, that pressure is also what makes them good entrepreneurs.

Bootstrapping? Efficiency is key

As we go into economically unstable times, you’ll see a lot of large corporations fire what equates to entire stadiums full of people. It’s very easy to say that that’s “stupid”, and they should never have let it go out of control that much, etc. Having grown a company myself I can tell you: that’s incredibly hard. I know of very few companies that were always extremely efficient. As a company grows, that gets harder and harder.

Bootstrapping a company makes you almost inherently efficient. It’s your own money, you can only spend it once, you’ll think twice before hiring another employee. I think that’s very healthy. It’s easy to grow fast if you have lots of money, but it won’t necessarily make you move faster. It feels counter-intuitive, but hiring more people will not always make you faster.

Keeping control

In most cases, the reason that your company is successful is you. Of course, your people are important, of course, there are lots of contributing factors. But successful businesses tend to have a strong and clear vision of where they want to go. Having anyone stop you from doing that is annoying. If you need a lot of funding, you’ll almost inherently give away quite a bit of control over your company, even if you still have the majority vote.

When bootstrapping, staying profitable is paramount

When you’re bootstrapping your company, you have to stay (or become) profitable. If you don’t, you can’t grow. This forces you to focus on the things that make money. This does not mean that money has to be the most important thing, in fact, it probably should never be the only reason to do something. But it does force you to make sure you’re making money, which we believe in the long run will make sure you build a healthy company.

So when should you take investment?

There are certainly reasons to take investment that I fully appreciate. Sometimes taking that next big leap requires money. You might do a big marketing investment, hire a few people to seize your momentum and quickly gain market share, these (and many others) can be good reasons to get an investor.

That doesn’t mean you need to lose your bootstrapping vibe entirely. In fact, hanging on to that will always build you a better business.

An investor should really always bring more to the table than just money, because if they don’t, you’re mostly better off going to a bank and getting a loan. Investors should truly become partners in building your company. It’s good to ask your investors upfront how they’d like to be connected to you and how often they’d like to talk to you.

Women stepping up

Women are still very much underrepresented in leadership positions. Just look at the Fortune 500, which shows only 5% of the largest companies are led by women. There are all kinds of reasons why women are underrepresented in those leadership positions. In the empowerwoment project we analyze the reasons, and try to change the status quo. The idea is to help women step up and to help organizations to open up. Because let’s face it: the underrepresentation is by no means the ‘fault’ of women, so it should be a joint responsibility (women AND organizations) to fix it.

The program

I am currently working on an online program with a lot of videos, tons of reading materials and practical assignments to work on. It’s going to be an online program with an offline (real-life) element as well. The general idea is that women of a certain company follow the online course and come together once a month to share their experiences.

The entire program will take a full year to complete. It will be rather intensive, with weekly videos, reading, writing or sessions with the other participants.

Focus on changing the organization

In the first part of the empowerwoment project, we’ll focus on what a woman herself can do in order to step up into a leadership role. How do you grow? How do you act? What could you do or not do to exhilarate your growth?

The second part of the empowerwoment project is focussed on the organization the women work for. What could the organization do? What is the organization (perhaps without noticing it) doing in order to prevent women to grow into leadership roles? How could the organization improve?

In that phase, women will do a short assessment of the current state of gender equality in the organization and come up with a plan to improve that. The empowerwoment project is a collaboration of women that want to grow and organizations that want to see women flourish. If they collaborate, that growth could really happen!

Empowerwoment at Yoast

We’ve seen what the effect of collaboration of women and organizations could do when we did the empowerwoment project at Yoast. It had an effect on the women within the project, but the effect on the organization itself was much bigger. The organization became much more aware of gender stereotyping, unconscious bias, and biases within our own HR policies. Solving those things and staying on top of these things, led to Yoast hiring more women in all departments of the organization. And nowadays, our leadership team consists of an equal amount of women and men!

Next steps & launch empowerwoment project

I am currently working really hard to get the empowerwoment project to launched. I am shooting videos and writing a lot of texts. Next step will be a kick-ass marketing campaign. It is something I truly enjoy doing and I am really passionate about. And, it puts me right back into the start-up fase. And being a startup entrepeneur is the best thing in the whole world!

Why we started Yoast

Yoast started as a hobby. We wanted people to have fun while working. And while we were profitable from the very beginning, making profits was never our main driver. We wanted to make an impact, create an SEO solution for everybody to use. And we wanted to improve WordPress and make the web better.

Yoast also started as a lifestyle business. Yoast became a family-friendly organization to work for. Mainly because I needed such an organization myself. Joost and I have four children together. I needed flexibility in my hours and wanted that flexibility for our co-workers as well.

But Yoast mainly started as a dream. A way to grow, make it bigger. Not necessarily in the number of employees, but definitely in terms of users and impact. Both Joost and I are crazy ambitious.

Different from Dutch startup entrepreneurs

We were very different from other Dutch startup entrepreneurs. When we started Yoast we weren’t that profit-driven, and not interested in seeking investments. We wanted to bootstrap our business and were profitable from the very start.

Next to that, we had the open-source mindset, which is not very common in the startup world. We strongly believe in the power of open source software. That’s why we gave a lot of our profits back to the WordPress community. It was a big part of who we were at Yoast and it is still a big part of who we are as persons.

On top of that, Joost and I had four children at a rather young age. We had a family. That made us very busy with non-typical startup activities. I helped with school activities, and Joost is a football trainer in his spare time. We did not have time to attend business meetups, drinks, and fancy lunches to extend our network. We were just busy running our business and running a big family.

And then, we are not in Amsterdam. We are in a small town near the border of Germany. That makes us very different too.

Hup hup hup

We move quickly. Decide quickly. We are fast.

That’s not necessarily a-typical for startup entrepreneurs. The start-before-ready, agile mindset is very common with successful entrepreneurs.

We like to call it Hup Hup Hup. Which is Dutch for Go-Go-Go.

You don’t have to build a perfect product, it needs to be good enough for you to release it. Yoast -especially in the early days- always worked like that. We would build something that wasn’t perfect yet, but that would be really useful to our audience. If your SEO improves by our product, it will be worthwhile to use it. It doesn’t have to be perfect at all.

If you let go of the need to build things that are perfect, then things get done.