Maido Janke: from zero to 300 000€ of investments

At the end of September, Eziil, an industry digitalization company, announced that it had raised more than 300,000 € as an investment and was ready for a strong expansion. As a result of the investment, Eziil also successfully completed the Tehnopol Startup Incubator program. Martin Goroško, incubator’s manager said that Eziil has a very strong and hard working team, which was definitely a big success factor. However, which factors really mattered the most and how rocky was their journey from zero to 300 000 € investment, was described by Eziil’s co-founder and CEO Maido Janke at the Tehnopol Startup Incubator event.

Eziil had been working on their product for two years before they decided to start scaling the measures. “I wanted everything to be perfect before raising money, but it is not possible in practice. You should start when your product is still under construction, ”said Maido. This way, it is possible to find out early on whether your product or service is actually needed in the market without taking too much risk and investing a lot of money in your product.

In addition to this, Maido highlighted five other important factors:

1. Find the right people. Starting with the right people right right next to you and your business, helps you to better understand yoursel. Maido said that this person for them was their mentor, who helped them understand which is the image of them from the outside. Maido added that listening is also an important skill – if you are given useful information, you should listen to it.

2. Share the roles and responsibilities in your team. Equally important is to define, what exactly is your company doing. At the start of the company, Eziil was offering software development for the manufacturing companies. It also gave us the opportunity to offer software for any other company, but we had to do somewhat more specific solutions for them. I quickly realized that answering to every other client request isn’t reasonable in case of time and finance. This is how offering software development for the manufacturing companies turned into making SaaS production planning software for SME metal production.

3. Sell actively! Move around, connect with people, and sell. Collecting feedback helps you understand what works, where the problems are, and what needs to be improved. According to Maido, thanks to the existing prototype, they were able to see their potential in the market and find customers abroad, which gave them a strong advantage finding investors.

4.Don’t start raising money in the last minute. You need to have possibilities, because otherwise you will look needy and investors are not interested in needy startups. Although Maido felt like there were at least 65 things left in the to-do list, he is happy that their mentor recommended to start raising money right away.

5. Don’t only depepend on your vision. Although you can start getting investments based on your vision, soon investors want to see the real product and results.

When it was asked what Maido would do differently next time when attracting investments, he jokingly replied: “I would not leave the meeting before I have signed an investor agreement.” So, be confident, consistent, and believe in your product!