My full Movie-like Founder Story — Director’s Cut
Placedise — Story of a failed Startup.
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In 2014, I founded my startup Placedise.
It failed as a business, but came with crazy adventures.
This is a quite long article, but provides you with the whole story. A slightly shorter version has been published before via “Entrepreneur’s Handbook”.
What to expect
- Be prepared to learn a lot about doing the right things, but still not getting to good product-market-fit.
- Experience the hard founders-without-rich-parents story.
No sugar-coating, just the brutal truth — which can be irritating between all those shiny smooth success stories on the web. - A story, spiced up with Hollywood glamour, corruption, and too much proof, that almost all consumer-oriented companies lost control over their marketing measures.
If this intro caught your interest, save this page as a bookmark, buckle up your seatbelt, maybe get yourself a drink, open your mind, and get ready for entertainment in 3 … 2 … 1 …
Before I jump into the step-by-step story with all its fancy details (starting with chapter 3), I want to provide you with a short summary of what we offered and our major challenge.
👉 1/20 — What is Placedise?
Placedise offered a software that is able to simulate and optimize the advertising effects of branded content (e.g. product placement), TV commercials, as well as other advertising measures, based on scientific data.
Its intelligent algorithm automatically combined the results of over 600 scientific studies in order to evaluate and optimize marketing activities within minutes — to achieve the best possible advertising impact and success.
The software could act as an AI consumer behavior researcher, analyzing the success of existing measures; or (the other way around) generate the most promising setup up-front, based on the individual goals and target audience of the advertiser.
We used complex statistical modelling and optimization algorithms (nowadays labeled as Predictive Analytics, or AI and Machine Learning) to make the…
