Start-up that helps daily deal site users wins 'Lift Off' award

THE NATIONAL Digital Research Centre marked its fourth LaunchPad Lift Off competition yesterday as, over 12 weeks, 15 start-ups, five judges and one winner saw social commerce company Adjuno securing a €50,000 investment prize.

A diverse range of digital start-ups – ranging from virtual clothes shopping via Xbox Kinect to a smartphone measurement gadget for surveyors – pitched in front of venture capital veterans including Bill Liao of SOSventures and Shay Garvey of Delta Partners.

The winning company, Adjuno, offers a social commerce platform that personalises offers from daily deal sites by providing ranking based on user feedback and geographic context while importing existing data from sites such as LivingSocial and Groupon.

The difference between Adjuno and aggregators in this space is it is not simply putting a collection of deals in one place.

“The individual doesn’t want to see a shortlist of all food deals; they want to see the best one,” said founder Terrence Hong.

Mr Hong relocated his start-up from Canada and launched a public beta of Adjuno two weeks ago in both Toronto and Dublin.

“What NDRC gave us that was most valuable were the intangibles: you connect with mentors who challenge bad ideas and give you the chance to defend good ones,” he added.

The next step for the start-up is to build deeper social media integration to provide what they call “social proof” in the order to help people make informed purchasing decisions based on what their friends like.

Explaining why the judging panel had chosen Adjuna, Bill Liao of SOSventures said: “We’re agile investors for agile start-ups.”

Daily deal management was a trend for this year’s participants. RedeemGet, which also took part in LiftOff, provides an SMS and email database for vendors and acts as the end-user’s central point or “deal wallet” for all deals of this kind across the web.

In a surprise move, RedeemGet stepped down from the competition at the last moment, announcing it had just exceeded its investment requirement with €1 million worth of deals redeemed to date. The start-up previously won ESB’s Spark of Genius award at the recent Dublin Web Summit.

Speaking about the overall level of competition, Ben Hurley, chief executive of the NDRC said: “The idea is to build up a head of steam and getting yourself ready for market in a compressed timeframe.

“From the quality of pitches here today, you can see a huge amount of effort has been put in. The level of competition was very high.”

Keynote speaker and Storyful founder Mark Little summed up the atmosphere: “There are those who think we’re in a recession and then there are those who know we’re at the centre of a historic disruption.”