Fact Sheet
Name of Product (Startup): Prefixbox
HeadQuarter location: Budapest, London
Financing method: Bootstrap, Angel investor
Fund raised by date: 400k USD
Interviewee: Istvan Simon
Website, Crunchbase link:
www.prefixbox.com
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/prefixbox
Product
Can you please very briefly summarize your solution?
Semantic on-site search for ecommerce websites.
Product-market evolution:
What phase are you in currently with your product on the startup lifecycle chart?
When did you found your company?
In October 2014.
How long did it take you to reach your current state?
- It took us 8 months from starting full time, to first beta customer, 5 months from first beta customer to first paying customer, another 5 months from first paying customer to first large size customer and 2 years from first paying the customer to PMF.
What were the biggest lessons learned moments?
- There were many. Most of these lessons have been talked about by many founders, but often we need to learn the lessons from our own experience.
I have learned the most in sales because I am a software engineer originally and I had zero experience in business before founding Prefixbox.
The key to building a business is surrounding myself with the right people.
Hiring great salespeople is a difficult task and must be done with diligence.
In B2B working with large customers, thinking that the “product sells itself” is foolish. Salespeople have a huge impact on the business.
In sales asking good questions and listening to the customer is way more important than talking about the product.
How many times did you change direction (“pivoted”) / how similar is your product currently to the original idea?
- The original idea was to build an easy to onboard autocomplete solution for everyone. Then we did a zoom-in market pivot into e-commerce.
There were lots of smaller corrections to our direction, based on understanding our customer requirements and the market, now we offer a complete e-commerce search solution for medium size and large customers.
Can you mention a memorable customer feedback about your product?
- One of our Polish customers said, that our autocomplete can find out his search intent by just typing 1 letter most of the time.
What information would have been good to know about your market or product before starting your company?
- It would have been great to know stats about the percent of website users who interact with the on-site search function. It would have saved us lots of time in prioritizing which customers to talk to.
Founders, team
How many ideas, entrepreneurial attempts did you have before your actual project?
We had one attempt with one of my friends building a B2C product over weekends. We lost interest after building the first prototype.
What was your (inner) motivation behind launching your first StartUp?
I could not think about anything, but building this product. Anything else I had to do to “make money” felt like a waste of time.
How many co-founders are in the team and when did each of you join the company?
There was one founder, and 4 early employees (David, Andras, Skippy and Gyuri) that joined in a few months after starting up. All of us are software engineers. 1 year later, Janos our 1st sales colleague joined the team.
How has your team changed since the beginning?
All of the team members who joined early are still working on Prefixbox.
Seven more people joined us during the years and colleagues who stuck around for more than 3 months are still with us.
How do you govern your startup, what is your approach for decision making?
It depends on the decision. Most areas already have leaders and they make most of the decisions. Product vision is with the CEO, but most of the decisions including hiring are team decisions. For product feature prioritization we follow a method called “customer driven development” with frequent re-prioritization based on new market insight we learn from our customers.
Did you have any particularly difficult decisions (as a team) - and of course, what and why?
One of the most difficult decisions for me was the market zoom-in pivot: before making the decision it felt like letting go most of the market, after the decision our direction became clear.
StartUp World
Do you expect anything (generally) unexpected in the startup world in the next 3 years?
The trend is already clear: you can build a technology startup from pretty much anywhere in the world. Technology and information is accessible regardless of your location.
What do you find especially challenging as a Hungarian startup?
I don’t see anything especially challenging being a Hungarian startup. 4 years ago when we started many people said we need to move to the US to be successful – that feels like a ridiculous idea now, for most startups.
Do you see any benefits of being a Hungarian startup?
Yes, we have great engineering talent in Hungary. Competition for talent is much less here than in major Tech hubs, and the whole Europe is 2-3 hours flight away. Hungary is still a cost efficient location in Europe for starting up: managing burn and extending runway in the early years is key. It help a lot in staying alive until the idea can be properly validated.
To me Budapest is ideal for building tech startups.
Do you have a book-, website or any other information source recommendation for other startuppers?
Most of what I read in the first couple of years is The Lean Startup book and Y Combinator blog posts.
Finding an experienced mentor (for me that is Peter Balogh) can help a lot in avoiding many of the unnecessary mistakes. I think the rest can be learned on the job.
Is there a book, website or information that is not widely known, but had a memorable big impact on you (as a person or on your startup)?
Not in my case. Most of the useful material gets popular quickly in my opinion.
