Urgency and confidence

We have all seen numerous times how a good call to action can increase the conversion rate of a website. And we have also learned that trust elements (like a clear return policy) are equally important for conversions. Both work because consumers react best to the two underlying concepts: urgency and confidence. Interestingly enough most […]

What does a Venture Partner do?

Most people know me as an early-stage investor in now over 30 internet companies through w media ventures and more recently, as a co-founder of the Vancouver-based start-up accelerator GrowLab. Lesser known is the fact that I also work as a venture partner for Munich-based Acton Capital. So what does a venture partner actually do? […]

An amazing year

2011 was an amazing year – made 10 new investments (most ever!), sold one company (Sparkbuy to Google) and started GrowLab with an exceptional team of co-founders. But more importantly, it was an amazing year for Canada’s start-up ecosystem – there is a new generation of angels and VC’s emerging in this country, more and […]

New investment: Unbounce, A/B testing made super-easy

Unbounce makes building, publishing and A/B testing of landing pages super-easy. It does not require any IT involvement and puts the marketer into the driver seat. This makes the product so successful and is the basic SaaS value proposition: let the user be the buyer and offer him a risk-free monthly subscription plan. I have […]

New investment: Edmodo, social learning network for teachers and students

Education is – besides health care – one of the verticals with the most amount of opportunity still left in the digital world. And still a lot of innovation in this space in the past few years was rather incremental (e.g. online test prep, language learning) than ground breaking. Things are starting to change and […]