Piins.com

The internet, most people would agree, is one of the greatest technological advances in the last decades. Penetration rates are increasing exponentially, everyone knows about it, everyone has identified his or her personal need in the Web. It offers amazing capabilities to make our life easier, the Internet helps us satisfy most of our information needs. There are many places out there, where people meet, chat, socialize or search for information.But even with all its’ greatness, has anyone ever thought about why the Internet itself does offer no capabilities to really “work with” or “organize” information, why it is so hard to “collaborate” in the Web? Why do we need so many different applications to deal with all the amazing capabilities the internet offers us? Why is there so many times a change in context involved? Consider the very simple task of sharing a Web page with a colleague, what is involved? I bet you can’t answer that questions in one sentence (without many “and”s, “or”s or “ehm”s).

That’s all well, but what is Piins?
With Piins we created a powerful technology that allows to build simple solutions for all the uneasiness users in today’s Web tolerate and endure. For now, we’ve proven this technology by implementing three easy but very useful tools, that help users in their daily Web-experience – across the Web, on all pages:

• Collaboration: just leave small post-it notes on any Webpage and discuss it with your friends
• Share information: don’t find the send-to link on the Web site, or don’t want to give your email to yet another site? Piins allows you do share information in just one click
• Organize information: have all your notes, bookmarks, contacts and browsing history in one place: Piins. Easy to search and browse

All that without installation or configuration – completely Web-based. You can access all your information and use Piins on any system, any computer, any place.

Even if you say, I’ve got all my bookmarks with del.icio.us already or somewhere else, it is definitely worth to have a look at what we do, because our way of doing it is different from what you experienced anywhere else so far. We don’t want to be a competitor of del.icio.us and we’re probably soon going to allow having all your bookmarks wherever you want, but still get them within Piins. That’s just one of the wonderful things we can do and that we are: we are a “Web enabler”, we lay on top of all applications in the web and allow easy access to all of them. Bare with us and you’ll experience yourself.

So how do you make money?
Obviously, that’s one of the core secrets of a company and other than some might suggest, it is not only the straight-forward answer (“advertisement”). We have very strong revenue models for both: B2B and B2C. For the business market, even if it sounds 90-ies and a little odd, think of SAP for the sake of the argument. What they are doing perfectly well is modeling and deploying workflows for companies. BUT what they’ve not been able to do so far is to extend all those automated workflows to the Web.

Let’s use a simple example. You want to do a review of your website and send it out to family and friends. How do they feed back? Do they know how to create screenshot? Do they know how to attach it to a mail? Do they know what to report? With Piins, even now already, you just can tell your family and friends to have a look at your site via Piins. And whenever something does not work or seems to be broken, they can just attach a note to it that will automatically be entered in your bug-tracking system or sent via email to you – with a link to the page including the note. So you can see what they see. Easy, short, simple.

There are many more examples like open-social solutions, synchronous browsing, single-sign on, instant messaging, general annotation services or simple page forwarding.

As far as the B2C market is concerned, we are based on a basic subscription model (for e.g. anonymity or advanced workflows and use-cases) and an advertisement system, of course .

How long did it take you to build the platform?
Piins has been in conceptualization and implementation for over 4 years with smaller and larger breaks, but we’ve been fully committed to developing it since almost a year now.

How did you get funding?
We’ve started funding it ourselves as all of you probably have. It starts with not taking any salary, working long hours, writing business plan presentations and pitching to investors. I’ve pitched it roughly 40 times to different people. To friends, friends of friends, Angels and proper VCs. Finally, it was a combination between consistent persistence and luck to gain and gather 5 different Angels to fund us for quite a while, and they are Angels indeed. Fabulous input and a fabulous network. More than a small start-up could wish for.

What comes for the future?
We are just starting to build revenue, which delivers the proof of market in addition to our proven technology. Yet, at this stage, we will only be able to scratch the very surface of the Piins opportunity, considering our limited resources. This is why we alrdeay now are beginning to discuss our next investment
round (scheduled for Q1 next year). We are looking for the best fit in resources to leverage Piins into the next phase – our growth phase.