7 Awesome Startups We Met at SLUSH 2019

and we think you should meet as well

I don’t think we’re holding the record yet (damn you local Finnish startups!), but this year we visited SLUSH in Helsinki for the fifth consecutive time.

That’s right: the fifth time fighting the cold, and of course the slush ❄️, to attend one of the biggest yet most underground startup events of the year.

We don’t go to SLUSH for the fancy banners at the entrance, although we admit they make for some great pictures. 😍

Yup, those badasses, that was us. And perhaps you too.

The main reason we go to SLUSH is the networking. And it is without comparison.

It’s the combination of:

  • 25,000 people attending 🤯
  • a matchmaking platform that allows you to neatly filter through the attendees
  • and then book efficient 30 minute meetings at one of the 330 meeting tables (or a meeting point if those are full, which we don’t recommend as it brings you back to the stress you’d have at most other events)

Mind-boggling possibilities. 😵

So who did we meet?

In short: a lot of interesting people, ranging from startups, over VC funds to agencies.

For this list we’re focusing on startups that are making a “dent in the universe”, which we enjoyed meeting and we think you should too.

Here we go! 😁

Beamer – beam important updates to your users

So you have a software company and you’re building a lot of cool new features for your users.

You’re emailing them about it and writing about it on your blog… and then you find out that they don’t know about this, because it’s very hard to get their attention while they’re doing something else.

Why not communicate your feature updates (and other important updates) from your software product? 😏 That’s what Beamer facilitates.

Beamer can be neatly embedded in your app. And if users like to have a bit more space to read they can switch to the standalone website.

It allows you to target the right users, send notifications, gather feedback, … and of course integrate with the rest of your tool stack.

Want to get closer to your customers?

Give them a try. 🙌

Cumul.io – integrate dashboards in your SaaS

You’re still that girl or guy with the software company?

Chances exist that you have some interesting data in your software and users want to visualize it. But building dashboards is a bit too much of a hassle to fit into your feature roadmap.

Meet Cumul.io, the easiest way to add dashboards to your SaaS app. 😌

The message is simple:

🎵 If you need dashboards, in your SaaS app. Who you gonna call? Cumul.io!🎵

We hope they give us some big discount for this free promotion. 😉

Typegenie – autocomplete for Zendesk

One of the coolest additions to Gmail in the past year: autocomplete aka Smart Compose.

It’s like it knows what you want to type… and it makes emailing so much quicker.

Now imagine you’re supporting customers and typing the same things over and over again. Wouldn’t you wish you had something similar at your disposal? 🧐

If you’re supporting customers using Zendesk, then you’re in luck: Typegenie brings autocomplete to Zendesk tickets.

This is how it looks:

Want this? Check Typegenie out.

Chatvisor – get eye to eye with your customers

Lots of business is done over the internet nowadays.

It brings a lot of increased efficiency, but also makes business way less personal. You can’t easily see your customers eye to eye anymore. 👀

Or can you…

Chatvisor offers you a suite of tools that help you to see what your customer sees and get on a videocall with them super easily (the latter is kinda like our friends and customers at Crankwheel).

You can co-browse, chat live, do webcalls, … but also see what your customers see when they’re not talking with you with session recordings and heatmaps.

Want to get more personal again? You know what to do. 👈

Al Bicchiere – this dispenser makes your wine last longer

Enough about software tools for software companies. 🙃

Who loves a good glass of wine? 🍷

And who doesn’t like to throw a bottle away because it’s been open too long?

Those problems are over with Al Bicchiere’s smart – and fancy looking – wine dispenser.

You can keep wine up to 8x longer, i.e. up to about 6 months from opening date.

And… you can control it with your Google Home or Alexa. 🤯 It’s not on Kickstarter yet, but I’m already a big fan.

If you’re reading this, guys, I’m happy to be a beta tester. 😍

Phenium – keep an eye on food safety

My wife got sick last week from eating a goat cheese salad.

She didn’t eat it in some scruffy restaurant. But still, she got sick.

Food safety isn’t easy. Enter Phenium.

Their software makes it much easier to keep track of all the ingredients and whether they’re still safe to eat.

No need to guess anymore. Phenium keeps an eye on it for you. 👀

Startup Sesame – better networking at tech events

SLUSH is great to meet people, but I’m sure we still missed out on a lot of opportunities to connect. We even randomly met some friends we didn’t know were there. 😬

Attending an event costs money, and you need to maximize its ROI.

Startup Sesame (one of our happy customers) aims to take care of that.

They’ll soon be launching an app that makes making the right connections at conferences much easier.

Not much has been revealed yet, but do make sure to keep an eye on them. 👈

Bonus: the organizers of 5 other events: 4YFN, The Next Web, HowToWeb, SaaStock and Mind the Product

As ironic as it may seem, we met the organizers of 5 different events at SLUSH… but not the organizers of SLUSH themselves. 😏

Here’s who we did meet:

  • 4YFN (Barcelona, Spain): the startup platform of the Mobile World Congress
  • The Next Web (Amsterdam, The Netherlands): the magazine’s yearly tech festival
  • HowToWeb (Bucharest, Romania): the leading product conference in the CEE region
  • SaaStock (Dublin, Ireland): the best conference in Europe for SaaS companies
  • Mind the Product (all over the world): leading product conferences and communities on (almost) every continent

Mark those in your calendar if you haven’t yet! 🗓️

And if you want to visit some more events in 2020, bookmark this article on the top conferences for startups. We’re giving it an update as we speak, so it’ll soon be ready for the new year!

Did you meet any other awesome startups at SLUSH, or maybe another recent event?

Let us know in the comments! We’d love to hear who you were excited to meet. 🤩

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Jeroen Corthout
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