Last week, we showcased four startups that aced the first Big50-2020 challenge, Navigating the COVID-19 Pandemic. This week, we’re featuring five newcomers to the competition, startups competing for the first time but which offered plenty of actionable information about how to weather a major market-disrupting crisis.
As challenge 1 winners, these startups have earned 10 of the 50 points needed to guarantee a spot in this year’s Big50 Startup Report.
There were a number of other solid entries, and we had a hard time narrowing this down to five winners. So, if you don’t see your startup below, don’t despair. You’ll have plenty more opportunities in future challenges.
Thank you to all of the startups that completed the first challenge. Now, let’s take a look at the winners:
Ascend.io
How CV-19 impacts the startup ecosystem: Businesses will need to find novel ways to do more with less. “There will be a focus on automation tools to meet business needs and increase productivity, while at the same time freeing employees to work on higher impact opportunities. As budgets are constrained and headcounts frozen, new approaches like automation and AI can help companies to survive and even thrive in the post-COVID economy.”
Main CV-19-related challenge for this startup: “Industry events accounted for a huge portion of our marketing initiatives for the year. As a startup with a recently launched product in a rapidly emerging category [data-engineering-as-a-service], Ascend.io relied heavily on in-person demos at trade shows and conferences to showcase the potential of our product.”
And then the pandemic shut down the economy.
“COVID-19 forced nearly every tech conference and trade show to cancel over the past few months, and only in the coming months have they started to resume virtually, yet with more focus on talks than on product showcases. As a result, Ascend.io, along with many other businesses, has been forced to get creative and adapt to this new marketing and enterprise sales landscape.” Since the onset of the shutdown, the company has significantly ramped up its digital marketing and content programs, including the launch of AscendTV, which live streams YouTube video segments on data engineering every week. “Ascend.io has also greatly accelerated its partnership efforts with more established industry leaders, officially launching its partner program earlier this year, and signing a number of marquee partners such as Looker, Snowflake, and more.”
Actionable info: “The pandemic and subsequent economic downturn have served as catalysts for change as many organizations continue to not only shift to a virtual work environment, but also to reconsider how they do business in the post-pandemic era.”
For instance, COVID-19 will dramatically alter the traditional sales process, and those changes could endure long beyond the current pandemic. “Enterprise sales, for example, has always been built on in-person relationships and connections. Moving forward, those connections will continue but increasingly remain virtual. The unpredictability of the pandemic also affects buying behaviors. From SMBs to large enterprises, businesses will be more reluctant in committing to large financial contracts and will prefer more open, pay-as-you-go models.”
Satori Cyber
How CV-19 impacts the startup ecosystem: This environment calls for war-time generals, whereas the last couple of years were favorable for peace-time generals. In the long run, we will see the stronger startups with better leadership and [product-market fit] endure and win a larger market shares.” Weaker competitors will not survive the challenging market conditions, creating even more room for growth for stronger startups. “This will also set a distinct tone for the culture of many startups that will use this experience as a model to overcome future challenges.”
Main CV-19-related challenge for this startup: “The biggest challenge was to quickly assess the situation and its short- and long-term impacts. There are a lot of assumptions and opinions today about the market, but we believe there are still many uncertainties. For startups, there are already many unknowns, so staying informed and positioning ourselves to thrive in any scenario is an ongoing challenge.”
Statum Systems
How CV-19 impacts the startup ecosystem: Due to COVID-19, it will take more time and effort to raise seed and growth capital.
Main CV-19-related challenge for this startup: “The biggest challenge we have is getting our pilot accounts to start testing our solution [secure mobile collaboration for health-care professionals], because our prospective clients are hospitals. We had three hospitals lined up to begin in March, just prior to the Covid lockdown – all went on hold.”
Tray.io
How CV-19 impacts the startup ecosystem: Tray.io believes that startups will need to be even more lean and efficient than they have been in the past, and one way to achieve this is by streamlining processes with automation. “[In a down economy], it is imperative to retain customers, particularly for SaaS companies generating revenue on an annual recurring revenue (ARR) basis. Churn can be absolutely catastrophic to a SaaS firm’s bottom line. 2019 may have been all about raising more funding and acquiring more logos, but in 2020 and beyond, retention might very well be the new growth.”
Main CV-19-related challenge for this startup: One of the biggest challenges that Tray.io has encountered is responding to the changing needs of its customer base. “Customers have largely been successful enterprises and high-growth firms, but the combination of the pandemic and the economic downturn has required them to be nimble, adaptable and able to support a distributed workforce.”
Many potential customers have instituted hiring freezes, shrunk budgets, and shifted their revenue priorities to customer retention, leaving less for on-boarding new technology.
Actionable info: To adapt to the pandemic and economic downturn, Tray.io encourages businesses to take advantage of automation. “While automation helps companies in high-growth mode scale faster, it also helps businesses squeeze the most return on investment from their pricey technology stacks to empower teams to work more efficiently. The Tray.io team has been working with customers and partners such as Zendesk, Intercom, and Demandbase to share the high-value tactics and use cases they themselves use to respond quickly to customer success queries; seamlessly integrate context-rich customer chat logs with the rest of your tech stack; and even optimize non-traditional sales funnels that use educational training to capitalize on abandoned carts and drive more conversions.”
Zero Networks
How CV-19 impacts the startup ecosystem:
This crisis could help startups by forcing them to slow down and more closely evaluate key aspects of their growth plans. For Zero Networks, the slowdown prompted them to re-evaluate the customer’s journey, which “led to the development of a new free tool that helps organizations understand the excessive trust in their networks, especially in today’s mainly remote workforce.
“When they see how open their networks are and how much an attacker can access once inside, there is more urgency around doing something about it. Because we had a moment’s pause, we had a chance to make sure we were doing the things that really mattered to our customers.”
Main CV-19-related challenge for this startup: “We launched Zero Networks two weeks before an almost global shelter-in-place mandate, so all the momentum we had been building up just stopped, as everyone, understandably, focused on adjusting to this new reality. Unfortunately, cyber-attackers didn’t stop. In fact, they escalated their efforts, and with the workforce suddenly going mobile, hackers suddenly had a whole lot of opportunities to execute their exploits.
“The good news is we have a service that helps organizations mitigate the risks by tightly controlling network access, so attackers cannot spread if they get into the network, including via a remote worker’s VPN, and cannot do a lot of damage (e.g. disrupt operations, steal sensitive information, or hold data ransom). The bad news is, as a startup, we didn’t know how to let people know we could help. We decided to offer our service for free to organizations hit hard by the pandemic, even though we needed to start to build our revenue. As a team, we felt it was more important to be a good company at this time than worry about a good bottom line.”
Actionable info: Quantifying the scope of a problem can be the first step in winning over customers. “Every organization knows they have too much trust in their networks, but they couldn’t quantify it. We realized if we could help them scope the size of their problem, we could then help them see just how important it is to solve. This new entry point will ultimately help us have more productive discussions with potential customers, faster.”
